Chapter 1 APUS Textbook

Four Women’s Lives Highlight the Convergence of Three Continents

C H A P T E R 1

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In what historians call the “early modern period” of world history—roughly the fif-teenth to the seventeenth century, when peoples from different regions of the earthcame into close contact with each other—four women played key roles in the con-vergence and clash of societies from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Their liveshighlight some of this chapter’s major themes, which developed in an era when thepeople of three continents began to encounter each other and the shape of the mod-ern world began to take form.

American Stories

Portuguese troops storm Tangiers in Morocco in 1471 aspart of the ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islamin the mid-fifteenth century Mediterranean world. (The ArtArchive/Pastrana Church, Spain/Dagli Orti)

Ancient America and Africa

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Born in 1451, Isabella of Castile was a banner bearer for reconquista—the cen-turies-long Christian crusade to expel the Muslim rulers who had controlled Spain forcenturies. Pious and charitable, the queen of Castile married Ferdinand, the king ofAragon, in 1469.The union of their kingdoms forged a stronger Christian Spain nowprepared to realize a new religious and military vision. Eleven years later, after endinghostilities with Portugal, Isabella and Ferdinand began consolidating their power. Byexpelling Muslims and Jews, the royal couple pressed to enforce Catholic religiousconformity.Their religious zeal also led them to sponsor four voyages of ChristopherColumbus as a means of extending Spanish power across the Atlantic.The first wascommissioned in 1492, only a few months after what the Spanish considered a “justand holy war” against infidels culminated in the surrender of Moorish Granada, thelast stronghold of Islam in Christian Europe. Sympathizing with Isabella’s fervent pietyand desire to convert the people of distant lands to Christianity, Columbus after 1493signed his letters “Christopher Columbus, Christ Bearer.”

On the other side of the Atlantic resided an Aztec woman of influence, also calledIsabella by the Spanish, who soon symbolized the mixing of her people with theSpanish. Her real name was Tecuichpotzin, which meant “little royal maiden” inNahuatl, the Aztec language.The firstborn child of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II andTeotlalco, his wife, she entered the world in 1509—before the Aztecs had seen a sin-gle Spaniard. But when she was 11,Tecuichpotzin witnessed the arrival of the conquis-tadors under Cortés. When her father was near death, he asked the conqueror totake custody of his daughter, hoping for an accommodation between the conqueringSpanish and the conquered Aztecs. But Tecuichpotzin was reclaimed by her peopleand soon was married to her father’s brother, who became the Aztec ruler in 1520.After he died of smallpox within two months, the last Aztec emperor claimed theyoung girl as his wife.

But then in 1521, the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec island capital in LakeTexcoco, overturned the mighty Aztec Empire and soon brought Tecuichpotzin into thelife of the victorious Spanish. In 1526, she learned that her husband had been torturedand hanged for plotting an insurrection against Cortés. Still only 19, she soon suc-cumbed to the overtures of Cortés, agreeing to join his household and live among hisIndian mistresses. Pregnant with Cortés’s child, she was married off to a Spanish officer.Another marriage followed, and in all she bore seven children, all descendants ofMoctezuma II. All became large landowners and figures of importance.Tecuichpotzinwas in this way a pioneer of mestizaje—the mixing of races—and thus one of the lead-ing Aztec women who launched the creation of a new society in Mexico.

Elizabeth I—daughter of Henry VIII, who had established the Church of Englandand rejected the authority of the Catholic pope in Rome—became the key figure inencouraging English expansion overseas. Through her long rule of nearly a half-cen-tury, she inspired Protestant England to challenge Catholic Spain and France. EvenPope Sixtus V acknowledged that she was “a great woman, and were she only Catholicshe would be without her match.” He also remarked, “She is only a woman, yet shemakes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Emperor, by all.” Commissioning buc-caneers such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and sponsoring promoters of colo-nization such as Walter Raleigh and the Richard Hakluyts (both uncle and nephew),Elizabeth assured the planting of English colonies in North America.They would growmightily after her death in 1603 and eventually challenge the Dutch, French, andSpanish, who also saw the Americas as a source of great wealth and power.

Elizabeth I’s vitality, ambition, and wit suited her perfectly to lead England forward,even though her nation,when she assumed the throne in 1558,was weak in comparisonto France, Spain, and even Portugal. Investing her own money in voyages of explorationand settlement, she encouraged others from the middle and upper classes to do thesame. In backing a 20-year conflict with the Spanish—a religious conflict and also astruggle for maritime power—she opened a gateway to the Americas for the English.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Peoples of AmericaBefore ColumbusMigration to the AmericasHunters, Farmers, and

Environmental FactorsMesoamerican EmpiresRegional North American CulturesThe IroquoisPre-Contact PopulationContrasting Worldviews

Africa on the Eve of ContactThe Spread of IslamThe Kingdoms of Central and

West AfricaAfrican SlaveryThe African Ethos

Europe on the Eve of Invadingthe AmericasThe Rebirth of EuropeThe New Monarchies and the

Expansionist Impulse

Conclusion: The Approach ofa New Global Age

3



4 PART 1 A Colonizing People, 1492–1776

On the west coast of Africa was another powerfulwoman. Born around 1595 and named because she enteredthe world with the umbilical cord wrapped around herneck (which was believed to foretell a haughty character),Queen Njinga led fierce resistance to the Portuguese slavetrade and the Portuguese attempts to control Angola. Sheknew that the Portuguese had been trading for slaves inAngola and had even converted King Affonso I of theKongo Kingdom to Catholicism in the 1530s. She also knewthat by the time Queen Elizabeth came to power in 1558 inEngland, the Portuguese had trapped her people into inces-sant wars in order to supply slaves to their Portuguesetrading partners. Only when she assumed the throne ofNdongo (present-day Angola) in 1624 did Queen Njinga’speople begin to resist Portuguese rule. Leading her troopsin a series of wars, she gave a fierce battle cry that legendsays was heard for miles, making her a heroic figure inAngolan history.

In opening this book, the stories of Queen

Isabella of Castile, Aztec princess Tecuichpotzin,

Queen Elizabeth I of England, and Angola’s Queen

Njinga set the scene for the intermingling of

Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in the New

World, what Europeans called North and South

America, by examining the backgrounds of the

peoples of three continents and glimpsing the changes

occurring with each of their many societies as the time

for a historic convergence neared. This allows us to

better understand the advent of colliding cultures

among societies rimming the Atlantic Ocean.

In narrating this historic meeting of societies previ-

ously distanced from each other, historians have too

often portrayed Europeans reaching the Americas as

the carriers of a superior culture that inevitably van-

quished people living in a primitive if not “savage”

state. Such a view renders Native Americans and

Africans passive and static people—so much dough to

be kneaded by advanced Europeans. Modern histori-

cal scholarship, however, tells us that Africans and

Native Americans played critically important roles in a

complex intercultural birthing of a “new world.” Thus

we examine the complexities of West African societies,

delve into the societies of some of the peoples of North

and South America, and study Western Europeans of

the late fifteenth century. In drawing comparisons and

contrasts, we equip ourselves to see three worlds meet

as a new global age began.




THE PEOPLES OF AMERICABEFORE COLUMBUSThousands of years before the European exploratoryvoyages in the 1490s, the history of humankind inNorth America began. Thus, American history canbegin with some basic questions: Who were the firstinhabitants of the Americas? Where did they comefrom? What were they like? How had the societiesthey formed changed over the millennia that pre-ceded European arrival? Can their history be recon-structed from the mists of prehistoric time?

Migration to the AmericasAlmost all the evidence suggesting answers to thesequestions comes from ancient sites of early life inNorth America. Archaeologists have unearthedskeletal remains, pots, tools, ornaments, and otherobjects to reach a tentative date for the arrival of hu-mans in America of about 35,000 B.C.E.—about thesame time that humans began to settle Japan andScandinavia.

Nearly every Native American society has its ownstory about its origins in the Americas. For example,many believe that they were the first people in

North America, people who emerged out of theearth or from underneath the waters of a large lake.However, paleoanthropologists, scientists whostudy ancient peoples, generally agree that the firstinhabitants of the Americas were no-madic bands from Siberia, hunting big-game animals such as bison, caribou, andreindeer. These sojourners from Asia be-gan to migrate across a land bridge con-necting northeastern Asia with Alaska.Geologists believe that this land bridge,perhaps 600 miles wide, existed most re-cently between 25,000 and 14,000 yearsago, when massive glaciers locked upmuch of the earth’s moisture and left partof the Bering Sea floor exposed. Ice-free passagethrough Canada was possible only briefly at the be-ginning and end of this period, however. At othertimes, melting glaciers flooded the land bridge andblocked foot traffic to Alaska. Scholars are dividedon the exact timing, but the main migration appar-ently occurred between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago,although possibly much earlier. Some new archaeo-logical finds suggest multiple migrations, both bysea and land, from several regions of Asia and evenfrom Europe.

IroquoisCreation Story;Pima CreationStory; OttawaOrigins Story(recorded ca.

1720)

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CHAPTER 1 Ancient America and Africa 5

Bering Strait

BeringSea

ATLANTICOCEAN

PACIFICOCEAN

NORTHAMERICA

SOUTHAMERICA

Approximate dry landarea during ice ages

Glaciers

Modern coastline

Migration Routes from Asia to the Americas

The red arrows indicate the general flow of migrating societies over thousands of years before Europeans reached the Americas.Based on fragile archaeological evidence, these migratory patterns are necessarily tentative, and new discoveries support thetheory of early Stone Age arrivals by boat. Reflecting on the Past Can you reconcile Native American creation myths with ar-chaeological evidence of the first humans reaching the Americas by crossing the Bering Straits land bridge? If so, how?

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Hunters, Farmers, and Environmental FactorsOnce on the North American continent, these earlywanderers began trekking southward and then east-ward, following vegetation and game. In time, theyreached the tip of South America—some 15,000miles from the Asian homeland to Tierra del Fuego,the southernmost limit of South America. Movingeastward, they traversed some 6,000 miles fromSiberia to the eastern edge of North America.American history has traditionally emphasized the“westward movement” of people, but for thousandsof years before Columbus’s arrival, the frontiermoved southward and eastward. Thus did peoplefrom the “Old World” discover the “New World”thousands of years before Columbus.

Archaeologists have excavated ancient sites ofearly life in the Americas, unearthing tools, orna-ments, and skeletal remains that allow them to re-construct the dispersion of these first Americansover an immense land mass. Although much re-mains unknown, archaeological evidence suggeststhat as centuries passed and population increased,the earliest inhabitants evolved into separate cul-tures, adjusting to various environments in dis-tinct ways. Europeans who rediscovered the NewWorld thousands of years later would lump to-gether the myriad societies they found. But by thelate 1400s, the “Indians” of the Americas wereenormously diverse in the size and complexity oftheir societies, the languages they spoke, and theirforms of social organization.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have chartedseveral phases of Native American history. TheBeringian period of initial migration ended about14,000 years ago. During the Paleo-Indian era, 14,000to 10,000 years ago, big-game hunters flaked hardstones into spear points and chose “kill sites” wherethey slew herds of Pleistocene mammals. This morereliable food source allowed population growth, andnomadism began to give way to settled habitations orlocal migration within limited territories.

Then during the Archaic era, from about 10,000 to2,500 years ago, great geological changes brought fur-ther adaptations to the land. As the massive Ice Ageglaciers slowly retreated, a warming trend turnedvast grassland areas from Utah to the highlands ofCentral America into desert. The Pleistocene mam-mals were weakened by more arid conditions, buthuman populations ably adapted as they learned toexploit new sources of food, especially plants.

About 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, a technologicalbreakthrough took place, probably independentlyin widely separated parts of the world, as humans

learned how to plant, cultivate, and harvest. Thisdevelopment, which historians call the agriculturalrevolution, allowed humans to gain control overonce-ungovernable natural forces. Agricultureslowly brought dramatic changes in human soci-eties everywhere.

Historians have sometimes imagined that theearly peoples of the Americas lived in a primordialparadise in harmony with their surroundings. But re-cent archaeological evidence points to examples ofenvironmental devastation that severely damagedthe biodiversity of the Americas. The first wave of in-truders found a wilderness teeming with so-calledmegafauna: saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths,gigantic ground sloths, huge bison, and monstrousbears. But by about 10,000 years ago, overhuntingand a massive shift of climate deprived these hugebeasts of their grazing environment.

The depletion of the megafauna left the hemi-sphere with a much restricted catalogue of animals.Left behind were large animals such as elk, buffalo,bear, and moose. But the extinction of the hugebeasts forced people to prey on new sources of foodsuch as turkeys, ducks, and guinea pigs, and thismay have gradually reduced their population.

An Ancient Skeleton The skeleton shown here of a saber-tooth cat was recovered from a tar pit in downtown Los Angeles,where excavation of the pits began in 1908. Roving animals, includingdinosaurs, giant sloths, and wolves, were trapped in the sticky asphaltbog and preserved for as long as 40,000 years. (Ed Ikuta/Courtesy of theGeorge C. Page Museum)

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Over many centuries in the Americas, saliniza-tion and deforestation put the environment underadditional stress. For example, in what is today cen-tral Arizona, the Hohokam civilization collapsedhundreds of years ago, much like that in ancientMesopotamia, when the irrigation system becametoo salty to support agriculture. At New Mexico’sChaco Canyon, the fast-growing Anasazi denuded amagnificently forested region in their search forfirewood and building materials. This resulting soilerosion impoverished the region for the Anasazi.

As Native Americans learned to domesticate plantlife, they began the long process of transforming theirrelationship to the physical world. Like all living or-ganisms, human beings depend on plants to survive.For both humans and animals, plants are the sourceof life-sustaining fuel. The ultimate source of this en-ergy is the sun. But in tapping solar energy, humansand animals had to rely on plants because they arethe only organisms capable of producing significantamounts of organic material through the photosyn-thetic process. Plant life was—and still is—the strate-gic element in the chain of life.

Dating the advent of agriculture in the Americasis difficult, but archaeologists estimate it at about5000 B.C.E. Agriculture had already been developedin southwestern Asia and in Africa and spread toEurope at about the time people in the Tehuacánvalley of central Mexico first planted maize andsquash. Over the millennia, humans progressedfrom doorside planting of a few wild seeds to sys-tematic clearing and planting of fields. As the pro-duction of domesticated plant food ended depen-dence on gathering wild plants and pursuing game,settled village life began to replace nomadic exis-tence. Increases in food supply brought about byagriculture triggered other major changes. As more

ample food fueled population growth,large groups split off to form separate so-cieties. Greater social and political com-plexity developed because not everyonewas needed as before to secure the soci-ety’s food supply. Men cleared the landand hunted game while women planted,cultivated, and harvested crops. Many

societies empowered religious figures, who orga-nized the common followers, directed their work,and exacted tribute as well as worship from them.In return, the community trusted them to ward offhostile forces.

Everywhere in the Americas, regional tradingnetworks formed. Along trade routes carryingcommodities such as salt for food preservation,obsidian rock for projectile points, and copper forjewelry also traveled technology, religious ideas,

and agricultural practices. By the end of theArchaic period, about 500 B.C.E., hundreds of inde-pendent kin-based groups, like people in otherparts of the world, had learned to exploit the re-sources of their particular area and to trade withother groups in their region. For centuries there-after, native societies grew in size, developed moresophisticated agricultural techniques, and in someareas adopted a sedentary life.

Mesoamerican EmpiresOf all the large-scale societies developing in theAmericas during Europe’s medieval period, themost impressive were in Mesoamerica—the mid-dle region bridging the great land masses of Southand North America. The Valley of Mexico, now

Pre-ColumbianSocieties of the

Americas

An Aztec Pictograph At the bottom of this pictograph, theAztecs displayed the conquest of two villages—Colhuacan pueblo andTenayucan pueblo—on the western side of Lake Texcoco. Thesewere the first two victories that marked the beginning of the consoli-dation of Aztec power in central Mexico less than a century beforeColumbus’s voyages. Note the importance of corn in the upper partof the pictograph and the prickly pear cactus, the meaning ofTenochtitlán, and the eagle, symbol of their war god, in the center.(Bodleian Library, University of Oxford [MS Arch. Seld.A.1. fol. 2r])

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Aztec was born into one of fourclasses: the nobility, including theemperor’s household, priests, andmilitary officers; free commonerswith rights to land and organizedin precincts with temples andschools; serfs, who like those inEurope were bound to the soil andtoiled on the lands of nobles; andslaves, who had rights akin tothose of slaves in ancient Rome orGreece.

When they arrived in 1519,Spaniards could hardly believe thegrandeur they saw in the immenseAztec capital, which covered about10 square miles and boasted some40 towers—one of them, accordingto the first Spaniards entering thecity, higher than the cathedral ofSeville, the largest in Spain. “Whenwe saw so many cities and villagesbuilt in the water and other greattowns on dry land and that straight

and level causeway going towards Mexico,” wroteone Spaniard in the army of Cortés, “we wereamazed and said that it was like the enchantmentsthey tell of in the legend of Amadis. . . . Some of oursoldiers even asked whether the things that we sawwere not a dream.” Indeed, they had found theirway to the most advanced civilization in theAmericas, where through skilled hydraulic engi-neering, the Aztecs cultivated chinampas, or “float-ing gardens,” around their capital city in whichgrew a wide variety of flowers and vegetables. TheSpaniards were unprepared for encountering suchan advanced civilization built by what they consid-ered savage people.

Regional North American CulturesThe regions north of Mesoamerica were never popu-lated by societies of the size and complexity of theAztecs, though some of them, particularly in what isnow the American Southwest, felt the Aztec influ-ence. Throughout the vast expanses of NorthAmerica in the last epoch of pre-Columbian develop-ment—the so-called post-Archaic phase—many dis-tinct societies evolved through a complex process ofgrowth and environmental adaptation. In the south-western region of North America, for example,Hohokam and Anasazi societies (the ancestors of the


dominated by Mexico City, became the center ofthe largest societies that emerged in the centuriesbefore the Spanish arrived early in the sixteenthcentury. In less than two centuries, the Aztecs, suc-cessor to the earlier Olmec and Toltec civilizations,built a mighty empire rivaling any known over thecenturies in Europe, Asia, and Africa by using theirwarrior skills to subjugate smaller tribes. By thetime of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, the Aztecs,with a population estimated at 10 to 20 millionpeople, controlled most of central Mexico.Extracting tribute from conquered peoples—beans, maize, and other foodstuffs; cotton fabrics;bird feathers for war costumes; animal furs; and la-bor on state projects such as canals, temples, andirrigation—the Aztecs built a great capital inTenochtitlán (“Place of the Prickly Pear Cactus”), acanal-ribbed city island in the great lake ofTexcoco. Connected to the mainland by threebroad causeways and supplied with drinkable wa-ter by an impressive aqueduct, Tenochtitlánboasted a population of perhaps 150,000, compa-rable to the medieval city–state of Venice and cer-tainly one of the world’s greatest cities on the eveof the Columbian voyages.

Aztec society was as stratified as any in Europe,and the supreme ruler’s authority was as extensiveas that of any European or African monarch. Every

Expansion of the Aztec Empire, 1427–1519

In the century before Europeans breached the Atlantic to find the Americas, theAztecs’ rise to power brought 10 to 20 million people under their sway—morethan the entire population of Spain and Portugal at this time.

Balsas R. Nex

apa R.

Mizteco R.

Atoyac R.

Cazones R.

Vina

zco R.

Rio Grande R.

LakeTexcoco

Gulf ofMexico

PACIFIC OCEAN

Popocatépetl

Isthmus ofTehuantepec

Sierra Madre del Sur

TexcocoTenochtitlán

Tlatelolco

METZTITLÁN

TLAXCALLAN

YOPTZINCOMIXTEC

PRINCIPALITYOF TOTOPEC

TEOTITLÁN(Allied to Empire)

TARASCANKINGDOM

OF MICHOACAN

1427–1440

1440–1468

1469–1481

1486–1502

1502–1519

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Tenochtitlán The plan ofTenochtitlán, later Mexico City, is fromthe Latin edition of Cortés’s “SecondLetter,” on his conquest of the Aztecs.Cortés’s account was widely published inEurope, where the Germans, French, andEnglish were astounded to hear of suchan extraordinary Aztec metropolis withfloating gardens, causeways, and monu-mental architecture. How would this citycompare with those in Europe? (TheGranger Collection, New York)

present-day Hopi and Zuñi) had developed a seden-tary village life thousands of years before the Spanisharrived in the 1540s.

By about 1200 C.E., these “Pueblo” people, as theSpanish later called them, were developing

planned villages composed of large, ter-raced, multistoried buildings, each withmany rooms and often constructed ondefensive sites that would afford theAnasazi protection from their northernenemies. The largest of them, containingabout 800 rooms, was at Pueblo Bonitoin Chaco Canyon. By the time theSpanish arrived in the 1540s, the indige-nous Pueblo people were using irrigationcanals, dams, and hillside terracing to

water their arid maize fields. In its agriculturaltechniques, skill in ceramics, use of woven textilesfor clothing, and village life, Pueblo society resem-bled that of peasant communities in many parts ofEurope and Asia. Don Juan de Oñate reportedhome in 1599 after reaching the Pueblo villages onthe Rio Grande that the Native Americans “livevery much the same as we do, in houses with twoand three terraces. . . . ”

Far to the north, on the Pacific coast of theNorthwest, native Tlingit, Kwakiutl, Salish, and Haidapeople lived in villages of several hundred, drawingtheir sustenance from salmon and other spawningfish and living in plank houses displaying elaborately

carved red cedar pillars and guarded by gi-gantic totem poles depicting animals withsupernatural power. Reaching this regionmuch later than most other parts of thehemisphere, early European explorerswere amazed at the architectural and artis-tic skills of the Northwest indigenous peo-ple. “What must astonish most,” wrote one Frenchexplorer in the late eighteenth century, “is to seepainting everywhere, everywhere sculpture, among anation of hunters.”

Carving and painting soft wood from deep cedarforest surrounding their villages, Northwest nativepeople defined their place in the cosmos with cere-monial face masks, which often represented ani-mals, birds, and fish—reminders of magical ances-tral spirits that inhabited what they understood asthe four interconnected zones of the cosmos: theSky World, the Undersea World, the Mortal World,and the Spirit World.

Ceremonial masks played a pivotal place in thePotlatch, a great winter gathering with song, dance,and ritual. In the Potlatch ceremonial dances, na-tive leaders honored their family lineage and signi-fied their chiefly authority in the tribe. By givingaway many of their possessions, chiefs satisfiedtribe members and in this way maintained their le-gitimacy, a largesse that mystified and often dis-turbed material-minded Europeans. Attempts byAmerican and Canadian authorities to suppress

The FirstAmericans:

Major IndianGroups and

Culture Areasin the 1600s

Cliff Palace inColorado

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Carved Mask For thousands of years, indigenous people in theNorthwest have carved masks to be used by dancers who commemorateancient family and clan history. Because they were carved of soft wood,most very old masks have not survived. This mask was carved by a BellaColla artist in the nineteenth century. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

Potlatch ceremonies in the late nineteenth centurynever succeeded.

Far to the east, Native American societies havebeen traced as far back as about 9000 B.C.E. From theGreat Plains of the midcontinent to the Atlantic tide-water region, a variety of tribes came to be loosely as-sociated in four main language groups: Algonquian,Iroquoian, Muskhogean, and Siouan. Like othertribal societies, they had been transformed by theagricultural revolution, gradually adopting semifixedsettlements and developing trading networks thatlinked societies occupying a vast region.

Among the most impressive of these societieswere the mound-building societies of theMississippi and Ohio valleys. When European set-tlers first crossed the Appalachian Mountains a cen-tury and a half after arriving on the continent, theywere astounded to find hundreds of ceremonialmounds and gigantic sculptured earthworks.Believing all “Indians” to be forest primitives, theyreasoned that these were the remains of an ancientcivilization that had found its way to NorthAmerica—perhaps Phoenicians, survivors of thesunken island of Atlantis, or the Lost Tribes of Israelspoken of in European mythology.

Archaeologists now conclude that the “MoundBuilders” were the ancestors of the Creek, Choctaw,and Natchez. Their societies, evolving slowly over thecenturies, had developed considerable complexity by

the advent of Christianity in Europe. Insouthern Ohio alone about 10,000mounds used as burial sites have beenpinpointed, and archaeologists haveexcavated another 1,000 earth-walledenclosures, including one enormousfortification with a circumference ofabout 31/2 miles, enclosing 100 acres, orthe equivalent of 50 modern cityblocks. From the mounded tombs, ar-chaeologists have recovered a great va-riety of items that have been traced towidely separated parts of the conti-nent—evidence that the MoundBuilders participated in a vast tradingnetwork linking hundreds of NativeAmerican villages across the continent.

The mound-building societies of theOhio valley declined many centuriesbefore Europeans reached the conti-nent, perhaps attacked by other tribesor damaged by severe climatic changesthat undermined agriculture. By about600 C.E., another mound-building agri-cultural society arose in the Mississippi

valley. Its center, the city of Cahokia with at least20,000 (and possibly as many as 40,000) inhabitants,stood near present-day St. Louis. Great ceremonial

An Anasazi Village The ruins of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico,mark the center of Anasazi culture in the twelfth century C.E. This San Juan River basintown may have contained a thousand people living in apartment-like structures largerthan any built in North America until the late nineteenth century. (© David Muench)

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´Tenochtitlan

Tikal

Quito

CuzcoMojos

Tiwanaku

Chan Chan

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Approximate limit of agriculture

Major urban centers

Mounds, pyramids

Terrace zones(mostly irrigated)

Irrigation

Raised fields

Roads, causeways

Marajóisland

CentralMexico

Guayas

Central Andes and coast

LakePátzcuaro

Lake Titicaca

Amazon

Cahokia

Pre-Columbian Societies of the Americas

Once described as nomadic hunter–gatherers, indigenouspeoples in the Americas were agriculturalists and urbandwellers in many areas and populated the land as densely asdid people in many other parts of the world.

plazas, flanked by a temple that rose infour terraces to a height of 100 feet, markedthis first metropolis in America. This wasthe urban center of a far-flung Mississippiculture that encompassed hundreds of vil-lages from Wisconsin to Louisiana andfrom Oklahoma to Tennessee.

Before the mound-building cultures of the conti-nental heartlands mysteriously declined, their influ-ence was already transforming the woodland soci-eties along the Atlantic. The numerous small tribesthat settled from Nova Scotia to Florida neverequaled the larger societies of the midcontinent inearthwork sculpture, architectural design, or devel-opment of large-scale agriculture. But they were farfrom the “savages” that the first European explorersdescribed. They had added limited agriculture totheir skill in using natural plants and had developedfood procurement strategies that exploited all the re-sources around them.

In the far north were the Abenaki, Penobscot,Passamaquoddy, and others, who lived by the seaand supplemented their diet with maple sugar anda few foodstuffs. Farther south, in what was to be-come New England, were the Massachusetts,Wampanoag, Pequot, Narragansett, Niantic,Mahican, and others—small tribes occupying fairlylocal areas and joined together only by occasionaltrade. In the mid-Atlantic area were the Lenape,Susquehannock, Nanticoke, Pamunkey, Shawnee,

Great Serpent MoundOne of the hundreds of symbolicmounds built by people of theHopewell culture, this mound, in theshape of a serpent, is near present-day Cincinnati. Nearly a quarter-milelong and about 20 feet across, thecoiled earthen serpent is devouring afrog or an egg. In 1887, FrederickPutnam, a Harvard archaeologist,saved the mound from destruction.Can you estimate how much laborwas required to construct this earth-works with simple tools? (Courtesy,National Museum of the AmericanIndian, Smithsonian Institution, P18523.Photo by Major Dache M. Reeves.)

ReconstructedView of Cahokia

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12

The recovery of the past before extensive writtenrecords existed is the domain of archaeology.Virtuallyour entire knowledge of native societies in NorthAmerica before the arrival of European colonizers isdrawn from the work of archaeologists who have ex-cavated the ancient living sites of the first Americans.Many Native Americans today strongly oppose thisrummaging in the ancient ancestral places; they partic-ularly oppose the unearthing of burial sites. But themodern search for knowledge about the past goes on.

Archaeological data have allowed us to overcomethe stereotypical view of Native Americans as a prim-itive people whose culture was static for thousands ofyears before Europeans arrived in North America.This earlier view allowed historians to argue that thetremendous loss of Native American population andland accompanying the initial settlement and west-ward migration of white Americans was more or lessinevitable. When two cultures, one dynamic and for-ward-looking and the other static and backward, con-fronted each other, historians have frequently main-tained, the more advanced or “civilized” culturealmost always prevailed.

Much of the elaborate early history of people inthe Americas is unrecoverable. But many fragments ofthis long human history are being recaptured througharchaeological research. Particularly important arestudies that reveal how Indian societies were changingduring the few centuries immediately preceding theEuropean arrival in the New World.These studies al-low us to interpret more accurately the seventeenth-century interaction of Native Americans andEuropeans because they provide an understanding ofNative American values, social and political organiza-tion, material culture, and religion as they existedwhen the two cultures first met.

One such investigation has been carried out overthe last century at the confluence of the Mississippiand Missouri rivers near modern-day East St. Louis,Illinois.Archaeologists have found there the center ofa vast Mississippi culture that began about 600 C.E.,reached its peak about 300 years before Columbus’svoyages, and then declined through a combination ofdrought, dwindling food supplies, and internal ten-sions. Cahokia is the name given to the urban centerof a civilization that at its height dominated an area as

large as New York State. At the center of Cahokiastood one of the largest earth constructions built byancient humans anywhere on the planet. Its base cov-ering 16 acres, this gigantic earthen temple, containing22 million cubic feet of hand-moved earth, rises infour terraces to a height of 100 feet, as tall as a mod-ern 10-story office building. The central plaza, likethose of the Aztecs and Mayans, was oriented exactlyon a north–south axis in order to chart the move-

RECOVERING THE PAST

Archaeological Artifacts

Pottery effigy vessels in the shape of human heads. (NationalMuseum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution [17/3277 and23/0980])

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13

ment of celestial bodies.The drawing shown above in-dicates some of the scores of smaller geometric bur-ial mounds near this major temple. Notice the outly-ing farms, a sure sign of the settled (as opposed tonomadic) existence of the people who flourished 10centuries ago in this region. How does this depictionof ancient Cahokia change your image of NativeAmerican life before the arrival of Europeans?

By recovering artifacts from Cahokia burialmounds, archaeologists have pieced together a pic-ture, still tentative, of a highly elaborate civilizationalong the Mississippi bottomlands. Cahokian manufac-turers mass-produced salt, knives, and stone hoeblades for both local consumption and export.Cahokian artisans made sophisticated pottery, orna-mental jewelry, metalwork, and tools.They used cop-per and furs from the Lake Superior region, black ob-sidian stone from the Rocky Mountains, and seashellsfrom the Gulf of Mexico, demonstrating that the peo-ple at Cahokia were involved in long-distance trade. Infact, Cahokia was a crucial crossroads of trade andwater travel in the heartland of North America.

The objects shown opposite, unearthed fromgraves by archaeologists, are an example of the culture

of the Mississippi Mound Builders. The round-facedpottery bottles in the form of heads, each about 6inches tall and wide, show a sense of humor in earlyMississippi culture. Holes in the ears of the bottlesonce held thongs so that the objects could be hung orcarried. Other objects, such as a figure of a kneelingwoman found in Tennessee, had holes under the armsfor a similar purpose.

Some graves uncovered at Cahokia contain largecaches of finely tooled objects while other burialmounds contain many skeletons unaccompanied byany artifacts. From this evidence archaeologists con-clude that this was a more stratified society thanthose encountered by the first settlers along theAtlantic seaboard.Anthropologists believe that someof the Mississippi culture spread eastward beforeCahokia declined, but much mystery still remainsconcerning the fate and cultural diffusion of theseearly Americans.

REFLECTING ON THE PAST What other conclusionsabout Cahokian culture can you draw from figures suchas these? Are there archaeological sites in your areathat contain evidence of Native American civilization?

A reconstructed view of Cahokia, the largest town in North America before European arrival,painted by William R. Iseminger. The millions of cubic feet of earth used to construct the cere-monial and burial mounds must have required the labor of tens of thousands of workers over along period of time. (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site)

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Tuscarora, Catawba, and other peoples, who addedlimited agriculture to their skill in using naturalplants for food, medicine, dyes, and flavoring. Mostof these eastern woodland tribes lived in watersidevillages. Locating their fields of maize near fishinggrounds, they often migrated seasonally betweeninland and coastal village sites or situated them-selves astride two ecological zones. In theNortheast, their birchbark canoes, light enough tobe carried by a single person, helped them tradeand communicate over immense territories.

In the Southeast were densely populated rich andcomplex cultures, which traced their ancestry backat least 8,000 years. Belonging to several languagegroups, some of them joined in loose confederacies.Called “Mississippian” societies by archaeologists,the tribes of the Southeast created elaborate pottery and basket weaving and conducted long-distance trade. These cultures also were influencedby Hopewell burial mound techniques, some of

which involved earthmoving on a vast scale. Aglobal warming trend that increased the annual av-erage temperature by a few degrees for about fourcenturies after 900 helped agriculture flourish inthis region, leading in some cases, as with theNatchez, to the development of highly stratified so-cieties in which chiefs and commoners weresharply divided and priests led ritual ceremonies.These people were the ancestors of the powerfulCreek and Yamasee in the Georgia and Alabama re-gions; the Apalachee in Florida and along the Gulfof Mexico; the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez ofthe lower Mississippi valley; the Cherokee of thesouthern Appalachian Mountains, and severaldozen smaller tribes scattered along the Atlanticcoast. However, after the “Little Ice Age,” whichspanned several centuries after about 1300, theyabandoned their mounded urban centers and de-volved into less populous, less stratified, and lesscentralized societies.

Lake Erie

Lake Superior

Lak

eM

ichi

ga

nLake

Huron L. Ontario

ATLANTICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

Cahokia

ONEOTA

CADDOANMISSISSIPPIAN

PLAQUEMINEMISSISSIPPIAN

MIDDLEMISSISSIPPIAN

FORTANCIENT

SOUTHAPPALACHIANMISSISSIPPIAN

ADENA–HOPEWELLPEOPLES,700 B.C.E.–900 C.E.

Hopewellian cultural area

Adena cultural area

Hopewellian mound site

Adena mound site

MISSISSIPPIAN MOUNDBUILDERS,900–1450 C.E.Temple Sites:

Oneota

Caddoan Mississippian

Middle Mississippian

Fort Ancient

South AppalachianMississippian

Plaquemine Mississippian

North American Mound-Building Cultures

Plows, shovels, and bulldozers have obliterated many of the earthworks created at hun-dreds of mound-building sites in the eastern half of North America.

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15

The IroquoisFar to the north of the declining southeasternmound-building societies, between what would be-

come French and English zones of settle-ment, five tribes composed whatEuropeans later called the League of the Iroquois: the Mohawk, Oneida,Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. TheIroquois Confederation began as a vast ex-tension of the kinship group that charac-terized the northeastern woodland pattern

of family settlement and embraced perhaps 10,000people at the time Europeans beganto build northeastern settlements inthe sixteenth century.

Not long before Europeans be-gan coming ashore in easternNorth America, the loosely orga-nized and strife-ridden Iroquoisstrengthened themselves by creat-ing a more cohesive political con-federacy. As they learned to sup-press intra-Iroquois blood feuds,villages gained stability, populationincreased, and the Iroquois devel-oped political mechanisms forsolving internal problems and pre-senting a more unified front in par-laying with their Algonquian neigh-bors for the use of huntingterritories to the north or in admit-ting dependent tribes to settle intheir territory. This facilitated thedevelopment of a coordinatedIroquois policy for dealing with theEuropean newcomers.

Work in the palisaded villages of Iroquoia, somebustling with more than a thousand people, was per-formed communally and land was owned not by in-dividuals but by all in common. While there might beindividual farming or hunting efforts, it was under-stood that the bounty was to be divided among all.Similarly, several families occupied a longhouse, butthe house itself, like all else in the community, wascommon property. “No hospitals [poorhouses] areneeded among them,” wrote a French Jesuit in 1657,“because there are neither mendicants nor paupersas long as there are any rich people among them.

DekanawidaMyth and the

Achievement ofIroquois Unity

AMERICAN VOICES

The legend of the Great League of the Iroquois, formed about1450 by the mythical figure Dekanawidah to bind the fiveseparate nations of the Iroquois together, was passed downorally from generation to generation. Here is an excerpt.

We bind ourselves together by taking hold ofeach other’s hands so firmly and forming a circleso strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it couldnot shake nor break it, so that our people andgrandchildren shall remain in the circle in security,peace, and happiness. Be of strong mind, O chiefs!Carry no anger and hold no grudges. Think notforever of yourselves, O chiefs, nor of your own

generation.Think of continuing generations of ourfamilies, think of our grandchildren and of thoseyet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneaththe ground.

■ Does this account of forming an ethnic confederacy seemdistinctly Native American, or might it have resonatedamong Europeans of different ethnic backgrounds?

■ What values are stressed in this legend?

The Legend of the Great League of the Iroquois

A European View of Indian Women When the Frenchman Jacques Le Moynearrived in what is now South Carolina in 1565, he painted Indian women cultivating the soiland planting corn. Le Moyne’s painting did not survive, but it was rendered as shown hereby the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry, who purchased it from Le Moyne’s widow in1588. De Bry took some liberties; for example, he put European-style hoes with metalblades into the hands of the women, whereas they tilled with large fish bones fitted tosticks. Did Iroquois women play the same role in agriculture?

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Their kindness, humanity, and courtesy not onlymakes them liberal with what they have, but causesthem to possess hardly anything except in common.A whole village must be without corn, before any in-dividual can be obliged to endure privation.” Onehistorian has called this “upside down capitalism,” inwhich the goal was not to pile up material posses-sions but to reach the happy situation in which theycould give what they had to others.

Out of extended kinship groups, the Iroquois or-ganized village settlements. Like many Africans, theIroquois had matrilineal families with family mem-bership determined through the female rather thanmale line. A typical Iroquois family comprised anold woman, her daughters with their husbands andchildren, and her unmarried granddaughters andgrandsons. Sons and grandsons remained with theirkinship group until they married; then they joinedthe family of their wife or the family of theirmother’s brother. If these arrangements puzzledEuropeans, whose men controlled women strictly,so did the Iroquois woman’s prerogative of divorce;

if she desired it, she merely set her husband’s pos-sessions outside the longhouse door.

Iroquois society also invested the community’swomen with a share of political power in ways theEuropeans found strange. Political authority in thevillages derived from the matrons or senior womenof the ohwachiras—a group of related families.These women named the men representing theclans at village and tribal councils and appointedthe 49 sachems or chiefs who met periodicallywhen the confederated Five Nations met. Thesecivil chiefs were generally middle-aged or elderlymen who had gained fame earlier as warriors butnow gained their prestige at the council fires. Thepolitical power of the women also extended to theruling councils, in which they caucused behind thecircle of chiefs and made sure that the tribal coun-cil did not move too far from the will of the womenwho appointed them. The male chiefs were securein their positions only as long as they couldachieve a consensus with the women who hadplaced them in office.

Gulf of Mexico

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Customary trading connections

Regional centers

Local centers

Native American Trade Networks in 1400

By recovering objects such as shell necklaces, stone tools, and decorative copper from ancientsites of Indian habitation, and by determining their place of origin, anthropologists have devel-oped this approximate map of Native American trading networks in the century before the ar-rival of Europeans.

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The tribal economy and military affairs furtherdemonstrated the division of power between menand women. While men did most of the hunting andfishing, the women were the community’s primaryagriculturists. In tending the crops, they became vitalto sustaining the community. When men were awayon weeks-long hunting expeditions, women were leftentirely in charge of village daily life. If “the forest be-longed to the men,” one historian explains, “the vil-lage was the woman’s domain.” In military affairswomen played a significant role, for they suppliedthe moccasins and food for warring expeditions. Adecision to withhold these supplies was tantamountto vetoing a military foray. Clan matrons often initi-ated war by calling on the Iroquois warriors to bringthem enemy captives to replace fallen clan members.

In raising children, Iroquois parents were morepermissive than Europeans. They did not believe inharsh physical punishment, encouraged the youngto imitate adult behavior, and were tolerant of fum-bling early attempts. The mother nursed and pro-tected the infant while hardening it by baths in coldwater. Weaning ordinarily began at age three or four.Childhood interest in the anatomy and in sexual ex-perimentation was accepted as normal. All this con-trasted with European child-rearing techniques,which stressed accustoming the child to authorityfrom an early age through frequent use of physicalpunishment, condemning early sexual curiosity, andemphasizing obedience and respect for authority.

The approach to authority in Iroquois society, asin most other native societies in North America,lacked most of the complicated machinery devel-oped by Europeans to direct individual lives. Nolaws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judgesand juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of au-thority in Europe—existed in pre-contact NorthAmerica. Yet the Iroquois set boundaries of accept-able behavior firmly. They prized the autonomousindividual yet maintained a strict code of right andwrong. They governed behavior by imparting asense of tradition and attachment to the groupthrough communally performed rituals. Europeansdealt with crime through investigation, arrest, pros-ecution, and sentencing. But in Native American so-ciety, those who stole food, to take one example,were “shamed” and ostracized until the culpritsatoned for their actions and proved ready for re-en-try into village communal life.

Pre-Contact PopulationFor many decades, anthropologists and historiansestimated that the population of the Americas, andespecially North America, was small, only about 10

percent of Europe’s population at the time ofColumbus’s first voyage in 1492. Only recently havescholars conceded that most estimates made in thepast were grossly understated due to the conventionalview that Native American societies peopled by no-madic hunters and gatherers could not be very large.

However, archaeological research in recentdecades has indicated that the sophisticated agricul-tural techniques of Native American societies al-lowed the sustaining of large societies. Therefore,population estimates have soared, with today’sscholars estimating the pre-contact population northof the Rio Grande to be at least 4 million people, ofwhom perhaps half lived east of the Mississippi Riverand some 700,000 settled along the eastern coastalplain and in the piedmont region accessible to theearly European settlers. Though estimates varywidely, the most reliable suggest that about 50 to 70million people lived in the entire hemisphere whenEuropeans first arrived, contrasting with some 70 to90 million in Europe (including Russia) around 1500,about 50 to 70 million in Africa, and 225 to 350 mil-lion in Asia. The European colonizers were not com-ing to a “virgin wilderness,” as they often described it,but to a land inhabited for thousands of years by peo-ple whose village existence in some ways resembledthat of the new arrivals.

In some important ways, however, NativeAmerican culture differed sharply from that ofEuropeans. Horses and oxen, for example, did notexist in the New World. Without large draft animals,Native Americans had no incentive to developwheeled vehicles or, for that matter, the potter’swheel. Many inventions—such as the technologyfor smelting iron, which had diffused widely in theOld World—had not crossed the ocean to reach the

Native Population of the Americas in World Context, 1500

Because they are from a time when censuses were rare inmost parts of the world, all these population figures are esti-mates. Some demographers believe that 100 million peopleinhabited the Americas in 1500. New research and lively de-bate will no doubt alter these figures. Reflecting on thePast What is the population today of the areas listed here,and how do you account for differing distribution of theworld’s population?

China 100–150 millionIndia 75–150 millionSouthwest Asia 20–30 millionJapan and rest of Asia 30–50 millionEurope (including Russia) 70–90 millionAfrica 50–70 millionAmericas 50–70 million

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New World. The opposite was also true: valuableNew World crops, such as corn and potatoes devel-oped by Native American agriculturists, were un-known in the Old World before Columbus.

Contrasting WorldviewsHaving evolved in complete isolation from eachother, European and Native American cultures ex-hibited a wide difference in values. ColonizingEuropeans called themselves “civilized” and typi-cally described the people they met in theAmericas as “savage,” “heathen,” or “barbarian.”Lurking behind the physical confrontation thattook place when Europeans and Native Americansmet were latent conflicts over humans’ relation-ship to the environment, the meaning of property,and personal identity.

Europeans and Native Americans conceptualizedtheir relationship to nature in starkly different ways.

Regarding the earth as filled with resources for hu-mans to use and exploit for their own benefit,Europeans separated the secular and sacred parts oflife, and they placed their own relationship to thenatural environment mostly in the secular sphere.Native Americans, however, did not distinguish be-tween the secular and sacred. For them, every aspectof the natural world was sacred, inhabited by a vari-ety of “beings,” each pulsating with spiritual powerand all linked together to form a sacred whole.Consequently, if one offended the land by stripping itof its cover, the spiritual power in the land—called“manitou” by some eastern woodland tribes—wouldstrike back. If one overfished or destroyed game be-yond one’s needs, the spirit forces in fish or animalswould take revenge, because humans had broken themutual trust and reciprocity that governed relationsbetween all beings—human or nonhuman. To ne-glect reciprocal obligations in nature’s domain was tocourt sickness, hunger, injury, or death.

Great Lakes

Gulf of Mexico

HudsonBay

PACIFIC OCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Number of people per square mile

0–1

1–4

4 or more

Native American Population Density in North America, ca. 1500

Historical demographers have devised estimates of Native American population density in NorthAmerica before the arrival of Europeans. Estimates are based on the “carrying capacity” of differ-ent ecological regions: rainfall, access to fish and animals, soil fertility, and length of growing sea-son are all factors in the capacity of the land to support human life.

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Europeans believed that land, as a privately heldcommodity, was a resource to be exploited for humangain. They took for granted property lines, inheri-tance of land, and courts to settle resulting land dis-putes. Property was the basis not only of sustenancebut also of independence, wealth, status, politicalrights, and identity. The social structure directly mir-rored patterns of land ownership, with a land-wealthy elite at the apex of the social pyramid and apropertyless mass at the bottom.

Native Americans also had concepts of propertyand boundaries. But they believed that land had sa-cred qualities and should be held in common. Asone German missionary explained the NativeAmerican view in the eighteenth century, theCreator “made the Earth and all that it contains forthe common good of mankind. Whatever liveth onthe land, whatsoever groweth out of the earth, andall that is in the rivers and waters . . . was givenjointly to all and everyone is entitled to his share.”

Communal ownership sharply limited social strat-ification and increased a sense of sharing in most

Native American communities, much to the amaze-ment of Europeans accustomed to wide disparities ofwealth. Not all Europeans were acquisitive, competi-tive individuals. The majority were peasant farmersliving from the soil, living in kin-centered villageswith little contact with the outside world, and ex-changing goods and labor through barter. But inEurope’s cities, a wealth-conscious, ambitious indi-vidual who valued and sought wider choices andgreater opportunities to enhance personal status wascoming to the fore. In contrast, Native American tra-ditions stressed the group rather than the individualand valor rather than wealth.

There were exceptions. The empires of the Aztecin Central America and the Inca in South Americawere highly developed, populous, and stratified. So,in North America, were a few tribes such as theNatchez. But on the eastern and western coasts ofthe continent and in the Southwest—the regions ofcontact in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies—the European newcomers encountered apeople whose cultural values differed strikinglyfrom theirs.

European colonizers in North America alsofound the matrilineal organization of many tribalsocieties contrary to the European male-dominatedsexual hierarchy. Family membership among mosttribes was determined through the female line anddivorce was the woman’s prerogative. Clans werecomposed of several matrilineal kin groups relatedby a blood connection on the mother’s side.

In Native American societies, women also heldsubordinate positions, but not nearly to the extentfound among European women. While Europeanwomen were excluded almost entirely from politicalaffairs, senior women in many Native American vil-lages designated the men who sat in a circle to de-liberate and make decisions and stood behind themto lobby and instruct. Village chiefs were male, butthey were often chosen by the elder women of theirclans. If the men moved too far from the will of thewomen who appointed them, these chiefs were re-moved or “dehorned.” “Our ancestors,” the Oneidachief Good Peter explained, “considered it a greattransgression to reject the counsel of their women,particularly the female governesses. Our ancestorsconsidered them mistresses of the soil. . . . Thewomen, they are the life of the nation.”

The role of women in the tribal economy rein-forced the sharing of power between male and fe-male. Men hunted, fished, and cleared land, butwomen controlled the cultivation, harvest, and dis-tribution of crops, supplying probably three-quar-ters of their family’s nutritional needs. When the

Pelican This figure of a pelican was extracted in the 1890s fromdeep muck on Key Marco, Florida. It is dated through carbon-14 teststo about 1000 C.E. Anthropologists believe that the figure was part ofa shrine. (University of Pennsylvania Museum [40708 Neg No. T4-303])

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men were away hunting, the women directed villagelife. Europeans, imbued with the idea of male supe-riority and female subordination, perceived suchsexual equality as another mark of “savagery.”

In economic relations, Europeans and NativeAmericans differed in ways that sometimes led tomisunderstanding and conflict. Over vast stretchesof the continent, Native Americans had built tradingnetworks for centuries before Europeans arrived,making it easy for them to trade with arrivingEuropeans and incorporate new metal and glasstrade items into their culture. But trade for Indianpeoples was also a way of preserving interdepen-dence and equilibrium between individuals andcommunities. This principle of reciprocity dis-played itself in elaborate ceremonies of gift givingand pipe smoking that preceded the exchange ofgoods. Europeans saw trade largely as economic ex-change, with the benefit of building goodwill be-tween two parties sharply limited in comparisonwith the Native American view.

The English saw a final damning defect in the re-ligious beliefs of Native Americans. Europeans builttheir religious life around the belief in a single divin-ity, written scriptures, a trained and highly literateclergy, and churches with structured ceremonies.Native American societies, sharing no literary tradi-tion, had less structured religious beliefs. Believingthat human life could be affected, positively or neg-atively, by the mysterious power pervading every-thing in nature—in rocks, water, the sun, the moon,and animals—Native American people sought toconciliate these spirits and maintain proper rela-tionships with them, even the spirits of the fish,beaver, and deer they hunted. Pueblo people, for ex-ample, living in arid lands where rainfall dictatedtheir well-being, expressed their thanks for rain byperforming frequent ritual dances.

For Europeans, the Native Americans’ polytheism,or belief in several gods, was pagan and devilish.Native religious leaders, called shamans, used medic-inal plants and magical chants to heal the sick and fa-cilitated the people’s quests to communicate with thespiritual world. But Europeans regarded the shamansas especially dangerous because they occupied pow-erful roles among a spiritually misled people. Theirfear and hatred of infidels intensified by theProtestant Reformation, Europeans saw a holy ne-cessity to convert—or destroy—these enemies oftheir God.

Mississippian Culture Shrine Figures Carved frommarble 700 to 800 years ago, these shrine figures, male and female,were found in a tomb in northwestern Georgia. The Native Americancarvings, known to us only as part of a South Appalachian Mississippiculture, are thought to be representations of ancestor gods. Are sim-ilar shrine figures found in African and European societies? (LynnJohnson/Aurora & Quanta Productions)

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AFRICA ON THE EVE OF CONTACTHalf a century before Columbus reached the Amer-icas, a Portuguese sea captain, Antam Gonçalves,made the first European landing on the west coastof sub-Saharan Africa. If he had been able to travelthe length and breadth of the immense continent,he would have encountered a rich variety of Africanstates, peoples, and cultures that had developedover many millennia. What Europeans consideredAfrican backwardness and cultural impoverishmentwas a myth perpetuated after the slave trade hadbegun transporting millions of Africans to the NewWorld. During the period of early contact withEuropeans, Africa, like pre-Columbian America,was recognized as a diverse continent with a longhistory of cultural evolution.

The Spread of Islam“The seat of Mansa Sulayman [the sultan, or ruler]was a sprawling, unwalled town set in a ‘verdant and




hilly’ country,” wrote Arab geographer Abu AbdallahIbn Battuta in 1351 after visiting the capital of the MaliKingdom at about the same time that the Aztecs roseto eminence in Mesoamerica. “The sultan had severalenclosed palaces there . . . and covered [them] withcolored patterns so that it turned out to be the mostelegant of buildings.” The 47-year-old Ibn Battuta,born into a family of Muslim legal scholars in Tangier,Morocco, on the southern shore of the MediterraneanSea, was struck with Mali’s splendor. “Surroundingthe palaces and mosques were the residences of the

citizenry, mud-walled houses roofed with domes oftimber and reed.” Keenly interested in their laws, IbnBattuta wrote, “Amongst their good qualities is thesmall amount of injustice amongst them, for of all peo-ple they are the furthest from it. Their sultan does notforgive anyone in any matter to do with injustice. . . .There is also the prevalence of peace in their country,the traveler is not afraid in it nor is he who lives there infear of the thief or of the robber.” With Ibn Battuta trav-eled the Muslim faith, or commitment to Islam (mean-ing “submission to Allah”).

Orange R.

Zambeze R.

Con

go

(Zaire) R.

Ubangi R.

Nile

R.

Gang es R.

Indu

sR

.

Danube R.

LakeTanganyika

LakeVictoria

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

NorthSea

CaspianSea

AralSea

ArabianSea

Bayof

Bengal

Red Sea

Gulf of Aden

CapeVerde

Islands

CanaryIslands

ATLANTICOCEAN

INDIAN OCEAN

TunisTangier

Marrakech

Agadir

FezSijilmassa

Timbuktu

Calicut

Cambay

Delhi

Kabul

Samarkand

Merv

Muscat

Basra

BaghdadDamascus

JerusalemCairo

Axum

Mombasa

Mogadishu

Mecca

MedinaAwadaghost

Gao

Kano

Kilwa

Sofala

Lisbon Cordoba

MarseillesGenoa

Constantinople

Kiev

Kazan

EGYPTALMORAVIDS

HEJAZ

MADAGASCAR

INDIA

KHWARIZM

FRANCE

SPAIN

IRAQ

ETHIOPIA

SOMALIA

GHANAMALI

SONGHAI

PERSIA

PORTUGAL

Extent of Islamic world in 733

Islamic areas reconquered byChristian kingdoms by 1492Routes used to spread Islamfrom 610 B.C.E. to 733 C.E.

Spread of Islam in Africa, ca. 1500

This map shows the extensive reach of Islam in Africa by 1500. On most of the North African Mediterranean coast and in the pow-erful Mali and Songhai kingdoms, the Muslim faith predominated. Reflecting on the Past Do you think enslaved Africans who hadconverted to Islam practiced their faith after arriving in the American colonies? How would they do so on slave plantations?




This account of the greatest traveler of premod-ern times opens a window to the two themes of thissection: the spread of Islam and the rise of great em-pires in West and Central Africa—a region thencalled the Sudan (the word comes from al-Sudan,the Arabic term for “black people”). Ibn Battuta hadtraveled for more than 20 years through much of theEastern Hemisphere before reaching Mali, visitingterritories equivalent to some 44 present-day coun-tries and traversing 73,000 miles.

Spreading rapidly in Arabia after Muhammad, thefounder of Islam, began preaching in 610 C.E., Islamrose to global eminence after several centuries. By thetenth century, Egypt was predominantly Muslim, andIslam was spreading southward from MediterraneanNorth Africa across the Sahara Desert into northernSudan, where it took hold especially in the tradingcenters. In time, Islam encompassed much of theEastern Hemisphere and became the main interme-diary for exchanging goods, ideas, and technologiesacross a huge part of the world. When Portuguesetraders initiated the slave traffic in West Africa in the1400s, they found that many of the Africans theyforced onto slave ships were devout Muslims.

The Kingdoms of Central and West AfricaThe vast region of West Africa, to which Islam wasspreading by the tenth century, embraced widelyvaried ecological zones—partly a vast desert, partly

grasslands, and partly tropical forests. As in Europeand the Americas at that time, most people tilledthe soil, and by the time of first contact withEuropeans were practicing sophisticated agricul-tural techniques and livestock management. Part oftheir skill in farming derived from the developmentof iron production, which began among the Nok inpresent-day Nigeria about 450 B.C.E., long before itreached Europe. Over many centuries, more effi-cient iron implements for cultivating and harvest-ing increased agricultural productivity, in turnspurring population growth. With large populationscame greater specialization of tasks and thus greaterefficiency and additional technical improvements.The pattern was similar to the agricultural revolu-tion that occurred in the Americas, Europe, the FarEast, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Cultural and political development in WestAfrica proceeded at varying rates, largely depen-dent on ecological conditions. Regions blessed bygood soil, adequate rainfall, and abundance ofminerals, as in coastal West Africa, began engagingin interregional trade. This in turn brought popula-tion growth and cultural development. But wheredeserts were inhospitable or forests impenetrable,social systems remained small and changed slowly.The Sahara Desert, once a land of flowing riversand lush green pastures and forests, had been de-populated by climate changes that brought highertemperatures and lower rainfall. As desertificationoccurred between about 4000 B.C.E. and 2500 B.C.E.,

Portuguese Attackon Tangiers In thisbeautiful tapestry hanging inthe Collegiate Church ofPastrana in Spain, we can seeDom Affonso V, thePortuguese king, leading histroops in 1471 in an attackon Tangiers, a Muslimstronghold in North Africa.The Portuguese campaignsof conquest in North Africafrom the 1450s to the 1470swere a response to the fallof Constantinople to theOttomans in 1453, a terribleblow to the Catholic worldin its prolonged struggle withIslam. (Bettmann/CORBIS)




Sahara people moved southward in search of morefertile land, first to oases situated along a strip ofgrasslands, or savanna, on the desert’s southernborder, then farther south to the fertile rain forestsof the Niger River basin where they built some ofAfrica’s greatest empires.

The Ghana Empire The first of these empires wasGhana. Developing between the fifth and eleventhcenturies, when the Roman Empire collapsed andmedieval Europe stagnated, it occupied an immenseterritory between the Sahara and the Gulf of Guineaand stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the NigerRiver. Though mostly a land of small villages, it be-came a major empire noted for its extensive urbansettlement, sculpture and metalwork, long-distancecommerce, and complex political and military struc-ture. Ideally positioned for trade, Ghana became awealthy empire built primarily on trade rather thanmilitary conquest, partly because of trading contacts

with Muslim Arabs, who had crossed the SaharaDesert in camel caravans to control the region by theeleventh century. From the south came kola nuts,palm oil, copper, and gold. From the north came im-ported items such as ceramics, glass, oil lamps,and—absolutely essential—the salt from Saharanmines that preserved and flavored food. By the late900s, Ghana controlled more than 100,000 squaremiles of land and hundreds of thousands of people.Gold was so plentiful that a pound of gold was tradedfor a pound of salt.

A thriving caravan trade with Arab peoples acrossthe Sahara to Morocco and Algeria brought exten-sive Muslim influence by the eleventh century,when the king of Ghana boasted an army of 200,000and maintained trading contacts as far east as Cairoand Baghdad. Gold made Kumbi-Saleh, Ghana’scapital, the busiest and wealthiest marketplace inWest Africa. By Europe’s Middle Ages, two-thirds ofthe gold circulating in the Christian Mediterraneanregion was coming from Ghana.

As trade in Ghana grew more profitable, Arab mer-chants came to live in the empire, especially in thecapital city of Kumbi-Saleh. With the trading of goodscame the exchange of ideas. Arabs brought the firstsystem of writing and numbers to West Africa, and theGhanaian kings adopted Arab script and appointedArabs to government positions. As these Arabs gainedinfluence in Ghana, they spread the Islamic faith.Most of Ghana’s rulers held tightly to their traditionalreligion and rejected the Muslim principle of patri-archy in which royal succession would follow the fa-ther’s lineage. But many Ghanaians, especially in thecities, converted to Islam. By 1050, Kumbi-Salehboasted 12 Muslim mosques.

The Mali Empire An invasion of North AfricanMuslim warriors beginning in the eleventh centuryintroduced a period of religious strife that eventu-ally destroyed the kingdom of Ghana. Rising to re-place it was the Islamic kingdom of Mali, dominatedby the Malinke, or Mandingo, people. Through ef-fective agricultural production and control of thegold trade, Mali flourished. The cultivation of riceand harvesting of inland deltas for fish helped sup-port the thriving trade for salt, gold, and copper.Under Mansa Musa, a devout Muslim who assumedthe throne in 1307, Mali came to control territorythree times as great as the kingdom of Ghana.Famed for his 3,500-mile pilgrimage across theSahara and through Cairo all the way to Mecca in1324 with an entourage of some 50,000, MansaMusa drew the attention of Mediterranean mer-chants. Dispensing lavish gifts of gold as he pro-ceeded east, he made Mali gold legendary.

Niger Region Archer This terra cotta sculpture from theNiger River delta region shows an archer. In the collection of theSmithsonian Institution’s National Art Museum of African Art, it isdated to the thirteenth–fifteenth century. (Archer Figure, Inland NigerDelta Style, Mali, 13th–15th century, Ceramic H x W x D: 61.9 x 16.5 x16.5 cm, Museum Purchase 86-12-1, Photograph by Franko Khoury,National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.)




Coming home, Mansa Musa brought Muslimscholars and artisans with him who were instrumen-tal in establishing Timbuktu, at the center of the MaliEmpire, as a city of great importance. Noted for its ex-tensive wealth, Timbuktu’s Islamic university devel-oped a distinguished faculty, who instructed North

Africans and southern Europeans who came to study.Traveling there in the 1330s, Ibn Battuta wrote admir-ingly of “the discipline of its officials and provincialgovernors, the excellent condition of public finance,and . . . the respect accorded to the decisions of jus-tice and to the authority of the sovereign.”

The Empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai

These ancient empires, each in their turn, controlled vast areas of West Africa. Ghana, which built its wealth on trade, was at itsheight from about 900 to 1100 C.E. Mali’s devout Muslim leader, Mansa Musa, commissioned large mosques and turned Timbuktuinto a center of Islamic learning. Songhai began its rise to power after the death of Mansa Musa. Reflecting on the Past Whywould some Europeans send their sons to Timbuktu to study? What evidence can you find that Muslim ideas contributed toEuropean scientific and cultural knowledge?

ATLANTICOCEAN

Gao

Timbuktu

Djenne

Kumbi Saleh

ALGERIA

MOROCCO

WESTERNSAHARA

MAURITANIAMALI

NIGER

NIGERIA

BURKINA FASO

CÔTED’IVOIRE

GHANATOGO

BENIN

SENEGAL

GAMBIA

GUINEABISSAU

GUINEA

SIERRA LEONE

LIBERIA

LIBYA

TUNISIAGhana

Mali

Songhai




The Songhai Empire After Mansa Musa died in1332, power in West Africa began to shift to theSonghai, centered on the middle Niger River. A mix-ture of farmers, traders, fishermen, and warriors,the Songhai declared independence from Mali in1435. Just as Mali had grown out of a state in the em-pire of Ghana, the new Songhai Empire grew out ofa region that had once been part of Mali. By the timePortuguese traders in the late 1400s were establish-ing firm commercial links with the Kongo, far to thesouth, the Songhai Empire was at its peak under therule of Sonni Ali (1464–1492) and Muhammad Ture(1493–1528).

Yet Songhai, too, collapsed, as some tribes thatwere resentful of Muslim kings began to break away.But the most dangerous threat came from Morocco,in North Africa, whose rulers coveted Songhai’ssources of salt and gold—the two critical commodi-ties in the African trade. Equipped with guns pro-cured in the Middle East, Morocco’s ruler conqueredTimbuktu and Gao in 1591. The North Africans re-mained in loose control of western Sudan for morethan a century, as the last great trading empire ofWest Africa faded. At a time when England, France,Spain, and other centralized kingdoms in Europewere emerging, the great empires of West Africaslowly devolved into smaller states. Looking backover the long centuries of the tragic Atlantic slavetrade, it seems that by a melancholy quirk of history,local West African conflicts made it easier forEuropean slave traders to persuade tribal leaders tosend out warrior parties to capture tradeable slaves.

The Kingdoms of Kongo and Benin Farther southalong the Atlantic coast and in Central Africa lay thevast kingdom of Kongo. The first European to en-counter these people was the Portuguese ship cap-tain Diego Cao, who in 1482 anchored in the mouthof the mighty Kongo River. Kongo’s royal capital,Mbanza, was a trade center for a kingdom of severalmillion people and also became a center of trade re-lations with the Portuguese, who by the 1490s weresending Catholic missionaries to the court of KingMani-Kongo. Thus was Mani-Kongo’s son baptizedAffonso I, and under Affonso’s rule in the early1500s, a flourishing trade in slaves with thePortuguese began.

Like Kongo, the kingdom of Benin developed longbefore seaborne Europeans reached western Africa.Benin, which became so important in the Englishslave trade, was formed in about 1000 C.E. west of theNiger Delta. When Europeans reached Benin Cityhundreds of years later, they found a walled city withbroad streets and hundreds of buildings. Thousandsof slaves procured in the interior passed through

Benin City on their way for exchange with thePortuguese, and later the English, at coastal Calabar,where one of the main slave forts stood. One ofBenin’s most important chroniclers, OlaudahEquiano, endured just such a trip. He was born in avillage in “a charming fruitful vale,” far into the inte-rior of the kingdom of Benin, which he regarded as“the most considerable” of “a variety of kingdoms” inthe “part of Africa known by the name of Guinea.”Equiano’s story has a timelessness that allows it tostand for the experiences over several centuries ofmillions of Africans who were born in western Africa,the ancestral homelands of most of today’s AfricanAmericans.

African SlaveryThe idea that slavery was a legitimate social condi-tion in past societies offends modern values, and itis difficult for many Americans to understand whyAfricans would sell fellow Africans to Europeantraders. But there were no people who identifiedthemselves as Africans four centuries ago; rather,they thought of themselves as Ibos or Mandingos, orKongolese, or residents of Mali or Songhai.Moreover, slavery was not new for Africans or anyother people in the fourteenth century. It had flour-ished in ancient Rome and Greece, in large parts ofeastern Europe, in southwestern Asia, and in the

Benin Leopards In the Benin kingdom of West Africa, peoplecelebrated the leopard as “king of the bush.” Copper alloy leopards ofthis kind were usually placed at the king’s side when he sat in state tosymbolize the king’s ominous power combined with prudent reserve.(Photograph © 1978 Dirk Bakker)




Mediterranean world in general. In times of pillageand conquest, invading people everywhere soldprisoners into slavery. Conquerors could not toler-ate holding massive numbers of the enemy in theirmidst and therefore often sold them to distant landsas slaves, where their threat would be neutralized.This seemed more merciful than mass execution—and more profitable.

Slavery had existed in Africa for centuries, but ithad nothing to do with skin color. Like other peo-ples, Africans accepted slavery without question asa condition of servitude and slaveholding as a markof wealth. To own slaves was to be wealthy; to tradeslaves was a way of increasing one’s wealth. OlaudahEquiano described how his tribe traded slaves to“mahogany-coloured men from the south west” ofhis village: “Sometimes we sold slaves to them butthey were only prisoners of war, or such among usas had been convicted of kidnaping, or adultery,and some other crimes which we esteemedheinous.” In this way, African societies for centuriesconducted an overland slave trade that carried cap-tured people from West Africa across the vast SaharaDesert to Christian Roman Europe and the IslamicMiddle East.

From the tenth to fifteenth century, about 5,000West Africans were sold eastward as sugar workers inEgypt, as domestic servants and craftspeoplethroughout the Arabic world, and as soldiers in NorthAfrica. Islam had facilitated this process by establish-ing secure trade routes connecting West Africa with

the Mediterranean world and the lands east of it. Bythe time Songhai rose to prominence in West Africa,the kingdom became a major supplier of enslavedcaptives across the Sahara to North Africa. This tradegave Songhai’s elite access to European tradegoods—Venetian beads, fine cloth, and horses, thelatter especially important to Songhai warriors whowere waging war against neighboring peoples.Though this slave traffic was on the rise, it was still anoccasional rather than a highly organized trade, andit was carried out to provide Mediterranean tradingpartners with soldiers, household servants, and arti-sans rather than gangs of field workers.

In this way, the peoples of West Africa held to aconception of slavery very different from the onethat would develop in the European colonies of theAmericas. “Those prisoners which were not sold orredeemed,” remembered Equiano, “we kept asslaves; but how different was their condition fromthat of slaves in the West-Indies! With us, they do nomore work than other members of the community,even their master. Their food, clothing, and lodgingwere nearly the same as theirs, except they were notpermitted to eat with the free-born.” Most impor-tant in the African practice of slavery was that theenslaved served as soldiers, administrators, some-times as royal advisers, and even occasionally asroyal consorts. Also key was the possibility of free-dom: the status of slave was not necessarily lifelongbut was revocable, and slavery did not automati-cally pass on to the female slave’s children.

The African City ofLoango The city of Loango, atthe mouth of the Congo River onthe west coast of Africa, was largerat the time of this drawing in themid-eighteenth century than all buta few seaports in the Britishcolonies in North America. Whatcan you discern from the figures inthe foreground? (The GrangerCollection, New York)




The African EthosMany of Africa’s peoples—Ashanti, Mandingo,Coromantee, Yoruba, Fon, Hausa, Ibo, Whydah, Ga,and others—eventually became African Americans.Indeed, they would become at least two-thirds of allthe immigrants who crossed the ocean to the WesternHemisphere in the three centuries after Europeansbegan colonizing there. They came from a rich diver-sity of cultures, but most of them shared certain waysof life that differentiated them from Europeans.

As in Europe, the family was the basic unit of socialorganization. By maintaining intimate connectionsbetween man and woman, parent and child, sisterand brother, enslaved Africans developed an impor-tant defense against the cruelties of slavery. UnlikeEuropeans, however, where patriarchy put the fatherand husband at the center of family life, Africans orga-nized themselves in a variety of kinship systems. Inmany African societies, as in many Native Americanones, the family was matrilineal, with property rightsand political inheritance descending through themother rather than the father. When a chief died, theson of his sister inherited his position. Upon marry-ing, a man joined his wife’s people. This matrilinealtradition carried over into slavery, as African womencontinued to have an influence not typical inEuropean family organization. In Africa, each personwas linked to others in the village, his or her identitydefined by family relationships. Individualism, whichwould become so prized in English society trans-planted to North America, was an alien, distasteful,and nearly meaningless concept to Africans.

Africans brought a complex religious heritage withthem to the Americas, which no amount of desolationor physical abuse could wipe out. Widespread acrossAfrica was a belief in a supreme Creator of the cosmosand in a pantheon of lesser deities associated withnatural forces, such as rain, animals, and the fertilityof the earth, that could intervene in human affairs andwere, therefore, elaborately honored. West Africans,like most native North Americans, held that spiritsdwelt in the trees, rocks, and rivers around them, andhence they exercised care in their treatment.

Africans also worshiped ancestors, who they be-lieved mediated between the Creator and the living.Relatives held elaborate funeral rites to ensure theproper entrance of a deceased relative into the spiri-tual world. The more ancient an ancestor, the greaterthis person’s power to affect the living; thus the “an-cient ones” were devoutly worshiped. Deep familyloyalty and regard for family lineage flowed naturallyfrom ancestor worship.

Finally, West Africans believed in spirit possession,in which the gods spoke to men and women through

priests and other religious figures. “Though we had noplaces of public worship,” Equiano remembered, “wehad priests and magicians, or wise men . . . held ingreat reverence by the people. They calculated time,foretold events, . . . and when they died, they weresucceeded by their sons.”

While their religious beliefs differed from those oftheir European slave owners, Africans shared somecommon ground, including a belief in an invisible“other world” inhabited by the souls of the deadwho could be known through revelations that spiri-tually gifted people could interpret. These roughlyshared foundations of religious feeling fostered thedevelopment of a hybrid African Christianity. Infact, in the kingdom of Kongo and several smallkingdoms close to the Niger Delta, extensive contactwith the Portuguese had allowed Christianity tograft itself onto African religious beliefs by the timeEnglish colonies were planted in North America in

Edo Sculpture This commemorative head, probably of a queenmother, was made by an Edo of the Benin kingdom about the timeColumbus was making his first voyage across the Atlantic. The elaborateheaddress and collar of beads are fashioned from copper alloy with ironinlay. Would ordinary Ibo women be dressed like this? (Commemorativetrophy head. Edo peoples, Nigeria, Late 15th–early 16th century, Copper alloy,iron inlay, H x W x D: 23.2 x 15.9 x 20 cm, Purchased with funds provided bythe Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, 85-5-2. Photograph byFranko Khoury, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.)




the seventeenth century. African religious customs,funeral rites, sacred images, and charms for protec-tion against evil spirits lost some of their power dur-ing enslavement, though how fast this happened ismurky and clearly varied from place to place. Buteven to the present day, African religious beliefs andpractices still hold at least partial sway among someAfrican Americans.

Social organization in much of West Africa by thetime Europeans arrived was as elaborate as in fif-teenth-century Europe. At the top of society stoodthe king, supported by nobles and priests, usuallyelderly men. Beneath them were the great mass ofpeople, mostly cultivators of the soil in innumerablevillages. “Agriculture is our chief employment,” re-called Equiano, “and everyone, even the childrenand women, are engaged in it. Thus we are habitu-ated to labour from our earliest years” and “every-one contributes something to the common stock.”In urban centers, craftspeople, traders, teachers,and artists lived beneath the ruling families. At thebottom of society toiled the slaves. As in ancientGreece and Rome, they were “outsiders”—war cap-tives, criminals, or sometimes people who soldthemselves into servitude to satisfy a debt. [Therights of slaves were restricted, and their opportuni-ties for advancement were narrow. Nevertheless, asmembers of the community, they were entitled toprotection under the law and allowed the privilegesof education, marriage, and parenthood.] Theirservile condition was not permanent, nor was it au-tomatically inherited by their children, as would bethe fate of Africans enslaved in the Americas.




EUROPE ON THE EVE OFINVADING THE AMERICASIn the ninth century, about the time that the MoundBuilders of the Mississippi valley were constructingtheir urban center at Cahokia and the kingdom ofGhana was rising in West Africa, western Europewas an economic and cultural backwater. The cen-ter of political power and economic vitality in theOld World had shifted eastward to ChristianByzantium, which controlled Asia Minor, theBalkans, and parts of Italy. The other dynamic cul-ture of this age, Islam, had spread through theMiddle East, spilled across North Africa, and pene-trated Spain and West Africa south of the Sahara.

Within a few centuries, an epic revitalization ofwestern Europe occurred, creating the conditionsthat enabled its leading maritime nations vastly toextend their oceanic frontiers. By the late fifteenthcentury, a 400-year epoch of militant overseas

European expansion was underway. Not until thesecond half of the twentieth century was thisprocess of Europeanization reversed; then colo-nized people began to regain their autonomy andcultural identity through wars of national libera-tion—a process now nearing completion.

The Rebirth of EuropeThe rebirth of western Europe, which began around1000 C.E., owed much to a revival of long-distancetrading from Italian ports on the Mediterranean andto the rediscovery of ancient knowledge that thesecontacts permitted. The once mighty cities of theRoman Empire had stagnated for centuries, but nowVenice, Genoa, and other Italian ports began tradingwith peoples facing the Adriatic, Baltic, and Northseas. These new contacts brought wealth and powerto the Italian commercial cities, which graduallyevolved into merchant-dominated city–states thatfreed themselves from the rule of feudal lords in con-trol of the surrounding countryside. By the late 1400s,sailing ships were crossing all the sea basins of theEastern Hemisphere—the China Sea, the IndianOcean, the Persian Gulf, the Red and Black seas, andthe Mediterranean, thus creating a zone of intercul-tural communication never before achieved.

While merchants led the emerging city–states,western Europe’s feudal system gradually weak-ened. For centuries, warrior aristocrats, not kings,had exercised the normal powers of the state: thepower to tax, wage war, and administer the law. Inthe thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however,kings began to reassert their political authority andto undertake efforts to unify their realms. One oftheir primary goals was to curb the power of thegreat feudal lords who dominated entire regionsand to force lesser nobles into dependence on andobedience to the crown.

Concurrently in the fourteenth century, the massof peasant people suffered greatly. Famine struckmany parts of Europe after 1300 because the pro-duction of food did not keep up with population in-creases. Malnutrition reduced the resistance of mil-lions when the Black Death (bubonic plague) struckwith fury. It first devastated China, wiping out nearlyone-third of the population, and then moved east-ward following trade routes to India and the MiddleEast, hitting hardest in the cities. Then in 1348 itreached western Europe and North Africa. Over thenext quarter century, some 30 million Europeansdied, a blow from which Europe did not recover de-mographically for centuries. This unprecedentedhuman misery produced economic disruption, vio-lent worker strikes, and peasant uprisings. Yet the




Black Death promoted the unification of old realmsinto early modern states. The nobilities with whichmonarchs had to contend were reduced in size, forthe plague defied class distinction. Ironically, feudallords treated their peasants better for a time becausetheir labor, tremendously reduced by the plague, be-came more valuable.

Early developments in England led to a distinc-tive political system. In 1215, the English aristocracycurbed the powers of the king when they forced himto accept the Magna Carta. On the basis of this char-ter, a parliament composed of elective and heredi-tary members eventually gained the right to meetregularly to pass money bills and therefore act as acheck on the Crown. During the sixteenth century,the Crown and Parliament worked together toward

a more unified state, with the Englishkings wielding less political powerthan their counterparts on theEuropean continent.

Economic changes of great signifi-cance also occurred in England dur-ing the sixteenth century. To practicemore profitable agriculture, greatlandowners began to “enclose” (con-solidate) their estates, throwing peas-ant farmers off their plots and turningmany of them into wage laborers. Theformation of this working class wasthe crucial first step toward industrialdevelopment.

Continental Europe lagged behindEngland in two respects. First, it wasfar less affected by the move to “en-close” agricultural land because con-tinental aristocrats regarded themaximization of profit as unworthyof gentlemen. Second, continentalrulers were less successful in engag-ing the interests of their nobilities,and these nobles never shared gover-nance with their king, as did Englisharistocrats through their participa-tion in Parliament. In France, a noblefaction assassinated Henry III in1589, and the nobles remained dis-ruptive for nearly another century. InSpain, the final conquest of theMuslims and expulsion of the Jews,both in 1492, strengthened themonarchy’s hold, but regional cul-tures and leaders remained strong.The continental monarchs wouldthus warmly embrace the doctrine ofroyal absolutism—the unqualified

authority of the king or queen—that developed inthe sixteenth century.

The New Monarchies and the Expansionist ImpulseIn the second half of the fifteenth century, ambitiousmonarchs coming to power in France, England, andSpain sought social and political stability in theirkingdoms by creating armies and bureaucraciesstrong enough to quell internal conflict and raisingtaxes sufficient to support their regimes. In thesecountries, and in Portugal as well, economic revivaland the reversal of more than a century of populationdecline and civil disorder nourished the impulse toexpand. This impulse was also fed by Renaissance

A Chapel Made of Bone The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth centurykilled nearly 40,000 people in the region of Prague. Five centuries later, a Czech wood-carver fashioned the bones of thousands of Black Death victims into a chapel where visi-tors are astounded to see a bone altar, bone chalices, the bone chandelier that is pic-tured here, and gigantic bone bells. Every bone in the human body is used in thechandelier. How does the Black Death compare with modern-day scourges such asAIDS? (Photograph © Lubomir Stiburek)




culture. Ushering in a new, more secular age, theRenaissance (Rebirth) encouraged innovation (in sci-ence as well as in art and music), freedom of thought,richness of expression, and an emphasis on humanabilities. Beginning in Italy and spreading northwardthrough Europe, the Renaissance peaked dramati-cally in the late fifteenth century when the age ofoverseas exploration began.

The exploratory urge had two initial objectives:first, to circumvent overland Muslim traders byfinding an eastward oceanic route to Asia; second,to tap the African gold trade at its source, avoidingMuslim intermediaries in North Africa. Since 1291,when Marco Polo returned to Venice with tales ofEastern treasures such as spices, silks, perfumes,medicines, and jewels, Europeans had bartered withthe Orient via a long eastward overland routethrough the Muslim world. Eventually, Europe’smariners found they could voyage to Cathay (China)by both eastward and westward water routes.

Portugal seemed the least likely of the rising na-tion–states to lead the expansion of Europe outsideits continental boundaries, yet it forged into thelead at the end of the fifteenth century. A poorcountry of only 1 million inhabitants, Portugal had

gradually overcome Moorish control in the twelfthand thirteenth centuries and, in 1385, hadwrenched itself free of domination by neighboringCastile. Led by Prince Henry the Navigator, forwhom trade was secondary to the conquest of theMuslim world, Portugal breached the unknown. Inthe 1420s, Henry began dispatching Portuguesemariners to probe the unknown Atlantic “sea ofdarkness.” Important improvements in naviga-tional instruments, mapmaking, and ship designaided his intrepid sailors. Symbolizing the increas-ingly interconnected world, the compass, inventedby the Chinese, was copied by Middle EasternArabs, then by the Portuguese.

Portuguese captains operated at sea on threeancient Ptolemaic principles: that the earth wasround, that distances on its surface could be mea-sured by degrees, and that navigators could “fix”their position at sea on a map by measuring theposition of the stars. The invention in the 1450s ofthe quadrant, which allowed a precise measure-ment of star altitude necessary for determining lat-itude, represented a leap forward from the chart-and-compass method of navigation. Equallyimportant was the design of a lateen-rigged

A Procession in Venice Venice’steeming life along the Grand Canal is ap-parent in this painting of a processionmaking its way across the Rialto Bridge to-ward a balcony. Warehouses and hand-some mansions flank the canal. Does thispainting reflect the class structure ofVenice? (Vittore Carpaccio, (1455–1525),Healing of the Possessed (Miracle of therelic of the Cross). Scala/Art Resource, NY)



caravel, adapted from a Moorish ship design. Thetriangular sails permitted ships to sail into thewind, allowing them to travel southward along theAfrican coast—a feat the square-rigged Europeanvessels could never perform—and return north-ward against prevailing winds.

By the 1430s, the ability of Prince Henry’s cap-tains to break through the limits of the world knownto Europeans had carried them to Madeira, theCanary Islands, and the more distant Azores, lyingoff the coasts of Portugal and northwestern Africa.These were soon developed as the first European-controlled agricultural plantations, located on thecontinent’s periphery and designed to produce cashcrops such as sugar that could be marketed inEurope. Thus, the Madeiras, Canaries, and Azoresbecame a kind of laboratory for much largerEuropean colony building much farther from thecolonizers’ homelands.

From islands off the West African coast, thePortuguese sea captains pushed farther south, navi-gating their way down the west coast of Africa by1460. While carrying their Christian faith to newlands, they began a profitable trade in ivory, slaves,and especially gold. Now, they were poised to capi-talize on the connection between Europe andAfrica, though not yet knowing that a stupendousland mass, to become known as America, lay faracross the Atlantic Ocean.

Astrolabe In Columbus’s era, the astrolabe was the most im-portant astronomical computer, in which the celestial sphere wasprojected onto the equator’s plane. Once the movable arm was set,the entire sky was visible. Europeans adopted it in the twelfth centuryfrom the Islamic world, where it had been used for centuries.(Courtesy of Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Chicago, Illinois)

AMERICAN VOICES

In 1444, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, a representative ofPortugal’s Prince Henry, described the arrival by ship ofenslaved Africans at Lagos, Portugal.

What heart could be so hard as not to bepierced with piteous feeling to see that company?For some kept their heads low, and their facesbathed in tears, looking one upon another. Othersstood groaning very dolorously. Looking up to theheight of heaven, fixing their eyes upon it, cryingout loudly, as if asking help from the Father of na-ture; others struck their faces with the palms oftheir hands, throwing themselves at full lengthupon the group; while others made lamentations

in their manner of a dirge, after the custom oftheir country . . . But to increase their sufferingstill more there now arrived those who hadcharge of the division of the captives, and . . . thenwas it needful to part fathers from sons, husbandsfrom wives, brothers from brothers. No respectwas shown to either friends or relations, but eachfell where his lot took him.

■ Does the wording and tone of this passage indicate thatEannes de Zurara was opposed to the slave trade?

■ Why would a courtier of Prince Henry write this?

Gomes Eannes de Zurara,The Arrival of a Slave Ship at Lagos, Portugal

31




All the forces that have made the world of the past500 years “modern” began to come into play by thelate fifteenth century. As the stories about four im-portant women of this era demonstrate, deep trans-formations were underway in West Africa, in south-ern and western Europe, and in the Americas. WestAfrican empires had reached new heights, some hadbeen deeply influenced by the Islamic faith, andmany had become experienced in transregionaltrade. Muslim scholars, merchants, and long-distance travelers were becoming the principal me-diators in the interregional exchange of goods,ideas, and technical innovations. Meanwhile theRenaissance, initiated in Italy, worked its way north-ward and brought new energy and ambition to a

weakened, disease-ridden, and tired Europe.Advances in maritime technology also allowedEuropeans to make contact with the peoples of WestAfrica and develop the first slave-based plantationsocieties in tropical islands off the West Africancoast. In the Americas, large empires in Mexicoand—as we will see in Chapter 2, Peru—were grow-ing more populous and consolidating their powerwhile in North America the opposite was occurring:a decay of powerful mound-building societies and along-range move toward decentralized tribal soci-eties. The scene was set for the great leap ofEuropeans across the Atlantic, where the conver-gence between the peoples of Africa, the Americas,and Europe would occur.

T I M E L I N E

35,000 B.C.E. First humans cross Bering Land Bridge toreach the Americas

12,000 B.C.E. Beringian epoch ends

8000 B.C.E. Paleo-Indian phase ends

500 B.C.E. Archaic era ends

500 B.C.E.–1000 C.E. Post-Archaic era in North America

600 C.E.–1100 Rise of mound-building center atCahokia

632–750 Islamic conquest of North Africa spreadsMuslim faith

800–1026 Kingdom of Ghana controls WestAfrica’s trade

1000 Norse seafarers establish settlements inNewfoundland

Kingdom of Benin develops

1000–1500 Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai inAfrica

1200s Pueblo societies develop village life insouthwestern North America

1235 Defeating the Ghanaian king, Malibecomes a West African power

1291 Marco Polo’s return from East Asia toVenice quickens European trade withEastern Hemisphere

1300s Rise of Aztec society in Valley of Mexico

1300–1450 Italian Renaissance

1324 Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Meccaexpands Muslim influence in WestAfrica

1420s Portuguese sailors explore west coast ofAfrica

1435 Kingdom of Songhai declaresindependence from kingdom of Mali

1450–1600 Northern European Renaissance

1460s–1590s Kingdom of Songhai controls WestAfrica’s trading societies

1469 Marriage of Castile’s Isabella andAragon’s Ferdinand creates Spain

1500s Quickening of western European tradeand production of consumer goods

Conclusion

The Approach of a New Global Age




1. To what do you attribute the remarkable diversity ofcultures in the Americas in the centuries prior tocontact with Europeans? What are the most markedexamples of that diversity?

2. What were the major features of western African so-ciety and culture prior to contact with Europeantraders?

3. What were the causes and major consequences ofthe revitalization of western Europe in the period af-ter 1000 C.E.?

Questions for Review and Reflection

4. Africa, Europe, and the Americas at the start of the“early modern period” are often treated as dramati-cally different in every way, yet commonalities ex-isted. What were the most striking of these commonfeatures?

5. Why did western Europeans expand out of their geo-graphical confines to explore, conquer, and colonizethe Americas? What factors were not present in Africaor the Americas to foster expansion into the Atlanticbasin from those areas?

Recommended ReadingRecommended Readings are posted on the Web site for this textbook. Visit www.ablongman.com/nash

Fiction and Film

Peter Forbath’s Lord of the Kongo (1996) tells the dra-matic story of a young Portuguese sailor countedamong those interacting with the Kongo people ofWest Africa in the early 1500s. Chinua Achebe’sThings Fall Apart (1958) is already a classic—an un-sentimental depiction of tribal life in Nigeria beforeand after the arrival of Europeans. Barbara Tuckman’sA Distant Mirror (1978) is the most engaging novelever written about the European Middle Ages—andparticularly about the calamitous fourteenth centurywhen England and France waged the Hundred Years’War (1337–1429). In The Man on a Donkey (1952), H.F. M. Prescott brings alive the tumultuous English eraof Henry VIII.

Search of the First Americans (1992), part of theNova series produced by the Public BroadcastingSystem (PBS), provides a fascinating introductionto the peopling of the Americas before theColumbian voyages. Secrets of the Lost Red Paint

People, also in this series, shows how archaeolo-gists have reconstructed—always tentatively—theancient world of the Americas. Films for theHumanities and Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey,has produced a five-part series of short films torecreate the history and culture of some of thegreat West African societies, particularly thosefrom which today’s African Americans in NorthAmerica and the West Indies have derived. In TheAgony and the Ecstasy (1965), derived from IrvingStone’s biography of Michelangelo, CharltonHeston and Rex Harrison bring alive the ItalianRenaissance. Luther, John Osborne’s play that cap-tivated London theatergoers, appeared on film,with Stacy Keach playing Luther, in 1974. TheReturn of Martin Guerre (1982), called by some thebest historical movie ever made, depicts Frenchpeasant life in the era when Europeans were awak-ening to overseas exploration and settlement.

Discovering U.S. History Online

Ancient Mesoamerican Civilizationswww.angelfire.ca/humanoriginsThis page supplies information regarding Mesoamericancivilizations with well-organized essays, links, and photos.

Cahokia Moundswww.medicine.wustl.edu/~mckinney/cahokia/cahokia.htmlThis online presentation of the historical CahokiaMounds offers background information, an interactivemap of the site, a satellite map, and other photos.




Pre-Contact Cultural Areaswww.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/housingmap.htmlwww.kstrom.net/isk/maps/cultmap.htmlThese clickable maps give regional cultural informationabout pre-contact native peoples of North America.

Vikings in the New Worldwww.emuseum.mnsu.edu/prehistory/vikings/vikhome.htmlThis site explores the history of some of the earliestEuropean visitors to the Americas.

Civilizations in Africawww.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CIVAFRCA/CIVAFRCA.HTMThis site offers a region-by-region, broad overview of thepre-conquest civilizations in Africa.

The Slave Kingdomswww.pbs.org/wondersPart of the PBS online exhibition “Wonders of the AfricanWorld,” this section describes the West African culturesduring the slave trade as well as both African andEuropean participation in the slave trade.

The Ancient West African City of Beninwww.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/beninsp.htmA brief description and exhibit example from each of thethree sections of this Smithsonian Institution exhibit givea view through art of the extent of cultural development atthe time of European contact and subsequent slave trade.

Life in Elizabethan Englandwww.renaissance.dm.net/compendium/home.htmlThis site provides a compendium of information abouteveryday life, politics, and religion in England prior to “thewestward fever.”

Life in Sixteenth-Century Francewww.lepg.org/index.htmlThis detailed site offers “a guide to the history, culture, anddaily life of 16th century France.”

Renaissancewww.learner.org/exhibits/renaissanceAn exploration of the European Renaissance, this interac-tive site seeks to discover and describe “the forces thatdrove this rebirth in Europe, and in Italy in particular.”



Chapter 1 APUS Textbook

Documents

Transcript of Chapter 1 APUS Textbook