� How did political, economic, and religious

systems of Native Americans, Europeans, and

Africans compare, and how did things change

as a result of contacts among them?

� This was covered in 1491 and other summer

assignment work so we will not cover it in

depth in our notes

� Monarchs and Nobles owned

land/peasants would live on and work the

land� Nobles had both military and political power

� Established institutions of nobility, church, and

village provided a sense of security despite

tremendous class differences, violence, and

instability.

� Men governed families –patriarchal� Christian teachings justified the man’s position

� Eldest son most important� Children worked for their fathers into their

middle to late twenties� Fathers chose spouses for children based on

wealth and status� Fathers bestowed land to eldest son (a

practice known as primogeniture), which left many men landless and poor

� Priority of eldest son meant that many men and women had no individual identify or personal freedom because they had no land.

� The peasantry – People who lived in small

agricultural villages� Farmed cooperatively on manorial lands

� There were tillage rights in exchange for labor

on the lord’s estates (serfdom)

� Output produced surpluses that fed a local

market economy

� Farming cycle was largely dictated by the

seasons and weather with busiest times of

year being spring and fall.

� The peasant’s fate was constant labor with primitive tools� Compared to today, output was very

small, roughly 1/12 of present-day yields� Malnourished mothers fed babies sparingly

(boys preferred to girls)� Half of peasant children died before age 21,

victims of disease and malnourishment� Had strong ties to religion as a result of this

hardship in daily life.

� Byzantine civilization� In the first millennium A.D., Europe was

extremely backward and Arab scholars in the Mediterranean basin preserved the achievements of the Greeks and Romans in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and geography

� Arab merchants controlled trade in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Near East▪ They had access to spices, silks, compasses, water-

powered mills, and mechanical clocks.

� The Italian Renaissance – In the twelfth century, Italian merchants pushed into Arab-dominated trade routes and carried Asian luxuries into European markets� Commerce created wealthy merchants, bankers,

and manufacturers who expanded trade� Wealthy Italian elites governed city-states as

republics� They celebrated civic humanism and sponsored

artists including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and others.

� Italy’s economic and cultural revolution

spread slowly to northern and Western

Europe, which traded in wool, timber, furs,

wheat and rye, honey, wax, and amber

� rise of commerce favored kings over

nobility� They established courts and bureaucracies

that allow them to centralize power.

� Oldest European religions were animistic� Pagan traditions of Greece and Rome

overlaid animism with myths about gods interacting directly in humans’ affairs� Christianity grew out of Jewish monotheism

to become the dominant religion� Roman emperor Constantine converted to

Christianity in A.D. 312 and made it Rome’s official religion

� Roman Catholic Church became great unifying institution in Western Europe

� Pope in Rome sat atop a hierarchy of cardinals, bishops, and priests; every village had a church

� Christians shared a common view of God and history through the church’s scholarship and teachings.

� Priests taught pagans that there was a supernatural God who sent his son (Jesus Christ) to save humanity from sin

� Pagan festivals were transformed into religious holidays and services

� People offered prayers to Christ instead of ritual offerings to nature

� Church also taught that Satan was a lesser and wicked supernatural being who constantly challenged God by tempting the people to sin

� The spread of “heresies” (teachings inconsistent with the Church) by prophets was seen as the work of Satan.

� The Crusades – In A.D. 632, the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad saw the conversion of Arab peoples to Islam and the desire then to spread Muslim teachings

� Between 1096 and 1291, Christian crusaders (armies) sought to reverse the spread of Islam and win back the lands where Christ lived� Crusades solidified Europe’s Christian identity and

spurred persecution and expulsion of Jews� Crusades also introduced Western European

merchants to trade routes from Constantinople to China along the Silk Road, and crusaders encountered sugar for the first time.

� The Reformation – In 1517, German monk Martin Luther wrote Ninety-five Theses which condemned corruption in Roman Catholic Church and called for Christians to look to the Bible, not the clergy, for spiritual authority

� John Calvin’s writings stressed human weakness, God’s omnipotence, and doctrine of predestination (God chooses certain people for salvation and condemns the rest to eternal damnation)

� Thousands of Europeans converted to Protestantism and the Protestant Reformation triggered a Counter-Reformation and wars between Catholic and Protestant nations� religious competition and conflict shaped European colonization

of the Americas in the 1600s and beyond.

� Sudanic civilization – Emerged 9000 B.C. in eastern West Africa and traveled westward� based on domesticated cattle (8500–7500 B.C.),

cultivation of sorghum and millet (7500–7000 B.C.), cultivation of cotton and production of cotton cloth (6500–3500 B.C.), and copper and iron production (2500–1000 B.C.)

� Mtates were stratified and ruled by kings and princes� Monotheistic religion was distinct from

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

� West African empires – Three great empires grew from Sudanic origins: � around A.D. 800, the Ghana Empire used

domesticated camels to pioneer trade routes across the Sahara to North Africa

� Mali Empire emerged in thirteenth century� Songhai Empire in fifteenth century

� These empires were similar to Aztecs and Incas, relying in military might to control trade routes.

� Importance of gold – Abundant in West

Africa, gold was cornerstone of

international trade and constituted one-

half to two-thirds of all the gold in

circulation in Europe, North Africa, and

Asia by 1450.

� Kingdoms and mini-states – West Africa’s

resource-rich lower savanna and tropical

rain forest regions were home to many

kingdoms

� Comparable to Italy’s city-states, these

densely populated kingdoms relied on

yam cultivation and gathering

� They also fought frequently in a

competition for local power.

� For centuries, smaller states along the West African coast had few trading options� By the mid-fifteenth century, a new coastal

trade with Europeans brought new options� European traders had to negotiate

contracts on local terms, but they welcomed the chance to trade Asian and European goods for West Africa’s resources, including gold, grain, and ivory.

� The slave trade – East of Africa’s Gold

Coast, the Bight of Benin, an early center

of the slave trade, came to be called the

Slave Coast.

� Islam – West Africans immediately south of the Sahara learned about Islam from Arab merchants and Muslim leaders called imams� They knew the Koran and built centers of Islamic

learning and instruction in cities like Timbuktu

� African animism – Most West Africans acknowledged multiple gods as well as animistic spirits� Kings were seen as divine, and ancestor worship

was important� Rituals celebrated male virility and female fertility

� Portuguese Expansion� In 1420, Prince Henry of Portugal founded a

center for sea navigation in the south of Portugal

� Looking for a way around North Africa to the

South and East

� Explorers from Henry’s center designed new,

better-handling vessels (caravels) and claimed

the Madeira and Azore islands for Portugal

� In 1435, they sailed to Sierra Leone and

exchanged salt, wine, and fish for African ivory

and gold.

� Portuguese Expansion� Genoese (Italian) traders cooperated with

Portuguese and Castilians and discovered the

Canary and Cape Verde Islands to which they

exported Mediterranean agriculture and

familiar cash crops.

� Portuguese Expansion� The sugar islands – Europeans conquered the

Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, and São

Tomé and enslaved the local populations▪ planters transformed local ecosystems to

agricultural colonies where they produced wheat,

wine grapes, and, where the climate permitted,

sugar.

� The African Slave Trade� Slavery was widespread in Africa, and slaves,

used as agricultural laborers, concubines, or

military recruits, were a key commodity of

exchange

� slaves were central to the trans-Saharan trade

� Between A.D. 700 and 1900, an estimated nine

million Africans were sold in the trans-Saharan

slave trade.

� The African Slave Trade� Europeans’ entered into the slave trade in

1482 when Portuguese merchants exploited

and redirected the existing African slave trade▪ First, they enslaved Africans to work on sugar

plantations

▪ they sold slaves in Lisbon

▪ After 1550, the Atlantic slave trade expanded

enormously as Europeans established sugar

plantations in Brazil and the West Indies.

� Sixteenth-Century Incursions� Columbus-Castilian monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella

subsidized Christopher Columbus’s (supported by Genoa investors) exploration of the west. In August 1492, three ships traveled 3,000 miles to present-day Bahamas, which Columbus believed was part of Asia; he called the region “the West Indies” and the people “Indians.” Columbus returned to report to the Spanish monarchs that, while he had found no gold, he had heard stories of gold on other islands

� Three more trips to the New World saw Columbus colonize the so-named West Indies for Spain, but no golden fortune for the king and queen. German geographer labeled the continents “America” after Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who had argued that this region was not part of Asia but a nuevo mundo,or a “new world.”

� Sixteenth-Century Incursions� The Spanish Invasion – Spanish explorers probed the

mainland for gold and slaves� In 1513, Juan Ponce de León and Vasco Núñez de

Balboa reported on explorations and encouraged veterans of the reconquista to invade the mainland

� 1519–1521 Hernán Cortés and his army (aided by European diseases) conquer the Aztec Empire and the Mayan city-states of the Yucatan Peninsula

� 1524–1532 Francisco Pizarro and his small army conquered the already weakened Inca Empire, making Spain the master of the New World.

� Sixteenth-Century Incursions� Cabral and Brazil – In 1500, Pedro Alvares

Cabral and his fleet discovered Brazil

� By the 1530s, Portuguese settlers began to

create sugar plantations worked by Native

Americans, but African slaves gradually

replaced them

� Brazil became the first American example of

the plantation system.