The Early Modern World 1450-1750 Guide 4

Clearly the Qing dynasty takeover of central Eurasia was a conquest, making use of China’s more powerful military technology and greater resources. Furthermore, the area was ruled separately from the rest of China through a new office called the Court of Colonial Affairs. Like other colonial powers, the Chinese made active use of local notables — Mongol aristocrats, Muslim officials, Buddhist leaders — as they attempted to govern the region as inexpensively as possible. Sometimes these native officials abused their authority, demanding extra taxes or labor service from local people and thus earning their hostility. In places, those officials imitated Chinese ways by wearing peacock feathers, decorating their hats with gold buttons, or adopting a Manchu hairstyle that was much resented by many Chinese who were forced to wear it. More generally, however, Chinese or Qing officials did not seek to assimilate local people into Chinese culture and showed considerable respect for the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim cultures of the region. People of noble rank, Buddhist monks, and those associated with monasteries were excused from the taxes and labor service required of ordinary people. Nor was the area flooded with Chinese settlers. In parts of Mongolia, for example, Qing authorities sharply restricted the entry of Chinese merchants and other immigrants in an effort to preserve the area as a source of recruitment for the Chinese military. They feared that the “soft” and civilized Chinese ways might erode the fighting spirit of the Mongols. The long-term significance of this new Chinese imperial state was tremendous. It greatly expanded the territory of China and added a small but important minority Map 13.3 China’s Qing of non-Chinese people to the empire’s vast population (see Map 13.3). The borders of Dynasty Empire contemporary China are essentially those created during the Qing dynasty. Some of After many centuries of intermittent expansion into Centhose peoples, particularly those in Tibet and Xinjiang, tral Asia, the Qing dynasty have retained their older identities and in recent debrought this vast region firmly cades have actively sought greater autonomy or even within the Chinese empire. independence from China. 0 250 500 miles Even more important, Chinese conquests, together 0 250 500 kilometers RUSSIAN EMPIRE with the expansion of the Russian Empire, utterly transformed Central Asia. For centuries, that region had MANCHURIA MONGOLIA been the cosmopolitan crossroads of Eurasia, hosting the (added 1697) XINJIANG (added 1750s) Silk Road trading network, welcoming all of the major TOKUGAWA Beijing JAPAN world religions, and generating an enduring encounKOREA TIBET (added 1720) ter between the nomads of the steppes and the farmNanjing East QING ers of settled agricultural regions. Now under Russian NEPAL China EMPIRE BHUTAN Sea or Chinese rule, it became the backward and impovMUGHAL TAIWAN Canton (added 1683) EMPIRE erished region known to nineteenth- and twentiethBURMA South LAOS century observers. Land-based commerce across Eurasia China PACIFIC THAILAND Sea CAMBODIA VIETNAM OCE A N increasingly took a backseat to oceanic trade. Indebted Mongolian nobles lost their land to Chinese merchants, while nomads, no longer able to herd their animals freely, fled to urban areas, where many were reduced to begging. The incorporation of inner Eurasia into the Russian and Chinese empires “eliminated permanently as a major actor on the historical stage the nomadic pastoralists, who had been the strongest alternative to settled agricultural society since the second millennium b.c.e.”25 It was the end of a long era. Muslims and Hindus in the Mughal Empire If the creation of a Chinese imperial state in the early modern era provoked a final clash of nomadic pastoralists and settled farmers, India’s Mughal Empire hosted a different kind of encounter — a further phase in the long interaction of Islamic and Hindu cultures in South Asia. That empire was the product of Central Asian warriors, who were Muslims in religion and Turkic in culture and who claimed descent from Chinggis Khan and Timur (see Chapter 11). Their brutal conquests in the sixteenth century provided India with a rare period of relative political unity (1526–1707), as Mughal emperors exercised a fragile control over a diverse and fragmented subcontinent, which had long been divided into a bewildering variety of small states, principalities, tribes, castes, sects, and ethnolinguistic groups. The central division within Mughal India was religious. The ruling dynasty and perhaps 20 percent of the population were Muslims; most of the rest practiced some form of Hinduism. Mughal India’s most famous emperor, Akbar (r. 1556– 1605), clearly recognized this fundamental reality and acted deliberately to accommodate the Hindu majority. After conquering the warrior-based and Hindu Rajputs of northwestern India, Akbar married several of their princesses but did not require them to convert to Islam. He incorporated a subDelhi R us an Agra stantial number of Hindus into the political-military elite of the empire and g RAJASTHAN m e s R. na HINR . supported the building of Hindu temples as well as mosques, palaces, and BENGAL DUS TA N GUJARAT forts. (See Document 13.2, pp. 653–55, for Mughal state building under Akbar Surat MAHARASHTRA and his son Jahangir ( jah-hahn-GEER). But Akbar acted to soften some GOLCONDA Bay of Hyderabad Arabian Bengal GOA Sea Hindu restrictions on women, encouraging the remarriage of widows, discouraging child marriages and sati (when a widow followed her husband to Calicut death by throwing herself on his funeral pyre), and persuading merchants to set aside special market days for women so as to moderate their seclusion in the home. Nur Jahan, the twentieth and favorite wife of Emperor Jahangir The Mughal Empire (r. 1605–1627) was widely regarded as the power behind the throne of her alcohol- and opium-addicted husband, giving audiences to visiting dignitaries, consulting with ministers, and even having a coin issued in her name. In directly religious matters, Akbar imposed a policy of toleration, deliberately restraining the more militantly Islamic ulama (religious scholars) and removing the special tax ( jizya) on non-Muslims. He constructed a special House of Worship where ■ Change In G d . How did Mughal attitudes and policies toward Hindus change from the time of Akbar to that of Aurangzeb? Ju he presided over intellectual discussion with representatives of many religions — Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Jain, and Zoroastrian. His son Jahangir wrote proudly of his father: “He associated with the good of every race and creed and persuasion. . . .The professors of various faiths had room in the broad expanse of his incomparable sway.”26 Akbar went so far as to create his own state cult, a religious faith aimed at the Mughal elite, drawing on Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism and emphasizing loyalty to the emperor himself. The overall style of the Mughal Empire was that of a blended elite culture in which both Hindus and various Muslim groups could feel comfortable. Thus Persian artists and writers were welcomed into the empire, and the Hindu epic Ramayana was translated into Persian, while various Persian classics appeared in Hindi and Sanskrit. In short, Akbar and his immediate successors downplayed a distinctly Islamic identity for the Mughal Empire in favor of a cosmopolitan and hybrid Indian-Persian-Turkic culture. Such policies fostered sharp opposition among some Muslims. The philosopher Shayk Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), claiming to be a “renewer” of authentic Islam in his time, strongly objected to this cultural synthesis. The worship of saints, the sacrifice of animals, and support for Hindu religious festivals all represented impure intrusions of Sufi Islam or Hinduism that needed to be rooted out. In Sirhindi’s view, it was primarily women who had introduced these deviations: “Because of their utter stupidity women pray to stones and idols and ask for their help. This practice is common, especially when small pox strikes, and there is hardly a woman who is not involved in this polytheistic practice. Women participate in the holidays of Hindus and Jews. They celebrate Diwali [a major Hindu festival] and send their sisters and daughters presents similar to those exchanged by the infidels.”27 It was therefore the duty of Muslim rulers to impose the sharia (Islamic law), to enforce the jizya, and to remove non-Muslims from high office. This strain of Muslim thinking found a champion in the emperor Aurangzeb (ow-rang-ZEHB) (r. 1658–1707), who reversed Akbar’s policy of accommodation and sought to impose Islamic supremacy. While Akbar had discouraged the Hindu practice of sati, Aurangzeg forbade it outright. Music and dance were now banned at court, and previously tolerated vices such as gambling, drinking, prostitution, and narcotics were actively suppressed. Dancing girls were ordered to get married or leave the empire altogether. Some Hindu temples were destroyed, and the jizya was reimposed. “Censors of public morals,” posted to large cities, enforced Islamic law. Aurangzeb’s religious policies, combined with intolerable demands for taxes to support his many wars of expansion, antagonized Hindus and prompted various movements of opposition to the Mughals. “Your subjects are trampled underfoot,” wrote one anonymous protester. “Every province of your empire is impoverished. . . . God is the God of all mankind, not the God of Mussalmans [Muslims] alone.” 28 These opposition movements, some of them self-consciously Hindu, fatally fractured the Mughal Empire, especially after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, and opened the way for a British takeover in the second half of the eighteenth century. Thus the Mughal Empire was the site of a highly significant encounter between two of the world’s great religious traditions. It began with an experiment in multicultural empire building and ended in growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. In the centuries that followed, both elements of the Mughal experience would be repeated. Muslims and Christians in the Ottoman Empire ■ Significance In what ways was the Ottoman Empire important for Europe in the early modern era? Like the Mughal state, the Ottoman Empire was also the creation of Turkic warrior groups, whose aggressive raiding of agricultural civilization was now legitimized in Islamic terms. Beginning around 1300 from a base area in northwestern Anatolia, these Ottoman Turks over the next three centuries swept over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe to create the Islamic world’s most significant empire (see Map 13.4). During those centuries, the Ottoman state was transformed from a small frontier principality to a prosperous, powerful, cosmopolitan empire, heir to both the Byzantine Empire and to leadership within the Islamic world. Its sultan combined the roles of a Turkic warrior prince, a Muslim caliph, and a conquering emperor, bearing the “strong sword of Islam” and serving as chief defender of the faith. Gaining such an empire transformed Turkish social life as well. The relative independence of Central Asian pastoral women, their open association with men, and their political influence in society all diminished as the Turks adopted Islam and acquired an empire in the heartland of ancient and patriarchal Mediterranean civilizations. Now elite Turkish women found themselves secluded and often veiled; slave women from the Caucasus mountains and the Sudan grew more numerous; official imperial censuses did not count women; and orthodox Muslim reformers sought to restrict women’s religious gatherings. And yet within the new constraints of a settled Islamic empire, Turkish women retained something of the social power they had enjoyed in pastoral societies. From around 1550 to 1650, women of the royal court had such an influence in political matters that their critics referred to the “sultanate of women.” Islamic law permitted women important property rights, which enabled some to become quite wealthy, endowing religious and charitable institutions. Many women actively used the Ottoman courts to protect their legal rights in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, sometimes representing themselves or acting as agents for female relatives. In 1717, the wife of an English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire compared the lives of Turkish and European women, declaring “’tis very easy to see that they have more liberty than we have.”29 Within the Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire represented the growing prominence of Turkic people, for their empire now incorporated a large number of Arabs, among whom the religion had been born. The responsibility and the prestige of protecting Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem — the holy cities of Islam — now fell to the Ottoman Empire. A century-long conflict (1534–1639) between the Ottoman Empire, espousing the Sunni version of Islam, and the Persian Safavid Empire, holding fast to the Shia form of the faith, expressed a deep and enduring division within the Vienna BOSNIA tic SERBIA Sofia CIRCASSIA . Da nu be R BULGARIA C AU CA S US M OU N TAI Black Sea MONTENEGRO Rome GREECE ANATOLIA Smyrna ARMENIA KURDISTAN Sicily Tunis Aleppo Crete SYRIA S e a Damascus S Y RI A N DES ERT r R. Jerusalem Alexandria Eu ph . R es at Tripoli Baghdad Cairo A R A ul nG H s ia A le Ni S EGYPT PERSIAN SAFAVID EMPIRE r Pe L I B YA N DESERT Teheran MESOPOTAMIA ris Tig Med ite r ra n e a n Cyprus NS o th a ns yb d b tom ime O t C la ns and sia Per Io ni an Se a Se a GEORGIA Constantinople (Istanbul) NAPLES Sardinia RU SS IA an Se a R. sp i Corsica Bucharest Belgrade ria n . KHANATE OF D o r R THE CRIMEA Ca Ad e iep Dn R. P S A L Venice RY GA l ga Vo N HU AUSTRIA OF OM D G Karlowitz N KI IAN S H IN AT A RP NT CA OU M BOHEMIA HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE R. f 0 250 250 500 miles 500 kilometers Core Ottoman region, ca. 1300 Ottoman Empire under Suleiman, 1566 Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire, 1566 Aswan ARABIA ea dS Re 0 Mecca Islamic world. Nonetheless, Persian culture, especially its poetry, painting, and traditions of imperial splendor, occupied a prominent position among the Ottoman elite. The Ottoman Empire, like its Mughal counterpart, was the site of a highly significant cross-cultural encounter in the early modern era, adding yet another chapter to the long-running story of interaction between the Islamic world and Christendom. As the Ottoman Empire expanded across Anatolia, its mostly Christian population converted in large numbers to Islam as the Byzantine state visibly weakened and large numbers of Turks settled in the region. By 1500, some 90 percent of Anatolia’s inhabitants were Muslims and Turkic speakers. The climax of this Turkic assault on the Christian world of Byzantium occurred in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the invaders. Renamed Istanbul, that splendid Christian city became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Byzantium, heir to the glory of Rome and the guardian of Orthodox Christianity, was no more. Map 13.4 The Ottoman Empire At its high point in the midsixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed a vast diversity of peoples; straddled Europe, Africa, and Asia; and battled both the Austrian and Safavid empires. In the empire’s southeastern European domains, known as the Balkans, the Ottoman encounter with Christian peoples unfolded quite differently than it had in Anatolia. In the Balkans, Muslims ruled over a large Christian population, but the scarcity of Turkish settlers and the willingness of the Ottoman authorities to accommodate the region’s Christian churches led to far fewer conversions. By the early sixteenth century, only about 19 percent of the area’s people were Muslims, and 81 percent were Christians. Many of these Christians had welcomed Ottoman conquest because taxes were lighter and oppression less pronounced than under their former Christian rulers. Christian communities such as the Eastern Orthodox and Armenian churches were granted considerable autonomy in regulating their internal social, religious, educational, and charitable affairs. Nonetheless, many Christian and Jewish women appealed legal cases dealing with marriage and inheritance to Muslim courts, where their property rights were greater. A substantial number of Christian men — Balkan landlords, Greek merchants, government officials, and high-ranking clergy — became part of the Ottoman elite, without converting to Islam. Jewish refugees, fleeing Christian persecution in a Spain recently “liberated” from Islamic rule, likewise found greater opportunity in the Ottoman Empire, where they became prominent in trade and banking circles. In these ways, Ottoman dealings with the Christian and Jewish populations of their empire broadly resembled Akbar’s policies toward the Hindu majority of Mughal India. In another way, however, Turkish rule bore heavily on Christians. Through a process known as the devshirme (dehv-SHEER-may) (the collecting or gathering), Balkan Christian communities were required to hand over a quota of young boys, who were then removed from their families, required to learn Turkish, usually converted to Islam, and trained for either civil administration or military service in elite Janissary units. Although it was a terrible blow for families who lost their children, the devshirme also represented a means of upward mobility within the Ottoman Empire. Nonetheless, this social gain occurred at a high price. Even though Ottoman authorities were relatively tolerant toward Christians within their borders, the empire itself represented an enormous threat to Christendom generally. The seizure of Constantinople, the conquest of the Balkans, Ottoman naval power in the Mediterranean, and the siege of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683 raised anew “the specter of a Muslim takeover of all of Europe.”30 (See Document 13.3, pp. 655–57.) One European ambassador reported fearfully in 1555 from the court of the Turkish ruler Suleiman: He tramples the soil of Hungary with 200,000 horses, he is at the very gates of Austria, threatens the rest of Germany, and brings in his train all the nations that extend from our borders to those of Persia.31 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /strayer/LC Indeed, the “terror of the Turk” inspired fear across much of Europe and placed Christendom on the defensive, even as Europeans were expanding aggressively across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean. But the Ottoman encounter with Christian Europe spawned admiration and cooperation as well as fear and trembling. Italian Renaissance artists portrayed the splendor of the Islamic world. (See Visual Sources for Chapter 12, pp. 600–09.) The sixteenth-century French philosopher Jean Bodin praised the religious tolerance of the Ottoman sultan in contrast to Christian intolerance: “The King of the Turks who rules over a great part of Europe safeguards the rites of religion as well as any prince in this world. Yet he constrains no-one, but on the contrary permits everyone to live as his conscience dictates.”32 The French government on occasion found it useful to ally with the Ottoman Empire against their common enemy of Habsburg Austria, while European merchants willingly violated a papal ban on selling firearms to the Turks. Cultural encounter involved more than conflict. Reflections: The Centrality of Context in World History World history is, to put it mildly, a big subject. To teachers and students alike, it can easily seem overwhelming in its detail. And yet the central task of world history is not the inclusion of endless facts or particular cases. It is rather to establish contexts or The Ottoman Siege of Vienna, 1683 In this late-seventeenthcentury painting by the Flemish artist Frans Geffels, the last Ottoman incursion into the Austrian Empire was pushed back with French and Polish help, marking the end of a serious Muslim threat to Christian Europe. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) frameworks within which carefully selected facts and cases take on new meaning. In world history, every event, every process, every historical figure, every culture, society, or civilization gains significance from its incorporation into some larger context or framework. Contextual thinking is central to world history. The broad outlines of European colonization in the Americas are familiar to most American and European students. And yet, when that story is set in the context of other empire-building projects of the early modern era, it takes on new and different meanings. Such a context helps to counter any remaining Eurocentrism in our thinking about the past by reminding us that Western Europe was not the only center of vitality and expansion and that the interaction of culturally different peoples, so characteristic of the modern age, derived from multiple sources. How often do we notice that a European Christendom creating empires across the Atlantic was also the victim of Ottoman imperial expansion in the Balkans? This kind of contextualizing also allows us to see more clearly the distinctive features of European empires as we view them in the mirror of other imperial creations. The Chinese, Mughal, and Ottoman empires continued older patterns of historical development, while those of Europe represented something wholly new in human history — an interacting Atlantic world of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Furthermore, the European empires had a far greater impact on the peoples they incorporated than did other empires. Nowhere else did empire building generate such a catastrophic population collapse as in the Americas. Nor did Asian empires foster the kind of slave-based societies and transcontinental trade in slaves that were among the chief outcomes of Europe’s American colonies. Finally, Europe was enriched and transformed by its American possessions far more than China and the Ottomans were by their territorial acquisitions. Europeans gained enormous new biological resources from their empires — corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, tobacco, timber, and much more — as well as enormous wealth in the form of gold, silver, and land. Should we need a motto for world history, consider this one: in world history, nothing stands alone; context is everything. Big Picture Questions 1. The experience of empire for conquered peoples was broadly similar whoever their rulers were. Does the material of this chapter support or challenge this idea? 2. In thinking about the similarities and differences among the empires of the early modern era, what categories of comparison might be most useful to consider? 3. Have a look at the maps in this chapter with an eye to the areas of the world that were not incorporated in a major empire. Pick one or more of them and do a little research as to what was happening there in the early modern era. 4. Looking Back: Compared to the world of the fifteenth century, what new patterns of development are visible in the empire-building projects of the centuries that followed? Documents Considering the Evidence: State Building in the Early Modern Era T he empires of the early modern era were the projects of states, though these states often made use of various private groups — missionaries, settlers, merchants, mercenaries — to achieve the goals of empire. Such imperial states — Qing dynasty China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and France, for example — were invariably headed by kings or emperors who were the source of ultimate political authority in their lands. Each of those rulers sought to govern societies divided by religion, region, ethnicity, or class. During the three centuries between 1450 and 1750, all of these states, and a number of non-imperial states as well, moved toward greater political integration and centralization. In all of them, more effective central bureaucracies curtailed, though never eliminated, entrenched local interests; royal courts became more elaborate; and the role of monarchs grew more prominent. The growth of empire accompanied this process of political integration, and perhaps helped to cause it. However, the process of state building differed considerably across the early modern world, depending on variations in historical backgrounds, the particular problems and circumstances that each state faced, the cultural basis of political authority, and the policies that individual leaders followed. The documents that follow allow us to examine this state-building effort in several distinct settings. Three of them were written by monarchs themselves and one represents an outsider’s view. Pay attention to both the similarities and the variations in this process of state building as you study the documents. You may also want to consider how these early modern states differed from the states of later centuries. To what extent was government personal rather than institutional? In what ways was power exercised — through coercion and violence, through accommodation with established elites, through the operation of new bureaucratic structures, or by persuading people that the central authority was in fact legitimate?