The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 61
century, was a by-product of the Mongols’ military success, and of the
radical rationality they exhibited in their management of weapons de
sign, logistics, and command. Yet so it was.
In the Middle East and India, Turkish soldiery harnessed in tandem
to Arab, Iranian, and Indian urban populations came to power be
tween the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Warriors of nomad back
ground assimilated Islamic urban culture and then combined with
urban traders and associated artisans to exploit the peasant grain pro
ducers of the countryside with a ruthlessness that may have had the
effect of limiting economic development in the mid-regions of Eur
asia.^73 Whether for this or other reasons, economic devolution seems
to have taken place in the Arab heartland of Islam. Merchants in Iraq
and adjacent regions achieved a higher level of wealth and social pres
tige in the tenth and eleventh centuries than ever before; but after
1200 their prominence and probably their wealth too diminished.^74
The irrigation system of Iraq decayed, and the fundamental productiv
ity of the landscape shrank back accordingly. Perhaps the change in
climate that made the thirteenth century an especially good time in
northwestern Europe, with warm, dry summers and correspondingly
good grain harvests meant drought and agricultural setback in the
Middle East. If so, even in proximity to cities, grazing areas must have
expanded at the expense of grainfields, a development which in turn
would tend to refresh and reinforce the nomadic element in the Is
lamic body politic.^75
At any rate, the Moslem world failed to take full advantage of the
new technical possibilities opened up by the diffusion of Chinese skills
in the wake of the Mongol unification of Eurasia. To be sure, the
Ottoman Turks used improvements in cannon design to capture Con
stantinople in 1453; but the craftsmen who cast the cannon for
Mohammed the Conqueror were Hungarian. Even as early as the
mid-fifteenth century it appears to be true that gun founders of Latin
Christendom had achieved a technical lead over cannon makers in
other parts of the civilized world, including China.
- John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, and Empire: A Study in
15th/9th Century Turko-Iranian Politics (Minneapolis, 1976), offers a sample of how
urban and tribal elements interacted and (usually) allied with one another to form one of
the many unstable states into which the realm of Islam divided after A.D. 1000.
- Cf. S. D. Goitein, “The Rise of the Near Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic
Times,” Journal of World History 3 (1957): 583–604.
- I am not aware of any scholarly discussion of climate change in the Middle East in
these centuries. For Europe see Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an
mil (Paris, 1967).
