The period 1450 to 1750 saw the rise of massive land-based empires across Eurasia. Although the expansion of these empires bore many similarities, each of them also adapted and responded to the peculiar geographic, cultural and ethnic realities of their regions.
All empires in this period benefited from the use of gunpowder. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, a result of new siege cannons that brought down the city’s fortifications, demonstrated the effectiveness of firearms and artillery in a very dramatic fashion. Small states did not have the resources to produce these weapons or to equip their soldiers with them. Consequently, empires, with their access to vast resources, had the advantage and were able to marshal large professional armies equipped with firearms which they used to quickly project power across the continent.
But rapid expansion came with its own set of challenges. Empires found themselves presiding over vastly diverse empires and had to navigate deep ethnic and religious divisions. In some cases, such as China’s Qing Dynasty, the empire was ruled by an ethnic minority group who had invaded from outside. In other cases, such as the Mughals, the ruling elites were Muslim invaders ruling over a Hindu majority. In all empires, belief systems played a role in legitimizing power, a reality that created tensions and rivalries between empires.
Manchu Empire
Near the end of the previous period (1200-1450) the Ming overthrew Mongol rule and set up a new Chinese dynasty. They established the previous bureaucratic/Confucian political system and sought commercial and tributary contacts with the states in Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Ming sponsored voyages, such as those led by Admiral Zheng He, to restore former Chinese preeminence in the world. In the 1430s these voyages were stopped. The Chinese government decided to devote their resources to purifying their empire and protecting them from further nomadic invasions.
By the 1600s the Ming dynasty had grown weak and corrupt. As they declined, the Manchu people across the Great Wall were expanding, unifying a strong state and borrowing Chinese bureaucratic institutions. In 1644 the Manchus entered China and easily drove all the way to Beijing where they defeated the weakened Ming and established their own rule over China, the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty would be characterized by a problem some other land-based mempires had in this time period—a minority ruling a different ethnic or religious majority. To bridge the gap between themselves and the ethnic Han Chinese, the Manchus implemented the civil service Confucian bureaucracy. Chinese were allowed to rise in the political system, and Qing Emperors adopted the Chinese title Son of Heaven. The Manchu emperors began the practice of publically performing Confucian rituals to gain political legitimization from the Chinese. For example, each year the Emperor would plow the first furrow of ground in front of the Temple of Agriculture (see above). This symbolic gesture was to ensure a good harvest. Most everything the emperor did was choreographed with Confucian ritual. The Manchu emperors continued these rituals. They also kept the classical Confucian texts as the basis of the civil service examination system. The Manchus utilized the nobles of conquered areas to help them administrate and control their growing empire. Buddhists and Muslim leaders, as well as Mongol aristocrats were given positions in the Qing. They respected local traditions by exempting Buddhist monks and monasteries from state labor service and taxes. They respected Mongol traditions by not allowing Chinese to migrate into Mongol territory and dilute Mongol culture. Indeed, the Qing respected Tibetan, Mongol and Buddhist culture, a practice that eased the expansion of the Qing Empire into new areas.
The Manchus outlined what is today the general boarders of China, and by respecting the cultures of minorities they preserved a sense of identity for many of these groups and endowed them with an enduring sense of autonomy (consider Tibet, for example). Despite the fact that ethnic Chinese were allowed to rise in the bureaucracy, the Manchus preserved the highest positions in the government for themselves. They maintained their cultural integrity by banning marriage between Manchus and Chinese. Han Chinese were forbidden to move into the Manchu homeland. They forced the Chinese to forgo the Ming style robs in favor of Manchu garments and ordered the Chinese to adopt the Manchu hair style of shaving the front of the head and braiding the long hair in the back into a queue.
Much of what the Manchu accomplished resembled previous Chinese dynasties. They centralized rule through a bureaucracy. They expanded militarily far into central Asia and established tributary relations with Vietnam, Burma. Korea and Nepal. They focused China’s economic strength more on the practice of agriculture than they did commerce; the city of Canton in the south of China was the only location where trade with Europe was allowed. As new crops were transplanted from the New World, the Qing experienced a large population growth commensurate with their territorial growth. In some areas, silk production exceeded rice production and consumed all surplus labor of peasant families.
Mughal Empire
The Mughals were another Turkish group of people. They claimed descent from Genghis Khan (Mughal is a Persian term for Mongol). Like the Ottomans, they relied on a military elite armed with firearms and created a strong centralized empire organized with a bureaucracy. They expanded into the south and unified much of the India subcontinent where they ruled an empire comprised mainly of Hindus. Thus the rulers and the ruled were divided along religious lines. The most famous Mughal leader, Akbar, attempted to bridge this divide through a policy of toleration. He married Hindu princesses but did not require them to convert. Hindus were given positions in the government. He invited Christian, Hindu and Muslim scholars to peaceful open debates about the merits of their religions. He removed the religious tax on non-Muslims. Akbar created his own syncretic religion called “the divine faith” which drew on Islamic, Hindu and Zoroastrian beliefs. This religion pointed to the emperor as the leader of all faiths in the empire. All this drew the anger of conservative Muslim teachers. Subsequent Mughal leaders fell under the sway of these conservatives and Akbar’s policy of toleration was later abandoned. Hindu temples were destroyed. Religious tension reemerged as a central problem of the Empire.
During hisreign Akbar significantly reformed the Mughal bureaucracy. Previously, the Mughal emperors collected taxes by relying upon a decentralized network of local administrators called zamindars. Acting as local aristocratic landlords, they collected taxes from peasants and sent a set quota to the state. But much of this revenue never made it to the emperor. As profits from the Indian Ocean pepper trade increased, Akbar monetized the tax system (required taxes paid in currency rather than in kind) and required the peasants to sell their grain in market towns and ports for cash where oversight of taxation could be more controlled. Having been bypassed in the taxation process, the role of the zamindars as tax-collecting landlords decreased; political control was also centralized. State profits poured directly into the government’s purse. This windfall of revenue was used to fund military expeditions and to embellish the imperial courts. With the decrease role of the zamindars, Akbar began the process of political centralization.
The most important beautification of the imperial courts was by emperor Shah Jahan. Jahan ruled during the commercial boom of the Mughal Empire and was flush with silver from the New World used to purchase tons of Indian pepper. He constructed the Taj Mahal in memory of his favorite wife. This architectural wonder of the world was a monument to enormous wealth of the Mughal state and displayed the power of the emperor.
During the Mughal empire, the price of spices declined. To maintain their profits, joint-stock companies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC encouraged Mughal leaders to supplement pepper exports with cotton textiles. Cotton, which was softer than many fabrics and could be dyed and printed with elaborate patterns, became an extremely popular fad in Europe. To meet this demand, the Mughal government forced a vast number of peasants to work cotton fields and textile operations. As in Russia, state mandates and incentives led to the mass mobilization of peasants to aid state objectives.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans began as Turkish nomadic people, comprised of aggressive and warlike tribes who raided agricultural people. After the Mongols crushed the Seljuks, the Ottomans had room to emerge as a powerful empire.
The Ottoman conquests expanded into the Byzantine Empire, a process that culminated in the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Many former Byzantines in Anatolia converted to Islam. In the Balkans, many remained Christian. Orthodox churches were allowed to remain. Despite their territorial conflicts with Christian Europe, most Christians in the Empire were permitted to practice their faith. Jewish, Christian, and other minorities could maintain autonomous communities with their own civil laws and customs. The Ottomans recruited many non-Muslims into their elite and relied on their skills for trade and craftsmanship. In fact, a Hungarian Christian cast the cannons that allowed Mehmed II to conquer the Christian city of Constantinople.
Originally military leaders were called the ghazis (elite Muslim warriors or champions: Mehmed II, who took the city of Constantinople, used this as one of his titles). Later the military grew into a powerful cavalry. As horses need grazing land, the military machine of the Ottoman Empire was based on constant expansion. The wealth from new land grants was used to support the military elites. Thus the Ottoman Empire was strong as long as it was expanding.
The practice of Devshirme (collecting, or gathering) became important to theOttoman state. Large conquered Christian communities were required to hand over a quota of young boys. They were taught Turkish and many of them converted to Islam. Many of these boys became members of the elite Janissaries. These troops came from nonMuslim homes, were raised by the state and depended on the Ottoman state rather than their families. This made them loyal warriors. The Janissaries were also the primary users of firearms, and gunpowder became an essential feature of Ottoman expansion.
Ottoman Empire grew second only to Ming China in Eurasia. It was a state based on expansion, and thus military leaders were the elites (compare with China). Growth of Ottoman Empire was always seen as a threat to Western Christian Europe. Ottomans unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna twice. As the Ottoman Empire expanded into Persia, they clashed with the Safavid Empire, the Shi’a heirs of the Persian Empire. This clash came to be an epic struggle between the Sunni and Shi’a forms of Islam. The Ottomans gain a decisive victory of the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, an event that stopped the expansion of Shi’a Islam and regulated it largely to the area of present day Iran.
Russian Empire
During this era the Russians broke free from Mongol domination and began a period of territorial expansion and government reform. They embarked on an aggressive program of westernization in order to leap forward and make up for their backwardness vis-à-vis the West. The forced imposition of European culture on the aristocracy of Russia created a wide cultural difference between the upper class and the peasants, a situation that only exacerbated the social tensions between serfs and nobles that was already present.
The first significant leader in this process was Ivan III, also known as Ivan the Great. In a carefully calculated political move, Ivan married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor and claimed continuity with imperial Rome and the Byzantine Empire. He proclaimed Moscow the “Third Rome” (Constantinople had been the “Second Rome) and exploited his close ties to the Orthodox Church to give legitimacy to his wars of territorial expansion. All in all, Ivan III increased the power of the central Russian government and drew more land under his control. But another Ivan, Ivan IV, would push these advancements to new levels.
Ivan IV (The Terrible) extend the Russian empire by defeating the Mongol stronghold city of Kazan. He motivated his soldiers by telling them they were marching as soldiers of Christ (the Mongols had converted to Islam). To commemorate this victory he commission the building of St. Basil’s Cathedral, an architectural symbol of the union of church and state.
Ivan’s most important contribution to the development of Russia is how he dealt with the powerful class of Russia’s aristocrats, the Boyars. If you remember, aristocrats have always been a problem for kings and emperors trying to centralize rule over large territories. Ivan held deep suspicions toward the Russian boyars and simply had many of them killed. Others he forced from their homes to different areas, an action that weakened their class by stripping them from the local connections that had given them power and influence. Consequently, Tsars in Russia would become true autocrats, unhindered by the pressures and influence of aristocracies. For example, even the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV in France was partially limited by the will of the nobles. But in Russia titles of nobility could be conferred or withdrawn arbitrarily by the Tsar. Thus the Russian nobility was kept in subservience to the state and would never emerge as a counter force to the monarch’s power. Their traditional power over local affairs was striped and the power of Russian Tsars would truly be absolute.
In no Tsar was this absolute power more obvious than Peter the Great. As a young man he took the first of several trips to Europe, where he studied shipbuilding and other western technologies, as well as governing styles and social customs. He returned to Russia convinced that the empire could only become powerful by imitating western successes, and he instituted a number of reforms that revolutionized it:
The Petrine Reform
Military reform - He built the army by offering better pay and also drafted peasants for service as professional soldiers. He also created a navy by importing western engineers and craftsmen to build ships and shipyards, and other experts to teach naval tactics to recruits. He introduced modern firearms, and gunpowder did much to bring success to Russian military campaigns, as it did with so many other empires during this era.
Building the infrastructure - The army was useless without roads and communications, so Peter organized peasants to work on roads and do other service for the government. He also borrowed the Mongol concept of a postal service (the arrow messengers) to facilitate rapid communication across the empire
Expansion of territory - The Peter gained Russian territory along the Baltic Sea by defeating the powerful Swedish military. To gain warm weather ports, he tried to capture access to the Black Sea, but he was soundly defeated by the Ottomans who controlled the area. He pushed the empire far to the east in Siberia, reaching the Bering Strait across from Alaska.
Reorganization of the bureaucracy and taxation - In order to pay for his improvements, the government had to have the ability to effectively tax its citizens. The bureaucracy had been controlled by the boyars, but Peter replaced them with merit based employees by creating the Table of Ranks, eventually doing away with titles of nobility. In terms of taxation, Peter reformed the tax system. Instead of a tax on each household (which peasants would avoid by registering several families at a single household) Peter taxed on a per-person basis. Although very unpopular, it generated the income to fund his ambitions.
Relocation of the capital - Peter moved his court from Moscow to a new location on the Baltic Sea, his "Window on the West" that he called St. Petersburg. The city was built from scratch out of a swampy area, where it had a great harbor for the navy. Its architecture was European, of course. The move was intended to symbolically and literally break the hold that old Russian religious and cultural traditions had on government.
Note that Peter’s reforms borrowed very selectively from Europe. He was not at all interested in Parliamentary governments or movements toward social reform. In this sense, he was much more concerned with the benefits of the Science Revolution than with the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophies; those things that directly benefited military progress and his own autocratic rule most interested him. Yet he did force European rules of etiquette and culture on his nobles. Beards, long considered a sign of religious piety and respect, had to be shaved off. He even forced the Russian upper class to practice European manners and appropriate French as the language of social life. In short, he did much to strengthen Russia into a modern imperial power but at the expense of fostering of a distinctly Russian identity. When Peter died, he left a transformed Russia, an empire that a later ruler, Catherine the Great, would further strengthen. But he also left behind a new dynamic in Russian society: the conflicting tendencies toward westernization mixed with the traditions of the Slavs to turn inward and preserve their own traditions.
To secure the new frontier settlements to the east that had growing since Ivan IV, Russian Czars encouraged peasants to migrate to Siberia. They were provided with incentives, such as grain, seeds, and farming tools. Many peasants sought to create a better and more independent life for themselves by moving east. Fur trappers push to the east as well to take advantage in the profitable trade in furs. For the most part, however, the eastern frontier was settled by peasant migrations who were encouraged by migrate by the Russian government.
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