Changing Traditions

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XI (Themes in World History), Chapter 3.

A geographer captured by pirates

In the early sixteenth century a man born in Granada and raised in North Africa, Hasan al-Wazzan, was seized by pirates and handed to Pope Leo X in Rome. The Pope had him baptised, and the world knew him as Leo Africanus. Encouraged by the papacy, he wrote the first geography of Africa. A North African geographer writing for a Pope tells you what this chapter is about: between about 1300 and 1700 people, goods, ideas and diseases crossed oceans and religions faster than ever before. The chapter is your map to the period. It sets out the big movements, and the later chapters fill in the detail.

Starting point: continental empires and a slower West

By the ninth century large parts of Asia had seen great empires, some nomadic and some based on cities and trade. The Macedonian, Roman, Arab and Mongol empires stand apart from earlier Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese and Mauryan empires because they were continental or transcontinental in scale.

In western Europe the story was slower. From the ninth to the seventeenth century features we link with modern life developed gradually: experimental science, governments with civil services and parliaments, codes of law, and better industrial and farming technology. But western Europe began from a weaker position. By the fifth century the western Roman Empire had broken up, and surviving Roman institutions were adapted to the needs of tribal kingdoms. Towns in western Europe stayed smaller than those further east. There were small but important centres by the ninth century, such as Aix, London, Rome and Siena.

Feudal Europe and the Church

The Church and the royal government combined Roman institutions with the customs of the tribes. The best example is Charlemagne's empire in western and central Europe around the beginning of the ninth century. When it collapsed, towns and trade survived attacks by Hungarians, Vikings and others. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries there were major changes in the countryside.

This produced feudalism: farming organised around castles and manor houses, where lords held land worked by peasants (serfs) who pledged loyalty, goods and services. Lesser lords were vassals of greater lords, and finally of kings. The Catholic Church, headed by the Pope, backed this order and held land itself. In an age of poor medicine and short lives, it taught people how to live so that the afterlife would be bearable, and monasteries were built for devotion to God. Churches were also part of a scholarly network that stretched from the Muslim states of Spain to Byzantium, which gave small European kings a glimpse of the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean.

Trade wakes up: Venice, Genoa and the Crusades

From the twelfth century Mediterranean traders from Venice and Genoa carried a growing trade with Muslim states and what remained of the eastern Roman Empire. Kings were drawn by wealth and by the wish to free the holy places linked with Christ, and the Crusades strengthened links across the Mediterranean. Inside Europe trade grew around fairs and around the Baltic and North Sea ports. So the Crusades are in this chapter as a trade and contact story, not only a religious war.

The Renaissance: from afterlife to "the wonders of life itself"

From the fourteenth century, especially in the towns of northern Italy, wealthy people began to turn from a preoccupation with the afterlife to "the wonders of life itself". Sculptors, painters and writers grew interested in human beings and in discovery. They were shaped by Islamic respect for living things and by Greek art and ideas carried through Byzantine trade. This is the Renaissance. It is a movement from the fourteenth century, not a single date.

Two views. For the exam: the Renaissance began in the towns of northern Italy in the fourteenth century as a break with the older, afterlife centred outlook. Another reading: Jacob Burckhardt, who popularised the idea, saw a sharp break between medieval and modern. Later historians, such as Peter Burke, argued that earlier scholars already knew Greek and Roman writers and that religion stayed central, so many Renaissance features have medieval roots.

The age of voyages

By the end of the fifteenth century Spain and Portugal were pushing out into the Atlantic. The Portuguese went down the west African coast, round the Cape of Good Hope and on to India, which they wanted for its spices. Columbus, trying to find a western route, reached islands in 1492 that came to be called the "West Indies". Others looked for a northern route to India and China through the Arctic. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut (Kozhikode).

Pause and predict: Columbus did not reach India, so why were the islands called the West Indies?

Check your answer: because Columbus believed he had arrived at the Indies by sailing west. The name stuck even after Europeans understood that this was a different continent.

Cause and effect chain: Black Death (1348) shakes the feudal order → Hundred Years' War (1337 to 1453) drains the lords → Ottomans take Constantinople (1453) → Iberian states look for sea routes → Columbus (1492) → Vasco da Gama (1498).

Two views. For the exam: the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 pushed Europeans to seek sea routes to Asia. Another reading: many historians point out that Portuguese exploration of the Atlantic coast of Africa had begun well before 1453, and that Italian merchants kept trading with the Ottomans afterwards. They treat the fall of Constantinople as one pressure among several, not the sole cause.

Meeting the world: people who stand for the encounters

European attitudes ranged from careful and curious to overbearing and cruel. The Catholic Church both studied other cultures and encouraged attacks on peoples it called "un-Christian". In the Islamic lands, India and China, Europeans remained a curiosity until the end of the seventeenth century. Japan acted quickly: by the late sixteenth century it had adopted muskets and begun large scale production. In the Americas the Aztecs' rivals used the Europeans against them, and European diseases killed over 90 per cent of the people in some areas by the end of the sixteenth century.

Pause and predict: Japan took up the musket within decades, while the Mughal and Ottoman empires saw Europeans as a curiosity. What does this tell you about "the European impact"?

Check your answer: there was no single response. Societies decided what to adopt and what to ignore, and the local politics, as with the Aztec rivals, shaped outcomes as much as European arms did.

Exchange: the engine of the age

The age ran on exchange. Goods moved (American silver for Asian textiles and spices), and so did ideas (Greek and Arabic texts reaching Europe through Byzantine and Spanish routes). People moved (Jesuits to Japan, Africans enslaved and shipped to the Americas), and so did microbes (smallpox and other diseases in the Americas). Several of these exchanges had heavy human costs, which is why the period is not simply a story of progress.

Timeline III in one table

Places to place on the map

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: An Empire Across Three Continents ends with the Roman world breaking into new kingdoms, which is where this chapter's western Europe begins.
• Next: The Three Orders takes the feudal order mentioned here and explains clergy, nobility, peasants and the crisis of the fourteenth century.
• Then: Changing Cultural Traditions takes the Renaissance, printing and the Reformation in detail.
• Class XII link: Peasants, Zamindars and the State follows the Mughal world of Babur and Akbar that appears on this chapter's timeline.