READ: Unit 3 Introduction – Land-Based Empires 1450 to 1750

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The large, multicultural Eurasian empires that we look at in this unit all emerged in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Mongol Empire. You may remember that the Mongol Empire—arguably the largest in human history—had stretched from China through Central Asia and much of the Islamic world in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. However, it fell victim to the forces of decentralization and local resistance, suffering even worse damage when the Black Death plague savaged trade and decimated populations from China to Europe from about 1331 to 1352.

As Mongol governance began to collapse, local leaders rose to take their places. In 1368, the Daoist Red Turban movement in China overthrew the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and installed their leader, Zhu Yuanzhang, as the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. In Islamic Southwest Asia, the Ottoman Sultanate, which had once paid tribute to the Mongols, established itself as the regional power controlling the vital trade routes of this region in the early fifteenth century. To their east, their great rivals, the Safavids, established a base of power in Persia after 1501, inheriting many institutions the Mongols had left behind. To the Southeast, Muslim warrior leaders claiming descent from the Mongols swept out of Afghanistan to conquer much of South Asia. This was the Mughal Empire, whose rulers had extended control across half of the Indian peninsula by 1526 and continued to expand. To the north, Christian princes on the edge of Europe who had also once paid tribute to the Mongols recovered much of their power and began to spread eastward.

This was the Slavic state of Russia, which began as the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and which by the 1480s had taken control of many neighboring states and become the dominant Slavic power.

By no later than the 1550s, five large empires dominated Eurasia (and bits of North Africa). There were still lots of smaller states around and between them—from France to Vietnam to Morocco. In addition, the Afro-Eurasian trading system was also fully rebuilt. But things worked differently post-Black Death. Rather than being structured around a single dominant central power, it was now a competitive system of exchange between smaller states and empires.

So although the Mongol empire perished, it spawned five children in the form of the states that succeeded it. Their leaders, in many cases, retained lessons learned from the Mongols about how to rule vast territories. They were all relatively centralized, meaning that they put as much power as possible in their own hands, rather than spreading it out among their followers and allies. They managed this centralization through increasingly large bureaucracies, employing professionals whose job was to help the state gather taxes and rule.

One of the major strengths that helped these governments control large empires was gunpowder, a relatively new innovation. The explosive substance that would eventually be called gunpowder had been developed in China prior to the Mongol age, but it took a while for technology to make it an effective battlefield tool. Many of these empires mastered the use of gunpowder and firearms in war. The Ottomans used the first really efficient cannon to conquer Constantinople and rename it as their new capital, Istanbul, in 1453. The Mughal Emperor Babur used cannons and muskets to neutralize the cavalry of the Sultan of Delhi at the Battle of Panipat, in 1526. The Russians defeated the remnants of the Mongol Khanate of Crimea in 1532 using gunpowder weapons. But they should have called it cannon-powder since those could blast the walls of castles, forts, and even huge cities like Constantinople to much greater effect than the smaller weapons being fired on the battlefield. For thousands of years, regional nobles with small armies had used stone walls to repel the larger armies of their own kings and emperors. The emergence of large, efficient cannons neutralized this form of local resistance. Now, emperors with successful economies and vast armies could conquer territory quickly and force the loyalty of their nobles.

It wasn’t just gunpowder, though. The successful empires of Eurasia grew for a variety of reasons and managing their newly acquired territories and diverse populations took more than cannons. Each empire—indeed, each emperor—adopted a unique set of policies for controlling their subjects. But as you will see in this unit, there were some common and shared strategies that were pretty effective.

One strategy was to appeal to a sense of unity or togetherness, at least for part of the population. Emperors often tried to depict themselves as champions of a state religion—like the Orthodox faith in Russia, or Islam in the Ottoman Empire, for example. They also frequently claimed to be descendants of older powers. The Russian Emperors called themselves Tsars, derived from the Roman title of Caesar. The Ming Emperors in China claimed to be connected to the Song Dynasty who had ruled before the Mongols came. They also built toward unity, of course, creating systems of roads and shared law codes to make travel faster and to bind people together.

Similarly, all emperors turned to allies—belonging totheir own societies but not their governments—for help. They recruited nobles, of course, like the Mughal mansabdars, or military commanders, or the Ottoman sîpahîs; basically knights. They also often turned to merchants. But the most common allies were religious leaders like the Muslim ulamâ, or judges, of the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes emperors turned to allies in different states, even to unite against a common enemy.

Emperors recognized just how multicultural their empires were and frequently used that diversity to their advantage. They elevated people of different communities, languages, and religions to serve in government. Many Mughal emperors, for example, had Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh mansabdars. Sometimes, emperors recognized special legal status for particular communities, like the millet laws of the Ottoman Empire.

These strategies had one particular goal: Keep a vast empire chugging along.

Europe seems like an exception to the trends across Eurasia at this time. It’s not the only exception. Empires struggled to dominate any areas where geography was broken up by natural barriers such as islands, peninsulas and mountains. Both Southeast Asia and Europe had these obstacle courses. And maybe Europe isn’t entirely an exception. For part of this period, the Habsburg Empire controlled much of Europe using gunpowder weapons and many of the strategies listed above. But it never really achieved dominance. In fact, throughout this period, economic and political power in Europe slowly moved toward smaller states—some very small—in Northwest Europe. Countries like Portugal, England, France, and the tiny but significant Netherlands. We often hear how the governments and economic systems of these countries made them very different from empires. But were they? They also used gunpowder to build empires in this period—but remotely, with conquests overseas instead of overland. In the next unit, we’ll dig into this, and also discuss their overseas interactions with peoples in sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.