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February 16 - February 19, 2022
Cairo’s Jewish population thrived in the relatively prosperous and tolerant atmosphere of the Muslim Fatimid Empire of the tenth to twelfth centuries, and that city’s arid climate preserved the papers (typically written in the Arabic language but with Hebrew script) well enough that they survived into the present.
The total transport costs from Cairo to Tunisia for a bale of “purple” (a camel’s load of textiles, weighing roughly five hundred pounds) was eight gold dinars. This sum was equivalent to about four months’ living expenses for a medieval Egyptian lower-middle-class family.
Thus, mile for mile, ground transport was ten times more expensive than maritime transport.
Until the nineteenth century brought the clipper ship and steam, the seasonal dance of the monsoons—southwest in summer, northeast in winter—would dictate the annual rhythm of trade in the Indian Ocean.
his decision to do so on land, by rescuing the slow, large, and defenseless camel from the brink of oblivion, reaped similar rewards. Already extinct in North America, and quickly headed for extinction in Eurasia, the camel was first valued, about six thousand years ago, solely for its milk. Not until twenty-five hundred years later, around 1500 BC, would humans begin to exploit the camel’s ability to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo across otherwise impenetrable territory. Without the domestication of the camel, the trans-Asian silk and trans-Arabian incense routes would have been
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Within a few decades after the conquests of Cortés and Pizarro, the cattle population of Spanish America doubled as rapidly as every fifteen months.
Native American seed stock, particularly potato and corn, changed the diet of Europe. Both crops produce far more calories per acre than wheat; the potato will grow in poor soils and in a wide variety of environments, from sea level to ten thousand feet. Corn is more fastidious, requiring rich soil and long stretches of hot weather, but it can grow in “in-between” climates too dry for rice but too wet for wheat. An impoverished swath of southern Europe stretching from Portugal to the Ukraine filled this bill precisely. By 1800 it had become one of the world’s largest corn growing regions.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, these crops provided Europeans with excess food to exchange for manufactured goods and freed agricultural laborers for more productive manufacturing. The increased crop yields, in turn, created a vast demand for fertilizer, which was initially met by stripping Latin American and Pacific islands of guano.
the introduction of yams, corn, tobacco, and peanuts into China allowed the newly ascendant Qing (or Ching) dynasty to expand its influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The historical value of obsidian lies in two facts: first, it is produced in only a handful of volcanic sites, and second, with the use of sophisticated atomic fingerprinting techniques, individual samples can be traced back to their original volcanic sources.
Water transport is by its nature cheaper and more efficient than land carriage. A draft horse can carry about two hundred pounds on its back. With the help of a wagon and a good road, it can pull four thousand pounds. With the same energy expenditure, the same animal can draw as many as sixty thousand pounds along a canal towpath, a load that could be managed by small ancient sailing ships.
For over four thousand years, the Egypt-Red Sea nexus served as a pivot point of world trade, and with it, Egyptians profited mightily.
Alone among the world’s great rivers, the Nile flows north, and it is also fanned by a year-round northerly wind. These two circumstances allow ships to float north downstream and to sail south upstream.
(Before the invention of the magnetic compass, overcast skies largely prevented open-water navigation, particularly at night.)
Although an exceptional animal and driver might cover as much as sixty miles per day, a more typical day’s span is approximately thirty miles.
Before the arrival of silk and pepper in the West, incense was the premier luxury product of antiquity.
The pre-Islamic desert dwellers prayed to many gods, and Islam appropriated many early Arab religious beliefs and practices. The early Arabs erected shrines to numerous deities; the holiest was Kaaba at Mecca,
Its traces are visible in today’s world, from the modern colonies of Muslim Indians in East Africa to the Lebanese merchants still active in West Africa to the “Syrians” who populated the third-world outposts of Graham Greene’s novels.
In 878, the rebel Huang Chao sacked Canton, slaughtering 120,000 Muslims (mainly Persians), Jews, and Christians living in that city’s trade community.
The Muslim ruler, whether in Africa, Arabia, India, or Southeast Asia, observed the same basic rules regarding tax and customs rates. Typically, 2.5 percent was charged to believers, 5 percent to protected dhimmi (Christians and Jews), and 10 percent to nonprotected nonbelievers, such as Hindus and animist natives.
Nautical historians have in fact wondered why the Indians and Arabs stuck with the dhow so long, almost to the present day, and did not adopt the superior Chinese and European designs. The answer is at least threefold. First, the weight of tradition among Indian shipbuilders overwhelmed the needs of sailors for secure oceangoing craft. Second, India’s west coast did not produce enough iron for construction. Third, although the sewn craft may have been less seaworthy, they were more “beachworthy”—that is, more pliable, and thus better able to survive the frequent encounters with the reefs,
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Only during the period between 1405 and 1433 did the Chinese intentionally flex their muscle in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the inferior status accorded traders by Confucianism, which viewed merchants as parasites, steered the brightest and most ambitious away from trade and into the economically stifling Mandarin bureaucracy.
On the death of Zhu Di in 1424, the eunuchs and the xenophobic Confucian bureaucracy faced off in a power struggle. The Confucians’ victory ended the great age of Chinese exploration. Zheng He died in command of the seventh voyage; after it returned up the Yangtze River in July 1433, none would follow. Within a few generations, the Chinese allowed their naval and merchant fleets to wither; in 1500, an imperial edict made the construction of vessels with more than two masts a capital offense. In 1525, another decree forbade the building of any oceangoing vessel.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, Japanese wako marauders so terrorized China’s coastline that to this day women in Fujian province hide their faces with blue scarves originally designed to shield the wearer from the lecherous gaze of foreign bandits.
For example, on his first expedition, Zheng He killed over five thousand pirates in the Strait of Malacca; their leader was returned to China, presented to the emperor, and decapitated. On later voyages, Zheng He captured and carried back the rulers of Sri Lanka, Palembang in eastern Sumatra, and Semudera (near modern Banda Aceh), and on numerous occasions led his troops into battle.
When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.
The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were perhaps the most outrageously chauvinistic of the Western intruders in Asia and the Americas.
In one of history’s most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.
During the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves were not workaday flavorings, but rather the world’s most sought-after commodities.
Did the Europeans produce any other commodity that could be traded at Alexandria and Cairo for the spices they so intensely desired? Indeed they did: slaves to fill the insatiable appetite of the Muslim armies for soldiers. Between roughly 1200 and 1500, Italian merchants became the world’s most prosperous slave traders, buying humans on the eastern shores of the Black Sea and selling them in Egypt and the Levant.
Long-distance trade in the medieval period thus revolved around three stories: the spice trade, the slave trade, and the age-old struggle for mastery of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
The most desirable source of captives was Circassia in the Caucasus, whose male and female slaves were highly prized for their beauty.
As early as the mid-ninth century, the Abbasid army consisted primarily of slave soldiers from these areas. In Egypt, the Buyid Empire, which preceded the Fatimids, purchased large numbers of Turks; the Fatimids cast their net even wider, acquiring Turks, Slavs, and Berbers.
During the medieval and ancient periods, slavery was not a racial phenomenon; as a practical matter, the mamluk system was largely a brown-on-white affair. In the words of one historian, “African slave markets were disregarded as far as Mamluk cadres were concerned.”
The females went into households and harems; the males were sent off to training camps and into military units where “they were turned from infidels into Muslims, from boys into grown men, from raw recruits into full-fledged soldiers, and from slaves into free men.”
Before the epidemic, Justinian seemed poised to reunify the empire; it is not too much of a stretch to conclude that Yersinia pestis was primarily responsible for dashing those hopes. The epidemic helped plunge Europe into the Dark Ages and provided a geopolitical vacuum into which the early adherents of Islam, protected from the disease by the desert climate (which is unfriendly to the black rat) and by a lack of large cities, could expand. The plague also aided the Muslims farther east; Procopius recorded its devastation in Persia, suggesting that succeeding waves of the pestilence may have
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The plague may even be responsible for the schism in Islam. After Abu Ubaydah’s death, another general, Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, overthrew Caliph Ali (the fourth successor of the Prophet, and also his cousin and son-in-law), cleaving Muslims forever into Sunni and Shiite camps. Had Omar been successful in saving the capable Abu Ubaydah from the plague, it is possible that Islam would not have suffered this tragic split.
between AD 2 and 742, the Chinese population appears to have decreased by about one-fourth.
While the plague of Justinian did strike scattered cities in northern Europe, it did not ravage the whole Continent for two reasons. First, in Europe the disease was conveyed primarily over Mediterranean routes, and the way west and north was blocked by the Goths, Vandals, and Huns. Second, by the sixth and seventh centuries, the essential intermediate host, the black rat, had not yet expanded much beyond the Mediterranean littoral, and certainly not yet to the continent’s Atlantic ports.
During the sixth century, the scourge emerged from the seas; in the fourteenth, it came overland. Political unification under the khans reopened the Silk Road, and along with the precious goods of China came the rats and fleas that infected the besiegers at Kaffa.
half century before the outbreak, in 1291, a Spanish flotilla, led by the Genoese commander Benedetto Zaccaria, overcame a Moorish force near Gibraltar and opened the strait to western shipping for the first time since the Muslim conquest of Spain.26 This allowed “plague ships” to sail directly out the newly opened passage into the Atlantic and deliver doom to northern Europe.
Muslim doctors were impressed that the tent-dwelling bedouin were rarely affected and, alone among the world’s medical scholars, drew the appropriate conclusion: that the disease was due to some sort of contagion, not divine wrath, miasma, the evil eye, or poisoning by unbelievers.38
Contemporary Egyptian accounts frequently mention completely depopulated towns. Egypt never recovered even a shadow of its former wealth, power, and influence.
The primary human vectors of the disease, the Mongols, never recovered. In 1368, the Ming Chinese rebelled against their now plague-ridden overlords from the steppes and threw off their yoke. Mongol attacks grew less vigorous following the death of Tamerlane in 1405;
With the disappearance of the khanates, the steppe returned to its age-old Hobbesian state, and the access to China enjoyed by the Polos, Ibn Battuta, and generations of Genoese merchants disappeared. This drove spice-hungry Europeans to seek alternative routes to the East.
The decreased tax revenues from the shrunken Chinese population contributed in no small part to the withdrawal of the Middle Kingdom’s navy from the Indian Ocean after the eunuch admiral Zheng He’s last voyage in 1433.
The absence of maritime threats from the great trading states allowed Asian vessels to sail largely unarmed, which greatly reduced manpower requirements and increased cargo capacity.
Before the Europeans’ arrival, the world of Asian trade was no Oriental Valhalla. But as long as merchants paid customs, provided local sultans with gifts, and kept pirates at bay, the Indian Ocean was, more or less, a mare liberum. The idea that any nation might seek to control all maritime traffic would have struck merchants and rulers alike as ludicrous.
At some point, the Portuguese mariners supported by Henrique developed a new type of round-hulled ship with lateen rigging, the caravel. These craft were capable of sailing generous cargoes closer to the wind than any other European vessel. Without them, the subsequent Portuguese crawl down the African coast, and the later voyages to the Indies, would not have been possible.
the caravel yielded more immediate benefits. It improved the speed and cargo-carrying capacities of Portuguese merchants to the point where they were able to divert the trade in Africa’s two most profitable exports, slaves and gold, to their North African ports and away from the Muslim-controlled trans-Saharan camel routes.
