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World History · AP World History: Modern
c. 1200–1450
In 1200 no one power led the world. Song China was its most commercial economy; Muslim rulers governed a belt of lands from Spain to India; Christian kings ruled a divided Europe; in Africa and the Americas, states grew on gold, tribute and farming. Over the next two and a half centuries the Mongols conquered much of Eurasia, Islam spread with soldiers, merchants and mystics, and new states formed on every inhabited continent.
The unit has three big ideas. First, states formed, grew and fell, and their rulers held power with a common set of tools: religion to legitimize them, bureaucracies, armies, tribute and taxes. Second, belief systems, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, shaped how societies were ordered, and spread and changed as they traveled. Third, economies grew: more productive farming fed more people, and commerce, cities and skilled crafts grew with them, while most people still worked the land.
The period’s states are best learned region by region, then compared: what was new, what continued from earlier states, and how the same problems were solved in different ways.
The figure is Afro-Eurasia as the years pass, colored by the faith of its rulers: red Muslim, blue Buddhist, Hindu or Confucian, gray Christian, paper the rest (including the Mongols before they turned Muslim). Watch Muslim rule reach northern India, Anatolia and the Balkans, the Mongol conquest open a hole in it and close again as the khans convert, and Christian kings take back most of Spain.
| topic | |
|---|---|
| 1.1 | Developments in East Asia from c. 1200 to c. 1450 |
| 1.2 | Developments in Dar al-Islam |
| 1.3 | Developments in South and Southeast Asia |
| 1.4 | State building in the Americas |
| 1.5 | State building in Africa |
| 1.6 | Developments in Europe |
| 1.7 | Comparison in the period from c. 1200 to c. 1450 |
Unit 1 is about 8–10% of the AP exam.
Song, Yuan and Ming China and their neighbors
In 1200 China was divided: the Southern Song ruled the south from Hangzhou, the Jurchen Jin the north. The Song justified and ran their state with Confucian ideas and a bureaucracy chosen by examination, and their economy was the most commercialized in the world. The Mongols conquered both, but Chinese traditions outlasted them and shaped Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
The Song state. The Song (960–1279) governed through an imperial bureaucracy of scholar-officials chosen by the civil service examinations, which tested mastery of the Confucian classics. Hundreds of thousands of men sat the exams in the 1200s; only a small fraction passed. After the Jin took the capital, Kaifeng, in 1127, the court moved south to Hangzhou (Lin’an), a city of perhaps a million people or more (estimates vary).
Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism. Confucian teaching put order in relationships: ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger. Filial piety, duty to parents and ancestors, was its root. Neo-Confucianism, as Zhu Xi (1130–1200) taught it, joined these ethics to Buddhist and Daoist ideas about the universe and the self; his commentaries became the official reading of the classics for the exams the Yuan restored in 1315. It also reinforced patriarchy: elite women’s lives were narrowed, and foot binding spread among wealthy families.
Buddhism, from India, changed as it spread: Mahayana schools in East Asia (Chan, called Zen in Japan; Pure Land), Theravada in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia, and Tibetan Buddhism, which the Yuan court patronized. In China it blended with Confucian and Daoist ideas.
A commercial economy. Fast-ripening, drought-resistant Champa rice from Vietnam, distributed by imperial order in 1012, allowed two harvests a year in the south, and the population grew. The Grand Canal, first built around 600, carried southern rice north; the Yuan cut it through to their capital, Dadu (Beijing), by 1293. Iron output reached perhaps 125,000 tons a year by 1078 (Robert Hartwell’s estimate). Workshops turned out porcelain, silk and other textiles for markets at home and overseas; paper money, printing and the compass spread. Yet the economy still rested on free peasants and artisans.
The Mongols. Temüjin, proclaimed Chinggis Khan in 1206, united the Mongols; his armies destroyed Xi Xia (1227) and the Jin (1234). His grandson Kublai proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and finished the Song in 1279: for the first time all of China was ruled by foreign conquerors. The Yuan ranked their subjects, Mongols and Central Asians above northern and then southern Chinese, and suspended the exams until 1315. Their invasions of Japan (1274, 1281) and of Đại Việt failed. Revolts, floods and epidemics brought them down: Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant rebel, founded the Ming in 1368 and restored Confucian rule and the exams; his son, the Yongle emperor, moved the capital to Beijing (1421) and sent Zheng He’s fleets across the Indian Ocean (1405–1433).
| dynasty | rulers | dates | capital |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southern Song | Chinese | 1127–1279 | Lin’an (Hangzhou) |
| Jin | Jurchen | 1115–1234 | Zhongdu (Beijing), then Kaifeng |
| Xi Xia | Tangut | 1038–1227 | Xingqing (Yinchuan) |
| Yuan | Mongol | 1271–1368 | Dadu (Beijing) |
| Ming | Chinese | 1368–1644 | Nanjing; Beijing from 1421 |
China’s neighbors took what they wanted of its culture. Korea, Vietnam and Japan adopted Chinese characters, Confucian ideas and Buddhism; Korea and Vietnam held examinations of their own. Goryeo Korea carved the whole Buddhist canon on 81,258 woodblocks (1237–1248), the Tripitaka Koreana; the Joseon dynasty (1392) made Neo-Confucianism its creed, and King Sejong’s scholars created a Korean alphabet, hangul, in 1443. Japan was ruled in fact by military shoguns and their samurai, and took up Zen. Đại Việt beat back the Mongols (Bạch Đằng, 1288) and, by 1428, a Ming occupation.
| c. 1200 | by 1450 | |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333) | Ashikaga shogunate (1336–1573) |
| Korea | Goryeo (918–1392) | Joseon (1392–1897) |
| Vietnam (Đại Việt) | Trần dynasty (1225–1400) | Ming occupation, then the Lê (1407–1427; 1428–1789) |
The figure runs from 1200 to 1450: red the Chinese dynasties (Southern Song, then Ming), blue the Mongols, gray the Jin and Xi Xia. The black line is the Grand Canal, cut north to Dadu as the Yuan dig it.
new Muslim states, the Mongols, and learning
Dar al-Islam, “the house of Islam,” was the lands under Muslim rule. By 1200 the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad had lost real power to new states, most of them led by Turkic peoples; in 1258 the Mongols ended the caliphate itself. Muslim rule kept spreading all the same, and Muslim scholars kept working.
Turkic states. The Seljuk Turks, nomads from Central Asia who had converted to Islam, took Baghdad in 1055 and ruled as sultans in the caliph’s name, with Persian officials running the government; a branch, the Seljuks of Rum, held Anatolia. In Egypt, Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty fought the crusaders until, in 1250, its Mamluks, slave soldiers mostly of Turkic origin, seized power. The Mamluks stopped the Mongols at Ain Jalut (1260), took Acre from the last crusaders (1291) and kept a line of Abbasid caliphs in Cairo to lend them legitimacy. In India, Turkic generals founded the Delhi Sultanate (1206).
The Mongols, conquerors converted. The Mongols overran Central Asia from 1219 and Iran soon after. In 1258 Hülegü, Chinggis Khan’s grandson, sacked Baghdad and had the last Abbasid caliph killed. But the conquerors were themselves converted: the Ilkhan Ghazan became a Muslim in 1295, and Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde from 1313, made Islam its faith. Timur, a Turko-Mongol Muslim, built a short-lived empire from Samarkand after 1370. In Anatolia a small frontier state founded by Osman about 1299 grew into the Ottoman Empire: it crossed into Europe at Gallipoli in 1354 and would take Constantinople in 1453.
| state | dates | where | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seljuks of Rum | 1077–1308 | Anatolia | Turkish sultans; vassals of the Mongols from 1243 |
| Ayyubids | 1171–1250 | Egypt, Syria | Saladin’s dynasty; fought the crusaders |
| Delhi Sultanate | 1206–1526 | north India | Turkic sultans ruling a Hindu majority |
| Nasrid Granada | 1232–1492 | southern Spain | the last Muslim state in Iberia |
| Mamluk Sultanate | 1250–1517 | Egypt, Syria, the Hejaz | slave soldiers turned sultans |
| Ilkhanate | 1256–1335 | Iran, Iraq | Mongol; Muslim from 1295 |
| Ottomans | 1299–1922 | Anatolia, the Balkans | a Turkish frontier state of ghazis |
| Timurids | 1370–1507 | Central Asia, Iran | Timur’s conquests and his heirs |
How Islam spread. Military expansion brought Muslim rule to northern India and the Balkans. Merchants carried the faith along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean and across the Sahara, to the Swahili coast, West Africa and Southeast Asia. Sufis, mystics who sought a personal closeness to God, won converts by preaching, poetry and example, and often blended Islam with local practice. Muslim rulers generally tolerated Jews and Christians as dhimmi, protected peoples who paid a tax, the jizya. In Iberia the frontier ran the other way: Christian kingdoms took Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248), leaving only Granada.
Learning. Muslim rulers paid for libraries, schools (madrasas), hospitals and observatories. In Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, and in Córdoba and Toledo, Greek works of philosophy, medicine and science had been translated into Arabic, preserved and commented on; from Spain many passed into Latin and to Europe’s universities. Mathematicians built on Indian numerals and on algebra; Nasir al-Din al-Tusi advanced trigonometry and astronomy at the observatory Hülegü built for him at Maragheh (1259).
| scholar | lived | known for |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Rushd (Averroes) | 1126–1198 | commentaries on Aristotle, read in Latin in Europe |
| Nasir al-Din al-Tusi | 1201–1274 | trigonometry; planetary models; the Maragheh observatory (1259) |
| Rumi | 1207–1273 | Sufi poet; his followers founded the Mevlevi order |
| Ibn Battuta | 1304–c. 1369 | traveled the Muslim world from Morocco to China, 1325–1354 |
| Ibn Khaldun | 1332–1406 | the Muqaddimah (1377): a theory of how dynasties rise and fall |
The figure runs from 1200 to 1450: red Muslim rulers, blue the Mongols until they converted, gray Christian states. Hülegü’s army marches on Baghdad in 1256–1258.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and new states
In South and Southeast Asia three faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, shaped how people lived and how kings ruled. Muslim sultans conquered northern India; Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms rose and fell in the south and across the mainland and islands of Southeast Asia.
Beliefs. Hinduism, the faith of most South Asians, bound society into castes, each with its dharma, the duty of its station, and was lived through temples, rituals and devotion. The bhakti movement, which began in south India centuries earlier and spread north, taught intense personal devotion to a single god, Shiva, Vishnu or Krishna, open to anyone, whatever their caste or sex. Buddhism, born in India, was by now fading there but flourished elsewhere: Theravada in Sri Lanka, Burma, Siam and Cambodia, Mahayana in East Asia. Islam came with conquerors, merchants and Sufis; Sufi saints such as Nizamuddin Auliya (1238–1325) in Delhi drew Hindus as well as Muslims, and bhakti and Sufism influenced each other.
The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) was founded by Turkic Muslim generals and ruled a mostly Hindu population. Its sultans paid officers with the revenue of land (iqta), taxed non-Muslims with the jizya, and beat back Mongol invasions in the late 1200s and early 1300s. Alauddin Khalji (r. 1296–1316) and Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–1351) pushed its power south to Madurai, but it could not hold the south: revolts produced the Hindu Vijayanagara empire (1336), founded by the brothers Harihara and Bukka, and the Muslim Bahmani Sultanate in the Deccan (1347). The Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan, Hindu warrior clans, held out in their forts. In 1398 Timur sacked Delhi.
Southeast Asia. States grew rich on rice and on the sea trade between India and China. Srivijaya, a Buddhist kingdom on Sumatra, controlled the Strait of Malacca and taxed the ships that passed until it faded in the 1200s. On Java, Majapahit (1293), Hindu-Buddhist, claimed tribute across much of the archipelago under its minister Gajah Mada. The Khmer Empire ruled the mainland from Angkor, its rice fields watered by great reservoirs; its kings, god-kings in the Hindu manner, built Angkor Wat for Vishnu (c. 1113–1150), the largest religious monument in the world (its site about 160 hectares), and Jayavarman VII (r. c. 1181–1218) made Mahayana Buddhism the court’s faith; Theravada later took its place. The Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya sacked Angkor in 1431. Islam arrived by trade: Samudera Pasai in northern Sumatra had a Muslim ruler by the 1290s, and Malacca’s ruler became Muslim early in the 1400s.
| state | faith of its rulers | dates | how it held power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delhi Sultanate | Muslim | 1206–1526 | Turkic cavalry; land grants (iqta) for officers; the jizya tax on non-Muslims |
| Vijayanagara | Hindu | 1336–1646 | warrior kings, temple patronage and tribute; wars with the Bahmani sultans |
| Rajput kingdoms | Hindu | from c. 700 | warrior clans holding the forts of Rajasthan against Delhi |
| Srivijaya | Buddhist | c. 650–c. 1300 | tolls on ships in the Strait of Malacca |
| Majapahit | Hindu-Buddhist | 1293–c. 1527 | Java’s rice and sea trade; tribute from the islands |
| Khmer Empire | Hindu, then Buddhist | 802–1431 | irrigated rice round Angkor; god-kings |
| Sinhala kingdoms | Buddhist | c. 400s BCE–1815 | Theravada Buddhist kings of Sri Lanka |
The figure runs from 1200 to 1450: red Muslim rulers, blue Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms. Delhi’s rule spreads east and south, then breaks up in the south; a merchant ship carries Islam across the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra and Malacca. Angkor Wat stands out at sea, a line to its place.
the Maya, the Mexica and the Inca
In the Americas, states grew larger and more centralized, most of all in Mesoamerica and the Andes, where the Mexica and the Inca built the largest empires the hemisphere had seen.
The Maya. In Yucatán the Maya lived in rival city-states, each ruled by its own king and nobles; Mayapán led a league of them from about 1220 until it was destroyed around 1441.
The Mexica (Aztecs) came to the Valley of Mexico as newcomers and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, by tradition in 1325, feeding it from chinampas, fields built up from the lake bed. In 1428 Tenochtitlan joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in the Triple Alliance, which conquered most of central and southern Mexico. It did not govern its conquests directly: it left local rulers in place and took tribute (maize, cotton cloth, cacao, feathers, gold and captives) from the 38 provinces listed in the Codex Mendoza. Its religion demanded human sacrifice to the sun and war god Huitzilopochtli at the Templo Mayor, and wars, including the ritual “flower wars” with Tlaxcala, supplied captives. By 1519 Tenochtitlan held perhaps 150,000–250,000 people (estimates vary).
The Inca of Cuzco began their conquests under Pachacuti (r. 1438–1471, traditional dates). Under his son Topa Inca and grandson Huayna Capac the empire, Tawantinsuyu, “the four parts together,” stretched more than 4,000 km from Ecuador to central Chile. Unlike the Mexica, the Inca ruled directly: they moved whole communities, spread their language, Quechua, and governed through officials who kept records on quipu, knotted cords. Instead of tribute in goods they required the mit’a, a labor tax: communities sent workers in turn to build roads, terraces and forts, farm state fields and serve in the army. Some 30,000 km of roads, with relay runners and way stations, and storehouses of food held the empire together. The ruler claimed descent from the sun god, Inti.
| Mexica | Inca | |
|---|---|---|
| capital | Tenochtitlan (1325) | Cuzco |
| expansion | Triple Alliance, from 1428 | from Pachacuti, 1438 |
| rule | indirect: local rulers kept, tribute paid | direct: officials, resettlement, Quechua |
| what subjects owed | tribute in goods and captives | labor (the mit’a) |
| holding it together | fear of the army; trade and markets | roads, storehouses, quipu records |
| religion and rule | sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli | the ruler, son of the sun (Inti) |
North of Mexico, the great centers of earlier centuries declined. Cahokia, the Mississippian city of earthen mounds near the Mississippi, was largely abandoned by about 1350; Ancestral Puebloans left the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde around 1300, in a long drought, and formed new communities to the south and east.
The figure runs on past 1450 to 1525 to show how far the two empires grew: red the Mexica and the Triple Alliance, blue the Inca, gray the other states. The Inca roads reach out with the conquests; Tenochtitlan and the Andean terraces stand out at sea.
Mali, the Hausa, Great Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, the Swahili coast
African states took many forms: empires and kingdoms, walled city-states, and societies organized by kinship without kings. Trade, in gold above all, made several of them rich, and Islam and Christianity shaped how some of their rulers held power.
Mali, in the West African Sahel, was founded about 1235 by Sundiata (Sunjata) Keita, who defeated the king of Sosso; his story is still told by griots, the oral historians. Mali controlled the gold fields of the upper Niger and Senegal and the trade across the Sahara, and its rulers were Muslim. Mansa Musa (r. c. 1312–1337) made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324–1325 with so much gold that, as the Cairo official al-Umari reported, gold lost value in Cairo for years afterward. He brought back scholars and an architect, and the mosques and schools of Timbuktu made it a center of Islamic learning. Ibn Battuta visited Mali in 1352–1353.
The Hausa kingdoms of what is now northern Nigeria, Kano, Katsina, Zaria and others, were walled city-states, each with its own ruler, linked by trade but never united into one empire. Their rulers took up Islam in the 1300s, Kano’s under Yaji (r. 1349–1385 by the Kano Chronicle), through merchants from Mali.
The Swahili city-states of the East African coast, Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Mogadishu and others, traded gold, ivory and slaves from the interior for cloth, beads and porcelain from across the Indian Ocean. Their people spoke Swahili, a Bantu language with many Arabic words, and their rulers and merchants were Muslim.
Great Zimbabwe, inland, was the capital of a Shona state from c. 1200 to c. 1450. Its rulers’ wealth came from cattle and from gold and ivory sent to the coast at Sofala and Kilwa; Chinese porcelain and Persian pottery have been dug up there. Its Great Enclosure is a wall of fitted granite blocks laid without mortar, about 250 m round and up to 11 m high, with a conical tower about 10 m high inside. Perhaps 10,000–20,000 people lived there at its height (estimates vary).
Ethiopia’s rulers had been Christian since the 300s, in the kingdom of Aksum. King Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty (r. c. 1181–1221) had 11 churches carved down into the solid rock at his capital. In 1270 Yekuno Amlak founded the Solomonic dynasty, claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a claim that legitimized its rule until 1974; Amda Seyon (r. 1314–1344) expanded the kingdom against neighboring Muslim sultanates. The Coptic church of Egypt appointed Ethiopia’s bishop.
Elsewhere, the kingdom of Kongo formed near the mouth of the Congo River in the late 1300s, and in the forests of West Africa the Yoruba city of Ife and the kingdom of Benin were known for sculpture cast in copper alloys.
| state | where | dates | rulers’ faith | wealth from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mali | West African Sahel | c. 1235–c. 1600 | Islam | gold, the Saharan trade |
| Hausa kingdoms | northern Nigeria | c. 1000s–1800s | local, then Islam (1300s) | crafts, trade, farming |
| Swahili city-states | East African coast | c. 1000s–1500s | Islam | Indian Ocean trade |
| Great Zimbabwe | southeast Africa | c. 1200–c. 1450 | local | cattle, gold and ivory to the coast |
| Ethiopia | the Horn of Africa | Solomonic, 1270–1974 | Christianity | farming, Red Sea trade |
The figure runs from 1200 to 1450: red states whose rulers were Muslim, blue states of local faiths, gray Christian Ethiopia and Nubia. Mali grows from Niani; the Hausa cities turn Muslim; Mansa Musa’s caravan crosses to Mecca from 1324; Great Zimbabwe fades about 1450 as Mutapa rises to its north.
feudalism, the manor and the Church
Europe from 1200 to 1450 was politically fragmented: kings shared power with nobles, the Church and towns. Most people were peasants, many of them serfs, working the land of a manor, and the Catholic Church gave the whole order its meaning and its rulers their legitimacy.
Feudalism tied the powerful to one another: a king granted land, a fief, to a lord in return for loyalty and military service, and great lords did the same for lesser lords and knights. Monarchies were decentralized: kings depended on their vassals. In England, barons forced King John to accept Magna Carta (1215), which placed the king under the law, and Parliament grew; the kings of France slowly gathered their lands; the Holy Roman Empire stayed a patchwork of hundreds of princes, bishops and cities under an elected emperor. England and France fought the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
| rank | owed | received |
|---|---|---|
| the king | protection; anointed by the Church | loyalty and service |
| lords and bishops | loyalty, knights and counsel to the king | large fiefs |
| knights | military service | a fief (a manor) |
| peasants and serfs | labor, rent and dues to the lord | land to farm, protection |
The manor was the economic base: a lord’s estate with its village, fields, mill and church. Europe was overwhelmingly agricultural, worked by free and coerced labor. Serfs were not slaves: they could not be sold apart from the land, and they farmed strips of their own; but they were bound to the manor, owed labor on the lord’s own fields (the demesne), rents and fees, and paid the Church a tithe, a tenth of their produce. The heavy plow and the three-field system, which left a third of the arable fallow each year instead of half, raised harvests; Europe’s population grew until the early 1300s.
| year | north field | east field | south field |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | winter | spring | fallow |
| 2 | spring | fallow | winter |
| 3 | fallow | winter | spring |
The Catholic Church, headed by the pope in Rome, was the greatest landowner in western Europe. It crowned and anointed kings, ran schools and the new universities, and could excommunicate rulers. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) joined the philosophy of Aristotle, recovered in part through translations from Arabic, to Christian theology. The Orthodox Church of Byzantium and Russia had split from Rome in 1054; the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople (1204) deepened the break. Jewish communities lived in many cities, restricted and often persecuted: England expelled its Jews in 1290, France in 1306 and again in 1394. In Iberia, Muslim al-Andalus shrank to Granada.
Crisis. The Black Death (1347–1351) killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe’s people (estimates vary). With fewer workers, survivors could demand higher wages and freer terms; revolts such as England’s Peasants’ Revolt (1381) followed, and serfdom faded in western Europe.
The figure is a manor over three years: red the serfs, blue the lord, gray the Church. Each field moves a step each year, winter grain to spring crops to fallow, while the sheep follow the fallow and the plow team works the fields; at the front, the feudal ladder.
how states formed and held power
States everywhere faced the same problems, holding land, raising revenue, keeping people loyal, and solved them with a small set of tools. Comparing means naming similarities and differences and explaining why they arose.
| tool | examples |
|---|---|
| religion legitimizes the ruler | Chinese emperors and the Mandate of Heaven; sultans as protectors of Islam (the Mamluks’ caliphs in Cairo); Ethiopia’s Solomonic descent; the Inca ruler as son of the sun; Khmer god-kings; European kings anointed by the Church; Mexica sacrifice |
| bureaucracy and records | Song and Ming officials chosen by examination; Inca officials and quipu; the Delhi Sultanate’s iqta holders |
| tribute and taxes | Mexica tribute from 38 provinces; the jizya in Muslim states; the tithe in Europe |
| labor | the Inca mit’a; serfdom on European manors; free peasants in Song China |
| military power | Mongol cavalry; Mamluk slave soldiers; Delhi’s Turkic horsemen; European knights and Japanese samurai |
| trade | Srivijaya’s tolls on the straits; Mali’s gold; the Swahili cities; Great Zimbabwe |
Similarities. Nearly every state tied its ruler to the sacred and drew its wealth from farmers, by taxes, tribute, labor or rent. Most built on what came before them: the Ming restored Song-style exams; the Inca adapted older Andean labor and road systems; Turkic sultans kept Persian administrators and the caliph’s name.
Differences. Some states were centralized (Song and Ming China, the Inca), governing directly through officials; others were decentralized (feudal Europe and Japan, the Hausa and Maya city-states), where power lay with local lords or cities. Empires ruled conquered peoples indirectly (the Mexica took tribute and left local rulers) or directly (the Inca moved peoples and imposed officials). Conquerors adapted to the conquered: the Yuan used Chinese forms of government, and the Ilkhans and the Golden Horde became Muslim.
Feudal Europe and Japan are a classic pair: both had military elites (knights, samurai) bound by codes of honor and paid in land, and both had weak central rulers. But Japan’s emperor reigned while the shogun ruled, and Japan had no Church to stand beside its rulers.
The figure is the period on one strip: each region’s states, red where the rulers were Muslim, blue Buddhist, Hindu or Confucian, gray Christian, paper Mongol or of local faiths. The bars grow as the year moves along.