World History Honors Semester 1 Content Review
Byzantine Empire
1)Byzantine Empire – The eastern half of the old Roman Empire, it continued to exist until 1453. At its height, it rimmed most of the Mediterranean Sea, with land held in Egypt and north Africa to the south, and Italy and the southern Iberian peninsula in the west. Its most extensive land holdings – in Asia Minor (Turkey) and the Balkans – were immediately east and west of the capital of Constantinople.Situated at a crossroads of land and sea routes, it played a vital role in Eurasian trade and became vastly wealthy.
2)Justinian’s Code– Justinian was the Byzantine emperor who temporarily recaptured lost lands and built the empire to its height. His most far-reaching accomplishment is known as Justinian’s Code, a body of civil law made by scholars he commissioned to comb back through centuries of ancient Roman laws, organizing and revising them. This code eventually influenced the development of law in western Europe.
3)Iconoclast Controversy –A controversy over the use of icons, or holy images, began to divide the Church in the Middle Ages. A Byzantine emperor in the 700s banned the use of icons for a time, and the pope in Rome condemned his actions. Resentment and rivalry between eastern and western Christianity simmered until 1054, when the Great Schism occurred. The pope in Rome and the patriarch in Constantinople excommunicated one another over various disputes concerning Church doctrine. This created the Eastern, or Greek, Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
4)Catholicism – The branch of Christianity that predominated in western Europe. The Roman Catholic Church, headed by the pope in Rome, was the only unifying institution in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
5)Orthodox– The Greek (or Eastern) Orthodox Church, headquartered in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
6)Silk Road(Geography, Impact on Trade)–The overland trade route through Central Asia linking China with the Mediterranean world. This was a vital link in the exchange of goods – Chinese silk and other valuable commodities – from East Asia to Europe.
7)Caravan – Camel caravans (or groups of people traveling together on camels over long distances) were known as “ships of the desert” as they crossed the Sahara Desert into West Africa or across the deserts and mountains along the Silk Roads. These were key to the vast trading networks across Muslim lands.
Islam
8)Five Pillars of Faith – the five duties all Muslims must perform: 1) declaration of faith in the one true God
2) prayer five times daily, facing toward Mecca 3) paying alms, or charity, to the poor 4) fasting from sunrise to sunset during the holy month of Ramadan 5) for those who are able, perform the hajj at least once in life – make a pilgrimage to pray at the Kaaba in Mecca
9)Mecca – It is the oasis market town on the Arabian Peninsula where Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) was born. In 630, Muhammad rededicated the Kaaba (the temple he believed Abraham had built to worship the one true God) to Allah, and it became the most holy place in Islam.
10)Medina– The “city of the Prophet” formerly known as Yathrib, where Muhammad and his few followers fled to in 622 (the first year of the Muslim, or Islamic, calendar). This journey to Yathrib/Medina is known as the hijra, a major turning point in Islam getting off the ground and gaining converts before Muhammad’s triumphant return to Mecca.
11)Jerusalem– A city in modern-day Israel that was first a holy city for Judaism and Christianity before Muslims captured it. It is the site of the Dome of the Rock, the oldest surviving Islamic building where, according to Muslim teaching, Muhammad ascended to heaven to learn of Allah’s will before returning to Earth to spread the message. On this same spot centuries earlier the Romans destroyed a Jewish temple, where Jews say Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac.
12)Istanbul– The Islamic Ottoman Empire in 1453 conquered the city of Constantinople (the last remaining remnant of the Byzantine Empire), a city strategically located next to a narrow strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The city was then renamed Istanbul and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. It’s now the largest city in Turkey, with 14 million residents.
13)Sunni – The largest branch of Islam. Sunni Muslims believe that caliphs, or successors to Muhammad in politically leading the Islamic community, could be any pious male Muslim from Muhammad’s tribe.
14)Shiite– The minority branch of Islam. Shiites (many of whom today live in Iran) believe that caliphs should only be descendants of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, and Fatima, his daughter.
15)Caliph/Caliphate– A caliph is the successor to Muhammad, and a caliphate is a dynasty, such as the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.(The question of who should be the next caliph [a blood relation of Muhammad or any pious Muslim from his tribe]is what led to the Sunni-Shiite split.)
Under the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258), Muslim civilization went through a “golden age” of advances in many areas. The capital was moved from Damascus to Baghdad, which became a huge cosmopolitan city, home to a thriving marketplace and center of learning.Merchants were honored in Muslim culture, partly because Muhammad had been a merchant. Among their economic advancements: They created partnerships, bought and sold on credit, formed banks to change currency, and invented the ancestors of today’s bank checks. They also developed a more sophisticated system of accounting.Muslim scholars, meanwhile, played a vital role in translating and preserving the works of the Greek philosophers. The Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi pioneered the study of algebra and developed a set of astronomical tables based on earlier Greek and Indian discoveries. In medicine, surgeons developed a way to treat cataracts to save patients’ eyesight.Because depicting humans or animals in religious art was prohibited, Islamic art came to feature elaborate abstract, geometric and flowering patterns. Also perfected was calligraphy, the art of beautiful handwriting.
16)Ottoman Empire– One of the Islamic “gunpowder empires,” the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 under the leadership of Mehmet II and spread across Asia Minor (Turkey) and Eastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula. For centuries it was the most powerful empire in both Europe and the Middle East. The empire enjoyed its own golden age under Suleyman (called “the Lawgiver” by his people and “the Magnificent” by Europeans). The Ottomans relied on an elite fighting force known as the janizaries, who were the best of the boys that Christian families in the Balkans were required to turn over to the Ottoman government as a form of “tax.”
17)Safavid Empire– A “gunpowder empire” in Persia (modern-day Iran) that came into conflict with the Ottomans in the 1500s and 1600s. The Safavids were Shiites, seen as heretics by the Sunni Ottomans. The Safavid king was called the shah, the best-known of which was Shah Abbas the Great. He centralized the government and created a powerful military force modeled on the Ottoman janizaries. Unlike Safavids who came before and after him, Shah Abbas tolerated non-Muslims and valued their economic contributions. He also sought alliances with European states that feared Ottoman expansion.
Middle Ages
18)Early Middle Ages or Dark Ages – The time in Western Europe from about 500 to 1000, when – after the fall of the Roman Empire – it was politically divided, rural and largely cut off from advanced civilizations in the Middle East, India and China. The medieval civilization that would arise in Western Europe would be a blend of Greco-Roman (from the Greeks and Romans), Germanic, Northern European and Christian traditions.
19)High Middle Ages or Age of Faith – The period of history in Western Europe from about 1000 to 1300, when population rose rapidly (and thus cities began to grow), the first universities were created, a Commercial Revolution occurred, and the Catholic Church reached the height of its political power, claiming “papal supremacy,” or authority over all secular rulers, including kings and emperors.The Church developed its own body of laws, called canon law, that governed many aspects of life. Anyone who disobeyed Church law could be excommunicated, meaning they could be denied the sacraments of a Christian burial, which condemned them to hell for eternity. A noble who disobeyed the Church could face the interdict, an order excluding an entire town, region or kingdom from receiving the sacraments or proper Christian burials. Among the most notable intellectual developments of this period was scholasticism – the philosophic method scholars used to try to resolve the conflict between faith and reason. Scholastics tried to use logic and ancient Greek philosophy to support Christian beliefs. The most famous scholastic was Thomas Aquinas. He concluded that faith and reason exist in harmony and that both lead to the same truth – that God rules over an orderly universe. During this period’s Commercial Revolution, new financial innovations emerged, such as the formation of partnerships, the buying and selling of insurance, and the issuance of letters of credit and bills of exchange, which eliminated the need for merchants to travel with large sums of money that could be easily stolen. Another commercial development was the emergence of guilds, which were associations of merchants or artisans of a particular kind (e.g., bakers, weavers, goldsmiths) who cooperated to protect their own interests. They made rules to protect the quality of their goods, regulate hours of labor, and set prices. Guilds also provided social services to their members, such as operating schools or hospitals, or providing support for the widows and orphans of their members.
20)Feudalism – This was the loosely organized system of rule that emerged in Europe because the continent was highly fragmented and decentralized yet was under the threat of constant invasion from Vikings (to the north), Magyars (to the east) and Muslims (from the south). It involved lords, or the heads of feudal estates, and their vassals, or lesser lords.
21)Obligations between lord and vassal – Lords promised to protect their vassals, who they would grant a fief, or land (or estate), plus peasants to work the land and any towns or buildings on it. In return, the vassals were obligated to pledge their allegiance and military service (when required) to their greater lords. These obligations were established by the feudal contract, which outlined the exchange of pledges that through custom and tradition held together feudalism.
22)Manorialism (Manor System) – This was the economic side of feudalism. At the heart of it stood the manor, or the lord’s estate, which usually included one or more villages and surrounding lands. Peasants living and working on the manor were called serfs, and they weren’t slaves exactly but they were bound to the land and couldn’t leave without the lord’s permission. Manors were self-contained, self-sufficient worlds unto themselves. The serfs grew their own crops, baked their own bread, brewed their own beer, fashioned their own tools, etc.
23)Charlemagne – He briefly put together (in the late 700s and early 800s) an empire that united much of the old Roman Empire across what is now France, Germany and the northern part of Italy. The empire – the one exception to the rule that Europe was decentralized through most of the Middle Ages – was broken apart after his death.He was crowned by Pope Leo III as Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day in 800.
24)King John I of England –He was an unpopular ruler who abused his power and forced oppressive taxes onto his nobles to the point that they rebelled and forced him in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta, or great charter.
25)Magna Carta – This document was the first baby step toward what would become, more than 500 years later, first in the United States of America, a full-blown modern democracy. It established two critical new ideas – that nobles had certain rights (and these rights would eventually filter down to include everyone) and the king had to obey the law. Clauses in the document later formed the basis of the right to “due process of law” (which comes from the idea that a freeman should be protected from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and that he should face legal actions only through “the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”and the right to habeas corpus (the principle that no one can be held in prison without first being charged with a specific crime). The Magna Carta also established the Great Council, a body made up of lords and clergy that King John agreed to consult with prior to raising any new taxes. Later English rulers often consulted with the body, which eventually evolved into Parliament, England’s legislature.
26)Joan of Arc –She was a 17-year-old peasant woman who, in 1429, appeared at the court of Charles VII of France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War with England. She claimed that God had sent her to save France, and Charles then authorized her to lead an army against the English. Joan inspired the French troops, leading them on a series of victories and planting the seeds for future triumphs, ensuring that when the Hundred Years’ War finally ended in 1453, England would be kicked out of France (except for the port of Calais). The French made great use of a new weapon, the cannon, to attach English-held castles. During the fighting, Joan was captured by the English, tried as a witch, convicted and burned at the stake. The Church would later declare her a saint.
27)Code of Bushido – The code of values among samurai in feudal Japan. Meaning “the way of the warrior,” the code emphasized honor, bravery, and absolute loyalty to one’s lord. Similar to the code of chivalry among knights in feudal Europe, but in Japan’s code of bushido women were not put on a pedestal – the wife of a warrior had to accept the same hardships as her husband and owed the same loyalty to his overlord.
28)Code of Chivalry– The code of conduct in feudal Europe requiring knights, in theory, to be brave, loyal and true to their word; to fightfairly and put women on a pedestal.
29)Samurai (military obligations, weapons fighting style) – Samurai were the fighting aristocracy of feudal Japan, similar to knights in Europe. They owed their loyalty to the great warrior lords known as daimyo, and fought with samurai swords.
30)Knight (military obligations, weapons fighting style)– Knights were the vassals to greater lords in feudal Europe, and their occupation was to serve as mounted (on horseback) warriors.
31)Cause of Crusades–In the late 11th century, Muslim Seljuk Turks had overrun most Byzantine lands in Asia Minor (Turkey) and the Holy Land, which includes Jerusalem and other places in Palestine whereChristians believe Jesus lived and preached. When the Byzantine emperor asked Pope Urban II for Christian knights to help fight the Muslim threat, Urban called for a crusade to free the Holy Land. Thousands of knights and ordinary men and women responded. The Crusades continued off and on for more than 200 years. Only the First Crusade was briefly successful in capturing Jerusalem from Muslim hands, but ultimately the Crusades were unsuccessful.
32)Effect of the Crusades –A legacy of religious hatred between Christians and Muslims can still be seen today. But the Crusades also helped reconnect western Europe to the wider world (symbolized most famously by the travels to China of Marco Polo), spurring trade and a money economy. The Crusades also strengthened the power of monarchs and, temporarily, popes. They also quickened the end of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, in which merchants in the northern Italian city of Venice – a trade rival of the Byzantines – persuaded crusaders to attack and loot the city of Constantinople, from which the Byzantine Empire never really recovered.
33)Causes of Bubonic Plague– The bubonic plague of the mid-1300s was called the Black Death. It erupted first in China, where it killed about 35 million people, before spreading via trade routes to the Middle East and then to Europe, where it killed one-third of the population. Increased trade during the Pax Mongolica was a major cause of the epidemic. Fleas on rats (in grain shipments) carried the disease.Another cause was that many people had weakened immune systems following the Great Famine of 1315-1317.
34)Effects of Bubonic Plague– The most immediate effect was huge death tolls, which harmed the economy because production declined. Christians accused Jews of causing it by poisoning wells, and some people desperately turned to magic and witchcraft for cures. Survivors demanded higher wages, which led to inflation. Because the Church couldn’t provide answers to the breakdown of society, its power in western Europe began to erode.