Chapter 6

History’s Mid-Life Crisis: The Middle Ages

In This Chapter

Flexing the Roman Empire’s muscles in Constantinople

Going berserk with barbarians and Vikings

Following the Bantu all over Africa

Uniting Arabs and building empires

Middle Ages and medieval mean the same thing: an age between ages. The Middle Ages in Western Europe was the period between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (officially 476 AD, although there wasn’t much of the empire left to collapse by then) and the Renaissance in the fourteenth century. (You can find much more about the Renaissance in Chapter 13.)

 Calling this period the Middle Ages doesn’t mean that nothing happened in Western Europe between the fifth and fourteenth centuries. There’s no such thing as a 900-year span when nothing happened. What it means is that the Middle Ages were sandwiched between two more monumental-seeming eras — the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

As I explain in this chapter, in today’s Turkey and a huge surrounding region, history wasn’t between two great ages during the Middle Ages but rather smack in the middle of one great age: that of the Byzantine Empire. Other empires peaked in those centuries, too, as India flowered and the Arabs conquered vast lands, inspired by their new religion, Islam.

In what used to be the Western Roman Empire, however, what civil authority there was became decentralized. Cities weren’t as important as they once were, and the economy became more agricultural and local than commercial and trade-based. Authority followed the complicated rules of feudal loyalty, so that instead of depending on imperial hierarchy, local vassals served local lords in return for favor and protection. (The exception was the monolithic Church, extremely powerful and still based in Rome. You can read more about the power of Europe’s medieval Church in Chapters 13 and 14.)

The Middle Ages reflected the people who brought them on, the many barbarian groups — Huns, Goths, Avars, and others — whose migrations into Europe and constant raids brought down Rome. The barbarians’ descendants remained in post-Roman Europe, blending and clashing among themselves and with the descendants of earlier Europeans. These descendants formed the beginnings of modern nations by standing up to new waves of raiders from the north — the Vikings — and conquerors from the east and south, the Arabs and Moors. Local lords became more willing to join forces, pledging allegiance to a strong king who could bring them together to fend off attackers.

As the barbarians moved out of Asia, other populations continued to move — and not just into Europe. Wave after wave of a people called the Bantu transformed the African continent over a millennium of southern migrations.

The world that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages was vastly different from what it was when Rome fell. So, maybe the Middle Ages should be called the Transitional Ages. . . .

Building (And Maintaining) the Byzantine Empire

Roman Emperor Constantine the Great modeled his eastern branch of the Roman Empire (which eventually became the Byzantine Empire) on old Imperial Rome — except that the eastern branch was a Christian power rather than a pagan one and people spoke Greek instead of Latin.

 Constantine chose the city of Byzantium for his new capital, rebuilding it to fit his concept of a great city and renaming it Constantinople in 330 AD. By the time the western part of the Roman Empire fell apart in the fifth century, Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey) was a seat of power that rivaled old Rome at its height. The Byzantine emperor had even more power than most of his western predecessors, and the Byzantine senate evolved as a sprawling, intricate (and notoriously corrupt) bureaucracy.

As a center of government, the Byzantine capital was remarkably stable. It was an urban seat of vast power, boasting a high level of literacy and wealth as the result of a commercial economy and extensive lands. Although its boundaries changed many times, the empire was always vast.

Before he died in 565 AD, Justinian, who became emperor in 537 AD, ruled lands on the north and south shores of the Mediterranean Sea, stretching from southern Spain all the way east to Persia. Trying to reunite east and west into one Christian Empire, Justinian sent his armies to retake many formerly Roman lands in Europe and North Africa. He even recaptured Italy, establishing a western Byzantine capital at Ravenna. But no matter how hard he tried, Justinian couldn’t reconcile the eastern and western branches of the Church, which were bitterly divided. (For more about the early Christian Church, see Chapter 12.)

To last so long as a power center, Constantinople had to endure physically, too. The city’s location on the Bosporus (the channel that links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea) and its heavily fortified walls helped it resist invasion. Although Constantinople took a beating, the Arabs’ four-year siege that finally ended in 678 AD failed. (You can read more about Constantinople’s strategic advantages in Chapter 17. See the later section “Emerging Islamic Fervor” for more about the Arabs, who quickly became a force to be reckoned with.)

Sharing and Imposing Culture

The so-called Middle Ages were an unsettled time in much of the world as different populations migrated, clashed, and intermingled. Europe continued to feel the influence of the barbarian peoples that had come west from Asia during the late centuries of the Western Roman Empire. Meanwhile in Africa, the Bantu people spread their languages and cultures southward as subgroups of Bantu migrated down the continent for century upon century. Later in the period, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, seafaring raiders called Vikings plagued, conquered, and settled parts of Europe.

At the same time, cultural influences from China and India began penetrating westward into the Byzantine Empire (Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean), not through population migrations, but through growing trade along an overland route, the Silk Road.

Bearing with barbarians

The hordes of barbarians battering away at the Roman frontiers for centuries brought cultural crosscurrents, although destructive ones. In a way, the barbarians created the Middle Ages, so it pays to understand who they were. It’s amazing how many peoples came out of the east and how far and fast they came without gas-electric hybrids or interstates.

Revealing obscure origins

To the Romans, a barbarian was an outsider who didn’t speak Latin. The term most often applied, however, to members of tribes such as the Goths and Vandals. Seeking lands to settle and eager for plunder, these migrating, warlike folks were a force in northern Europe for a very long time before Rome fell and after.

Many barbarians came from northern parts of Asia, in the steppes region, and most were nomadic herders before they turned to raiding. The Vandals and Alans wandered north of the Black Sea before they came west, as did some of the other barbarians, although they moved so much that it’s difficult to pin down where they started. Once in Europe they sometimes settled in a specific region — the Huns in Hungary, for example, and the Vandals in Denmark. That didn’t mean, however, that the groups stayed put. The Vandals also built Vandalusia, a kingdom in what is now Spain. (Over time, the “V” fell off and the region is known today as Andalusia.)

When Vandals arrived in Denmark in Roman times, they met, fought, and eventually mingled with people who had been hunting and farming in Scandinavia for thousands of years. The Greek adventurer Pythias of Marseilles, visiting Britain in about 350 BC, wrote that he traveled across water (perhaps the North Sea) to a place he called Thule (maybe Norway). There he visited friendly, blond people who threshed their grain indoors to save it from the damp, cold climate. Whether Pythias’s courteous hosts were direct ancestors of later invaders is difficult to say, but it’s possible.

 Before 500 BC, a prolonged warm spell pervaded the far north of Europe. Archeological evidence seems to show that for a while the ancient Scandinavians didn’t even have to bother with much clothing. But a gradually cooling climate and difficulty raising food provided the northern tribes with the incentive to come south and prey on Celts and Romans who were enjoying the continent’s warmer climes. The barbarian incursions went on for centuries, and tracing them to a colder Scandinavia gives only a small picture (and maybe a distorted one) of the population movements that defined those hundreds of years.

Related to the Mongols who made China their own, the Huns hailed from Mongolia. Huns rode into Europe in the fourth century AD and settled along the River Danube. From there, their leader Attila launched fifth-century attacks on Gaul (modern France) and Italy.

Seeking a better life

 Until about 550 AD, entire populations were constantly migrating, some for thousands of miles — and not just around Europe. Migration is a response to economic hardship and climate changes. When people move, they run into other people. If the ones on the move are warlike and desperate, the encounters get ugly.

Many barbarians were poor and looking for a better life. If plunder was a way to a better life, they went for it. No doubt they felt pressures similar to those that fed the much smaller scale migration of Oklahomans out of the drought-ravaged dust bowl of the United States in the 1930s.

Traversing Africa with the Bantu

The barbarians weren’t the only populations on the move. Bantu people flowed out of today’s Nigeria and north-central Africa, beginning in the last century BC and continuing through the first millennium AD. The Bantu, a group of related peoples who spoke Bantu languages (the largest group of African languages today), were grain farmers and metalworkers who mastered iron-smelting technology long before the rest of Africa.

The Bantu success led to population growth that in turn forced them to seek new lands. So they took their languages and their metalworking technology with them and overwhelmed indigenous populations all the way to the southern tip of the African continent. Most of the people in Africa today are descendants of the Bantu.

Also like the barbarians of Europe, new waves of Bantu continued to move south over successive centuries, overwhelming descendants of earlier waves of Bantu immigrants. In the twelfth century, the Bantu founded the powerful Mwenumatapa civilization (in today’s Zimbabwe), centered in the city of Great Zimbabwe.

Sailing and settling with the Vikings

In Europe, another wave of invasions from the north, beginning around the year 800 AD, profoundly marked the Middle Ages. The people of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, thriving through agriculture and sea trade, started running out of good farmland. Like northern and eastern people before them, they decided to make new opportunities for themselves. One way to do this was to go a viking — adventuring and raiding as far as their sturdy ships could take them, which was very far indeed. With the advantage of good longboats and experienced navigators, the Vikings raided the coasts of Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Morocco, and Italy.

The Vikings were opportunists and traders as well as warriors. Like the earlier barbarians, Vikings settled in places they raided. They founded Dublin and Limerick in Ireland, and the Shetland Islands off Scotland remained a Norwegian possession for centuries. In northeast England, the city of York was once a Viking settlement called Yorvig. Viking dynasties also set up Norse kingdoms in diverse parts of Europe from Sicily to Russia to Normandy, which is a part of France named for the Northmen who came to raid and stayed to settle.

Invading England’s former invaders

The Anglo-Saxon rulers of England fought wave after wave of invading Vikings, yet Anglo-Saxons were invaders in their own time. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were among the tribal northerners that the Romans called barbarians. (For an explanation of why the name of the Germanic tribe called the Angles becomes Anglo in the Anglo-Saxon, see the sidebar in this chapter called “Angling for a nation’s name.”)

From northern Europe (Denmark and Germany), some Germanic tribes had settled in Britain in the fourth century AD. It wasn’t until much later, however, after the Romans left the island to its own defenses in the early fifth century that Angles, Saxons, and Jutes poured into Britain in significant numbers. These newcomers overwhelmed the indigenous Celts, or Britons, and drove some of them west to Cornwall and Wales, north to Scotland, and across the water to Brittany (now part of France).

The invaders’ medieval descendants were Anglo-Saxons, as are their descendants today. For short, and because of the way Saxon leaders exercised power, the Anglo-Saxons of the ninth–eleventh centuries are frequently referred to as just Saxons — especially the Saxon kings, who controlled pieces of Britain for hundreds of years. For a time, Vikings challenged Saxon control and ruled all of northern England, including Yorkshire. But Saxons gained the upper hand in 878 AD when the king of Wessex (or the West Saxon land), Alfred, defeated the Viking ruler Guthrum. He let Guthrum keep the north, called the Danelaw, but Alfred made the Vikings pay him tribute. Saxons ruled England for most of the next 200 years, although Vikings reasserted control for a time in the early eleventh century. Alfred is the only English king to be called “the Great.”

Carrying on through generations

As with the earlier waves of population movement in Europe, the Vikings’ prolonged and successive impact echoed across the continent in interesting ways. For example, the Viking leader Hrolfr (or in French, the much-easier-to-pronounce Rollo) founded the dynasty of Norman kings in the duchy (like a kingdom) of Normandy (now part of France) when he conquered that land in 911 AD.

 William the Conqueror was Hrolfr’s descendant. Yet when he invaded England and claimed the English throne in 1066, he battled a kingdom that had only recently been under the rule of Vikings from Denmark. Edward the Confessor, of Saxon lineage, nominated William’s rival, Harold II, for the English throne. Edward, however, gained the throne in 1042 only after a king called Hardicanute, a Dane, failed to leave a successor. Hardicanute’s father Canute (or Cnut) ruled over England, Denmark, and Norway simultaneously. His father, Danish ruler Sweyn Forkbeard, had conquered England with Viking raiders in 1013.

Finding and losing the New World

One place Vikings had little impact was North America. Norwegians from Greenland landed in Canada around 1000 AD, but after a few years they lost interest in the new land. The first Norseman to see North America, the trader Bjarni Herjolffson, was trying to get from Iceland (colonized by the Norse in the 860s AD) to recently settled Greenland in the summer of 986 AD. Losing his way in the fog, Herjolffson came to a shoreline, probably that of Labrador, which obviously wasn’t where he wanted to go, so he turned around without exploring. About 15 years later, brawny, young Leif Eriksson (son of Erik the Red, who had discovered Greenland) bought Herjolffson’s boat, rounded up a crew, and set out from Greenland to find the new land.

For a short while, parties of Norse explored and even tried settling in the place they called Vinland (today’s northeastern Newfoundland). They fought with some natives, but unlike the Spanish explorers who came to North America 500 years later in the south, the Vikings had no firearms, so they had no huge advantage in battle. As well as fighting them, the newcomers also traded with the indigenous people. Some Norsemen (and Norse women, too) built houses and stayed for a while, but they fought among themselves, undermining their chances to thrive. The voyages west from Greenland soon stopped, and the Vinland settlements faded into memory.

 The Norse are bad guys in the 2007 adventure-drama film Pathfinder. The movie is about a 12-year-old Viking boy who gets left behind in North America, where a native tribe takes him in and trains him as a warrior. When the bloodthirsty villains from over the sea return years later, the boy, now a man, fights his former comrades.

Even if the Norse had taken a keener interest in North America, their discovery was marred by a number of factors.

The climate changed. After 1200, the North Atlantic experienced a mini ice age, which ice-locked ports and closed off Viking settlements in Greenland. No more settlers came, and many left.

Trade was less lucrative. Russian furs flooded the European market, and craftsmen clamored for elephant ivory, considered superior to the walrus tusks that the Greenlanders could offer.

Bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, destroyed Norse Greenland. When the plague arrived in Greenland in the fourteenth century, it wiped out the small remaining Norse population. Norway and Iceland, both hard-hit by the epidemic, no longer had a reason to send ships so far west.

Traveling the Silk Road

Around the second century AD, traveling merchants began moving increasing amounts of trade goods both eastward and westward along the Silk Road, a caravan route that followed the Great Wall of China and then wound along a natural corridor through the Pamir Mountains and Tajikistan, across Afghanistan and south of the Caspian Sea to the eastern Mediterranean. By the sixth century AD, the Silk Road had reached Constantinople.

A single caravan was unlikely to make the entire journey. Rather, traders operated an improvised relay system, with regional merchants buying and shipping over selected distances along the Silk Road. Wool and precious metals were traded eastward while coveted Chinese silk, the luxurious fabric that gave the road its name, was the primary trade good going west. See Chapter 7 for more about how centuries of trade in silk and spices changed Western tastes and contributed to European-ruled, worldwide empires.

Planting the Seeds of European Nations

In the Middle Ages, the European map looked very little like what you see in a modern atlas. There was no France, no Germany, and no Spain. For the sake of convenience, I sometimes refer to these areas by the national names they bear now, but the concept of nationhood was lost on Europe for quite a while after the Roman Empire collapsed.

Yet in the Middle Ages, people and regions began to join together and to take on identities that would lead to modern nations such as France. The catalyst for this unity came partly from the inside, as feudal leaders sought more power. But it got its biggest push from the outside, from the very raids and invasions that I cover throughout this chapter.

For example, when people in Ireland tired of Viking raids, they looked to a king strong enough to bring together regional lords to mount a defense. In France (then called Gaul), the people known as Franks feared invasion by Arabs and by fierce Magyar raiders from Hungary. The Franks, like the Irish and other Europeans, looked to someone to unite them.

Repelling the raiders

Alfred the Great was the leader who brought Saxons (and Angles and Jutes) together in Britain (you can read more about him in the “Invading England’s former invaders” sidebar).

 In Ireland, a warrior named Brian Boru seized power as high king (a king who ruled over lesser kings) and gathered forces strong enough to conquer the Vikings at Clontarf, near Dublin in 1014. Brian died in that battle, but the Irish won, and for the first time united under an Irish leader, Ireland no longer belonged to the Norse.

Uniting Western Europe: Charlemagne pulls it together

 The Franks gave rise to the strongest of the new kings, the only one to forge an empire anything like old Rome’s. A Germanic people from the Rhine region, the Franks settled in Gaul (roughly identified with modern France) around 400 AD, and in 451 AD they helped the Romans repel Attila the Hun at Châlons. By 481 AD, the Romans in Gaul no longer had a Roman Empire to back them up. The king of the Franks, Clovis, overthrew the Romans and took possession of all the land between the Somme and Loire Rivers. Clovis’s dynasty, called the Merovingians, gave way to a new Frankish dynasty called the Carolingians in the middle of the eighth century.

Angling for a nation’s name

England’s Anglo-Saxon rulers were called Anglo-Saxon, just like Anglo-Saxons today, because they descended from Germanic tribes, chief among them the Angles and the Saxons. In fact, England means the “Angles’ Land,” and regions within England also got their names from these people. That’s why there’s a Wessex (West Saxon Land), Sussex (South Saxon Land), Essex (East Saxon Land), and East Anglia.

People say “Anglo-Saxon” rather than “Angle-Saxon” because of the influence of Latin on the English language. Anglo is a Latinized version of Angle, applied when the word (today often used to mean “English” or even “British”) is put together with the name of another ethnic or national group, as in an Anglo-Danish business venture or the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.

French becomes Franco in such combinations, as in a Franco-American trade agreement. It gets even crazier when you’re talking about the Chinese, because political scientists, historians, and even some journalists cling to an old Greek word for Chinese and then put the Latin ending on it. That’s why you might read about a Sino-Japanese economic conference.

Modern Americans use “Anglo” without linking it to another word but usually use it to refer to Americans who are of majority-white background and speak English, as opposed to Americans of other ethnic backgrounds and those who speak Spanish.

The Arab Empire came out of the Middle East in the seventh century, conquering most of North Africa and then extending northward into Spain. (There’s more about the Arabs in the later section “Emerging Islamic Fervor.”) In Spain, the Arabs, who were Muslim (meaning followers of the Islamic faith) and their North African comrades the Moors beat Visigoth rulers in 711 AD, taking over most of the Iberian Peninsula. The Visigoths were among the many groups of barbarians who brought down the Roman Empire. (I cover barbarians earlier in this chapter.) From their stronghold in Spain, these Moors (as all Spanish Muslims soon were called) pummeled southern Gaul, gaining a foothold just as the Carolingians came to power later in the eighth century.

 In 732 AD, Islamic forces tried to conquer Gaul. The Carolingian king, Charles Martel, stood up to them and turned them away. If he hadn’t, historians say that Western Europe could have turned out Islamic. This would have upset Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Charlemagne (the name means “Charles the Great”) became king of the western Franks in 768 AD and then ruled all the Franks after his brother Carloman died in 771 AD.

Charlemagne wasn’t the kind of Christian who thought that the meek inherit the earth. To get the Saxons of Germany (yes, they were related to the Saxons of England) converted to the faith, he fought and subjugated them. Instead of waiting for the Moors to try another invasion, he plunged his forces into Spain and attacked the Amir of Cordoba. He also smashed the kingdom of Lombardy in northern Italy, among many other conquests that brought most of Western Europe under his rule. The extent of Charlemagne’s empire at his death is shown in Figure 6-1.

 Pope Leo III liked Charlemagne’s efforts to conquer and convert, especially the part about getting rid of the pesky Lombards, who had been a threat to the Papal States (an area ruled directly by the Pope). The pope crowned Charlemagne as Carolus Augustus, Emperor of the Romans (or Holy Roman Emperor) in 800 AD, beginning the strange-yet-enduring European entity, the Holy Roman Empire.

Charlemagne mellowed in his later years. He built churches and promoted education and the arts, along with Christianity, and he sponsored improved agriculture and manufacturing. His stable reign fostered a kind of mini-renaissance, hundreds of years before the big Renaissance. But after Charlemagne died in 814 AD, his empire deteriorated quickly.

Keeping fledgling nations together

Although strong kings rose to patch together diverse, small principalities and duchies (ruled over by princes and dukes, respectively), consolidated power was difficult to keep. The title of king or even emperor didn’t guarantee that lesser lords of the feudal system would remain loyal. For example, Otto I (or Otto the Great) of Germany, who became Holy Roman Emperor in 936 AD, also gained the title King of the Lombards in 951 AD after he rescued Lombardy’s Queen Adelaide (imprisoned by a neighboring prince) and married her. Lombardy is in north central Italy, and Otto’s empire (supposedly Roman even though it was based in Germany) included other Italian lands. Yet even after getting Pope John XII to give him an official coronation as emperor in 962 AD, the German king never won Italian support. Italian princes who were officially his vassals(meaning they had to pay Otto tribute) fought him at every turn.

Emerging Islamic Fervor

The Arabs are a Semitic people, related to the Hebrews and the ancient Assyrians and Mesopotamians. Like the Hebrews, they consider themselves descendants of the Biblical patriarch Abraham. Originally farmers in the then-fertile region of what is now Yemen and also nomads and traders throughout Arabia, they get little mention in history up until the seventh century. Arab states rose and fell. Trade flourished and wealth grew, largely because the Arabs had two substances: frankincense and myrrh, aromatic gum resins refined from the sap of trees (frankincense) and bushes (myrrh). Highly prized for their scent, frankincense and myrrh were as valuable as gold. Think about that next time the clerk at the perfume counter offers you a sample spritz.

 The Arabs followed a number of religions, including Greek-style paganism. Judaism gained a foothold, and Christianity won many converts. But that was before an Arab merchant, a fellow called Mohammed, gave up his business so that he could devote himself to contemplating Allah, or the One True God. Things in Mohammed’s part of the world would never be the same.

Religion was volatile during the late Roman period and through the Middle Ages as Buddhism spread east from India to China along silk-trading routes and as Christianity became the unifying focus all over Europe and beyond. (The Christian faith even spread to the Aksum Empire in northeast Africa.) But perhaps no religion ever had such an immediate and powerful effect as Mohammed’s Islam. (For more about religions, see Chapter 10.)

Mohammed said the new religion came to him in a vision of the angel Gabriel. Mohammed became a prophet, but as he gathered followers, he also gained authority in earthly matters. Leaders in his native Mecca saw his power grow and kicked him out. In the city of Medina, however, Mohammed became a lawgiver and judge. Soon the prophet led a Muslim army out of Medina to conquer Mecca.

 By the time Mohammed died in 632 AD, the Muslims had conquered most of Arabia. His immediate successor, Abu Bakr, finished the job within a couple of years. Then the Muslim Arabs conquered Egypt on the way to expanding westward into Algeria in North Africa, eventually conquering most of Spain and Portugal. Muslims pushed north from Arabia into Iraq and Syria and then west to Persia.

New Islamic dynasties followed this expansion, including the Omayyad Dynasty, founded in 661 AD. From its capital at Damascus, in Syria, the Omayyad Dynasty ruled an empire that stretched from Morocco to India. Although factionalism arose within Islam and disagreements led to power struggles and war, there was remarkable continuity in the Arab world. The Abbasid Dynasty, descended from Mohammed’s uncle, succeeded the Omayyads. It moved the capital to Baghdad and ruled for 500 years.

Rebounding Guptas in India

Islamic armies surged eastward as well as westward, and new national and ethnic identities formed around the faith and variations within it. Muslims from Afghanistan conquered much of India in 1100.

Yet before Muslims got there, India experienced another flowering similar to the Mauryan Dynasty of the fourth to second centuries BC. In Chapter 5, I talk about both the Mauryans, the first dynasty to unite most of India, and the Gupta Dynasty, whose stable rule brought an Indian golden age in the arts, architecture, and religion in the mid-fourth to mid-sixth centuries AD.

Hun attacks on India’s northern borders eventually caused the Gupta Empire to collapse, just as a western contingent of Huns were among the barbarian people whose attacks brought down Roman authority in Europe, beginning the Middle Ages. As decades passed, the Huns of India became more Indian, adopting local customs and habits.

Assimilating into the general population diffused the Huns’ power and helped a Gupta leader named Harsha, descended from the great Gupta kings, reestablish an Indian Empire in 606 AD. Equally good at conquest and administration, and an art lover like his ancestor Chandragupta II of the Gupta Dynasty, Harsha built a glorious capital city, Kanauj, famous for its magnificent buildings, on the Ganges River. Indian culture, thus fortified, spread to Burma, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Indian influence over the region continued as the Chola of southeast India conquered much of the country after 880 AD. Savvy merchants and businesspeople, the Chola built up prosperous trade routes with the Arabs to the west and the Chinese to the east. The Chola governmental style continued the Gupta tradition of allowing local control.

Rounding Out the World

Through the miracle of time-space travel, here’s a sampling of happenings elsewhere during Europe’s Middle Ages:

The Japanese: Japan was deeply influenced by China beginning sometime around the fourth century. By 538 AD, that influence took the form of religious conversion as the Japanese court adopted Buddhism and replaced old temples with new ones. The cultural pendulum began to swing theother way only in the eighth century when the Chinese-influenced Japanese emperors lost power to a rising warrior class. The warrior leaders, or samurai, were organized by clans and fought among themselves, plunging the island into civil war in the twelfth century and giving rise to the imperial office of shogun. Minamoto Yoritomo became shogun in 1192 and used his samurai retainers to impose law and order. Japan was governed this way for centuries.

The Khmer: In Southeast Asia, the Khmer people of Cambodia broke away from foreign influence (Chinese and Indian) as they established their first state, called Funan, on the Mekong River. The later Angkorian Dynasty grew into an empire that built a capital at Angkor and ruled until the fourteenth century.

The Maya: In Central America, the Maya civilization lasted from 300 BC–1500 AD, although what was left after 900 AD was only a shadow of what had been. Great Mayan cities (actually independent city-states) boasted temples, ball courts, and community housing. And Mayans grew much more than corn; they also harvested beans, chiles, other vegetables, cocoa, and tobacco. They domesticated bees as well as ducks and turkeys. More importantly, the Maya were the first people in the Western Hemisphere to use an advanced form of picture writing. Good at mathematics and astronomy, the Maya developed a 365-day calendar. (Find more on the Maya in Chapter 5.)

 Mel Gibson directed the 2006 drama Apocalypto about a young native who’s captured by Mayan soldiers and almost becomes a human sacrifice to Mayan gods before escaping and fighting his way back to his family.

The Polynesians: Between 400 and 800 AD, Polynesian people originally from Southeast Asia spread across thousands of miles of ocean to virtually every island in the Pacific — Hawaii, Tahiti, and Easter Island among them — proving themselves some of the most skillful and courageous navigators in the world. Around 1000, when Leif Erikson was checking out the east coast of Canada, a group of Polynesians made it to New Zealand, where they developed the Maori culture.

The Toltecs: Farther north than the Maya, the nomadic Toltecs settled down and farmed central Mexico long before the Aztecs rose in the same region. The Toltecs built the city of Tula. Covering 13 square miles, Tula may have been home to as many as 60,000 people.

Tracking the Centuries

330 AD: Roman Emperor Constantine renames his eastern capital, Byzantium (in today’s Turkey), making it Constantinople.

538 AD: The Japanese adopt Chinese Buddhism.

565 AD: Justinian, the Byzantine emperor, rules vast lands stretching west from his capital in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) to encompass much of formerly Roman North Africa and part of Spain and east to Persia.

632 AD: Mohammed, founder of a vigorous new religion called Islam, dies after conquering most of Arabia.

661 AD: The Omayyad Dynasty comes to power over Arab lands, ruling from its capital at Damascus, Syria.

800 AD: Pope Leo III crowns the Frankish king, Charlemagne, with a new (if anachronistic) title, Emperor of the Romans. This is the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire.

878 AD: King Alfred of Wessex and his Anglo-Saxon followers defeat the Viking ruler Guthrum, who must then pay tribute to Alfred (later referred to as Alfred the Great).

911 AD: Viking leader Hrolfr (or Rollo) founds a dynasty of Norman kings in Normandy, later a part of France.

1000: Leif Eriksson and a party of sailors from Norse Greenland land on the coast of Canada.

1014: Brian Boru, the first high king of Ireland, leads Irish warriors to defeat the Vikings at Clontarf, near Dublin.

1343: Bubonic plague begins its march across Europe, killing one-third of the inhabitants.