The Year 1000: When Globalization Began

by Valerie Hansen

The year 1000 occurred during the reign of Sylvester II, yet the year didn’t mean much to Europeans because very few people used a calendar that counted years starting at the birth of Jesus. Such calendars had existed since the 500s, but this system of dating gained ground slowly, winning official acceptance by the church only in 1500. Most people referred to the year by the reign of the ruling king or pope, calling the year 1000, for example, the second year of Sylvester’s reign. Few Christians believed that Christ would return to earth in the year 1000. Various itinerant preachers and church reformers claimed to be the messiah and led uprisings, but their movements occurred in different centuries, none near the year 1000.

To judge the reliability of such accounts, the best method is to compare one report with other available sources and form an opinion about whether it rings true. This approach allows us to test the different theories claiming that certain travelers reached the Americas before Columbus. Some are utterly credible and have received widespread scholarly support; others, utterly unfounded, have triggered profound skepticism. While, for example, the evidence for the Viking voyages to Newfoundland is ironclad, the case for the Chinese beating Columbus to the Americas is speculative.

Except for al-Biruni and other leading scholars in the Islamic world, few people alive in the year 1000 conceived of the entire globe.

When they voyaged back to Scandinavia, the Vikings could catch the Gulf Stream, which is part of the North Atlantic Gyre. Sailing on the Gulf Stream is like taking a fast-moving river through a sluggish ocean. It travels north along the east coast of the Americas and then veers out into the Atlantic around Newfoundland. Reaching the British Isles, it continues north into Europe. It moves at more than 100 miles (160 km) in a day, and its width—visible because it is a different color from the surrounding water—is some 40 miles (70 km) across.

There is good reason to believe that L’Anse aux Meadows wasn’t the main Norse camp in the Americas. Unlike typical Norse settlements in Iceland and Greenland, the site had no agricultural fields nearby and couldn’t have supplied the residents with food.

Stefansson’s map revived the memory of the Norse voyages to the Americas in 1000, which raise many of the same challenges posed by globalization today. What happens if weapons technology is unequal and hostilities break out? What are the consequences of trade imbalances? If one side has more people, what can the other side do to compensate? And, finally, why is it so difficult to learn from the other side, even if it has mastered a demonstrably useful skill?

As was always the case, geography played a role. The dense jungle of Panama posed a major geographical obstacle for those going overland; it’s the one place in Latin America uncrossed by major highways even today. Goods traveling from Panama to Colombia almost always go via container ships. In the Andes, llama caravans carried many commodities through the highlands where the llamas had ample supplies of fresh grass. Llamas could go up and down mountains and as far as the Peruvian coast, but because of the lack of grasslands at sea level, they couldn’t travel along the coast for long. The only way to move along the coast was by boat.

But the sea journey north wasn’t easy either. One computer simulation found that it would have taken two months to sail north from Ecuador to western Mexico but five months for the return leg, which required going deep into the ocean—out of sight from the coast—for an entire month because of ocean currents. Ocean currents also posed genuine challenges for those traveling in a dugout canoe without a sail, the only type of boat in certain use before contact with the Europeans.

the resident peoples of the Americas had constructed a sophisticated network of pathways long before the Spanish came.

the Rus weren’t a single ethnicity. An amalgam of various northern peoples such as the Norse, the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, and the Slavs, they joined together to form warbands and disbanded just as quickly.

Once the silver had been melted down and was no longer shaped like a coin, the only way to determine the value of a given item was to weigh it. To do so, the Rus adopted a new tool from the Islamic world: balance scales. These have surfaced all over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe—certain evidence of an early technology transfer.

How many slaves could one million coins buy? One hundred thousand over the course of the eleventh century, or roughly one thousand per year.

The world of plundering chieftains slowly gave way to tax-collecting monarchies around the year 1000. Kings rewarded their followers with land, not loot. An early example was William the Conqueror, whose ancestors had come to France in the early 900s as pirates, collected protection money, and eventually became the Norman kings of England,

events depicted in the world-famous Bayeux Tapestry.

The 1066 invasion of England marked the end of the Viking Age. Indeed, William’s administration in England implemented the same changes taking place in multiple Scandinavian lands, in which rulers rewarded their followers with specific lands, and the farming revenue ...

Olga was one of the first Rurikids to convert to Christianity. While serving as regent for Igor’s son Sviatoslav between 945 and 961, when he was too young to rule on his own, she chose to be baptized at Constantinople. The Primary Chronicle reports that the Byzantine emperor Constantine proposed to her. Her refusal was clever: “How can you marry me, after yourself baptizing me and calling me your daughter? For among Christians that is unlawful, as you yourself must know.” Constantine apparently took no offense since he quickly admitted defeat: “Olga, you have outwitted me.” The two players may not have spoken these exact words, but Olga certainly converted to the Byzantine form of Christianity, and she definitely never married Constantine.

In his quest to gain support, Vladimir put up statues to six traditional Rus deities, including Perun, the god of lightning. Yet Vladimir realized that, because his subjects had no belief system in common, they lacked a shared identity, which weakened his hold over them. A political rival could easily challenge Vladimir’s rule by rallying his supporters around a competing deity. Vladimir began to look for a major religion that could command the loyalty of all his subjects. Once he selected the right religion and required his subjects to convert to it, he could ban the worship of other deities and head off any challenges to his government.

The process of conversion among the Khazars to Judaism was gradual and only partial; the Persian geographer Ibn al-Faqih, writing in 902 or 903, noted, “all of the Khazars are Jews, but they have been Judaicized recently.” Archeologists have searched in vain for evidence of Judaism among ordinary people. Going through thousands of mud bricks with various graffiti and drawings on them, they’ve found no menorahs or other Jewish symbols. Historians sometimes face this type of situation when the written record says one thing, but the archeological record produces little to substantiate it. If the written record is correct, the Khazars formed the largest Jewish state in existence between the destruction of the Temple of ancient Israel in AD 70 and the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

The Primary Chronicle presents Vladimir’s decision to convert to Byzantine Christianity as a sequence of four events. First, at Cherson his armies defeat the forces of Bardas Phokas, a claimant to the Byzantine throne. Second, he loses his sight. Third, he is baptized and his sight returns. Fourth and finally, he marries Anna, the sister of the Byzantine ruler Basil II. No contemporary observer in either Byzantium or Germany viewed Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity as a major event; to them, it was a minor local matter between the Byzantines and the Rus. From our vantage point today, though, Vladimir’s conversion marked a key step in the formation of the Christian world. Vladimir’s realm had five million people living in an area of more than 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 sq km), twice the size of France. With Vladimir’s switch to Christianity, Eastern Europe turned to face Byzantium—not Jerusalem, Rome, or Mecca. The Rus maintained intensive economic and cultural ties with Western Europe, but they had only one sacral center, and it was in Byzantium.

Once a ruler converted to a major religion, he gained access to clerics who could assist him in governing. Because they could read, write, and do math, the clergy helped monarchs such as Vladimir gain greater control. Those skills became increasingly important around 1000, especially as rulers needed literate officials to help them draft documents and numerate staff to count the taxes they collected.

The history of the Italian community in Constantinople illustrates another aspect of globalization: a sizable group of foreigners came to a city to do business, established households (often with local women), and thoroughly antagonized everyone around them. The trouble all began in 1081, a decade after the defeat at Manzikert, when the Byzantine emperor asked the Venetian merchants in Constantinople for help fighting the Normans in Albania. At this time, several Italian republics were extremely prosperous and commanded powerful armies, and the Venetians were the wealthiest of all. In exchange for their assistance, the Byzantine emperor granted Venetian merchants the right to trade almost everywhere in the empire. In addition, he completely exempted the Venetians from all commercial taxes.

Relations between Western Europe and the Byzantines hit rock bottom during the Fourth Crusade, which was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1201. The trouble began when the leaders of the Fourth Crusade took out a loan from the Venetians that they couldn’t repay and so decided to ransack Constantinople. The Crusaders smashed the altar at the Hagia Sophia cathedral and divided the gems and precious metals among the troops. After looting Constantinople in 1204, the Crusaders didn’t go on to Jerusalem. They replaced the Byzantine emperor with a Westerner and imposed a new government called the Latin Empire, which lasted until 1261.

Africans played a key role in the growing trade between the Islamic world and Africa. Some two thirds of the gold entering Europe and Asia before 1492 came from West Africa. And the number of slaves who left Africa for the Islamic world between 800 and 1800 was so great that it rivaled the total number of slaves shipped across the Atlantic.

in retrospect, it is tempting to condemn those—here the Omani ship captain and the African king prior to his abduction—who profited from the slave trade. But we must realize that, in the preindustrial world, the constant demand for labor meant that the slave trade existed almost everywhere. The first abolitionist critics of slavery spoke up only in the 1750s. For much of human history, slavery was a big business.

As the sailor’s tale about the slave king suggests, Muslims welcomed all converts and treated all men, including slaves, as equal in the eyes of God, if not socially. Male slaves in the Islamic world carried goods and rowed boats, but they also managed stores and even tended the personal libraries of their owners. Although the Quran forbade the practice, slave dealers castrated young boys because eunuch slaves were in high demand as supervisors of women’s quarters. Male slaves, particularly those from Central Asia, also served in the armies of different military powers.

Deeply interested in the learning of other societies, the second Abbasid caliph, Mansur, who reigned from 754 to 775, financed the translation from Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian into Arabic of books about geography, medicine, math, physics, and logic. Sometime after 800, factories in Baghdad began to produce paper in large quantities using Chinese manufacturing techniques, another early example of technological transfer.

In the year 1000 the export goods from Africa—apart from slaves—that passed through Cairo included ivory, copper, bronze, and most alluring of all, gold. A major mystery of the era was identifying the origin of the gold—learning not just where the mines were located but identifying who controlled the mines and who sold the gold they produced. Because this knowledge could allow the bearer to challenge the middlemen who ran the gold trade, the middlemen did everything in their power to prevent outsiders from learning how they operated. They kept their secrets for centuries.

Sugar spread throughout Europe in the 1000s. Expensive, it was generally used in small quantities as a spice, not as a sweetener.

by the time that the Portuguese sailed along the West African coast, a sophisticated system of pathways traversed Africa and connected North and East Africa to the outside world.

Along with Eastern Europe and Africa, Central Asia was the third major source of slaves entering the Islamic world. The sale of Central Asian slaves caused a major forced migration in the world of 1000. Once they realized that skilled slave soldiers commanded a higher price than unskilled slaves, the Samanids established a school to train military slaves. The revenues from the slave trade made the Samanids so rich that they continued to mint silver coins with a high degree of purity until the continent-wide silver shortage cut off their silver supplies sometime after 1000.

Women couldn’t stay in madrasas—they had no separate rooms for female students—but some women, particularly from prominent scholarly families, pursued their studies and managed to achieve a high level of scholarly attainment. Thirty-seven biographical dictionaries listing prominent scholars and interpreters of the Quran preserve the names of hundreds of female scholars. Twenty-three percent of the scholars listed in one dictionary written in 1201 turned out to be female. Multiple female scholars attained sufficient scholarly eminence that men, including those who weren’t their relatives, traveled to study with them. Because information about teachers and students moved along the same pathways as did commercial goods, even the people who stayed home were exposed to new ways of thought and novel products.

The Ghaznavids’ main target was the bullion stored in Hindu palaces and temples. Mahmud used Muslim fighters to plunder Hindu temples—permissible because Hindus didn’t qualify as dhimmi, or protected peoples.

The year 999 marks the official end of the Samanid dynasty, and the start of a twenty-year contest between the Ghaznavids and Karakhanids to gain control over the former Samanid lands. The Ghaznavids intensified the hold of Islam in Afghanistan, while the Karakhanids brought Islam to western Xinjiang.

Claiming descent from the Turkic rulers of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–536), the Kitan ruling house supported Buddhism. Whenever non-Chinese peoples defeated the Chinese in battle and took over part of the empire, they had to select which Chinese religion to support from among Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Otherwise their Chinese subjects would not accept their rule. Few conquering dynasties chose Confucianism or Daoism with their daunting textual traditions.

Buddhism, a belief system that originated in India and became popular in China, appealed to foreign rulers because of its teachings about ideal monarchs, called chakravartin rulers. Such rulers didn’t have to live in monasteries or take vows of sexual abstinence as monks did. Continuing to rule in the secular world, they contributed land, money, and other gifts to the Buddhists and so fulfilled the traditional chakravartin ideal. By ruling in accordance with Buddhist tenets and encouraging their subjects to follow Buddhism, they accrued Buddhist merit.

Himself a product of this system, Abaoji resisted it. He particularly objected to having to seek the approval of all the tribal leaders every three years as was the Kitan custom. In 916 he founded a Chinese-style dynasty later called the Liao and named himself emperor. Ending the triannual meetings, he asserted that he couldn’t be replaced.

Mahmud conceived of a world in which his Muslim allies were on one side, and everyone else, including the Buddhist Liao emperor, was on the other.

The belief in the 1052 end of the world was shared by the various powers in the Buddhist bloc—Song dynasty China, the Liao realm, Japan, and Korea—and books traveled along the pathways that linked them. Korean calendrical experts conferred with their counterparts in Japan and the Liao realm just as al-Biruni consulted with like-minded experts in the Islamic bloc.

When a Franciscan missionary from Belgium named William of Rubruck visited the capital at Karakhorum, in modern Mongolia, he encountered European prisoners of war from as far away as France. One man was a skilled silversmith who made elaborate fountains. Captives like the silversmith were able to marry, form families, and live comfortably, but they couldn’t return home. The movement of so many people across the grasslands resulted in unprecedented exchanges of information: Iranian and Chinese astronomers consulted with each other, and one Iranian historian wrote a history of the world that covered the Islamic world as well as China in considerable detail.

The most surprising journeys around the year 1000 took place between the Malay Peninsula and Madagascar on the east coast of Africa some 4,000 miles (6,500 km) away (just under the 4,400 miles, or 7,000 km, of Columbus’s first voyage). Although Madagascar is only some 250 miles (400 km) off Africa’s east coast, the language of the islands, Malagasy, is related to Malayic languages and not—as you’d expect—to the Bantu family of languages predominant in Africa and along the East African coast. Malagasy turns out to be in the same language group as Malay, Polynesian, Hawaiian, and the indigenous language of Taiwan. These Malayo-Polynesian languages have much in common: the Hawaiian word for “forbidden” is kabu, while the Tahitians pronounce the same word as “tabu” (the origin of “taboo” in English). The peoples who settled the Pacific between 1000 BC and AD 1300 spoke languages in this family, as did those who went all the way to Madagascar.

If we could travel back in time, we would observe locals wearing Indian cotton textiles and eating food inspired by Indian cuisine. Evidence of the early penetration of Indian culture into Southeast Asia takes the form of Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions and stone images of the Buddha dating to between AD 300 and 600.

Like leaders elsewhere in the year 1000, Southeast Asian leaders converted to a universal religion to enhance their power. Both Buddhism and Hinduism gained many princely adherents. Especially appealing was the Buddhist ideal of the chakravartin donor-king. Popular among the grasslands peoples of North Asia such as the Kitan, it proved to be just as powerful in Southeast Asia. The chakravartin ideal wasn’t limited to Buddhism; Hindus also believed that talented leaders were able to rule over large realms only because of divine support.

Rulers of temple states came to power in the usual way—by outsmarting their rivals and defeating them in battle—but once in power they didn’t depend exclusively on force to govern. They encouraged their subjects to associate them with the main deities of Buddhism, Hinduism, or both. Carrying out the ideals of chakravartin rule, monarchs donated gifts and land to temples, where their subjects regularly saw their rulers performing rituals.

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument anywhere in the world. Dating to around 800 and constructed entirely of stone, the nine-level monument rises over 100 feet (31.5 m) tall. The bottom layer of the monument sank below ground even when first built, possibly because of a volcanic explosion or earthquake. This layer depicts a hell for those who don’t observe Buddhist precepts.

Rajaraja I, like other rulers, conducted diplomacy through temple patronage. He believed that the best way to solidify ties with allies was to allow them to construct temples in his territory, and he demonstrated his support by making contributions to the temples his allies paid for. In 1005 the ruler of Srivijaya established a Buddhist monastery and financed a Hindu temple on its grounds in Nagapattinam, the most important port in the Chola realm. Both Rajaraja I and his son Rajendra dedicated the tax income from neighboring villages to support these structures, which were still standing in 1467 when some shipwrecked Burmese monks worshipped at the site. These types of temple donations helped to bind the far-flung states in South and Southeast Asia together.

Lidar surveys of Angkor have captured the outlines of canals, earthworks, dams, and ponds—all part of the irrigation system—that are very hard to detect even when walking through the jungle. Without these crucial waterworks, the king’s subjects could never have cultivated the wet rice that underpinned the entire economy.

The shift in trade toward China affected Southeast Asian localities in different ways. The Javanese and Balinese began to import Chinese bronze coins to use as small change in the eleventh century, and by the thirteenth century, when supplies from China ran low, they copied Chinese coins for their own use. In ports all over the region, Chinese merchants came to outnumber Indian merchants, especially after the Mongol conquest of South China in the 1270s, when many Chinese moved permanently to Southeast Asia.

Zhu Yu is the only writer in the Song dynasty who mentions slaves brought from other countries. He explains that some were originally crewmen captured by pirates and that they possessed an unusual skill: “the foreign slaves are good at swimming; they enter the water without closing their eyes.” The slaves knew how to fix leaks in ships by using “wadding to repair the ship’s exterior.” The slaves had difficulty adjusting to Chinese ways. Since they were accustomed to eating raw food, cooked food gave them such severe diarrhea that some died. Zhu Yu tells us the slaves “are black as ink. Their lips are red, and their teeth are white. Their hair is curly as well as yellow.” Yellow? This word in Chinese can indicate the color of aging hair, but it is also possible that the slaves suffered from a nutritional disorder called kwashiorkor, which is caused by a severe lack of protein. Sometimes those who eat only raw foods suffer from this disorder, which can leave their hair rust-colored.

We don’t think of these kilns as industrial simply because they didn’t use steam or electric power (they burned wood or charcoal), but these enterprises were just as large and complex as the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. Fully 7.5 percent of Fujian’s population of five million—some 375,000 people—were involved in making export ceramics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

A shift in Song monetary policy had a dramatic effect on its international trade partners. When Song government officials first issued paper notes in 1024, they had limited their use to the province of Sichuan, but in 1170 the Song government established a permanent system of paper notes backed by silver.