The world in AD 1400

Africa

Southeast of the Zambezi, Great Zimbabwe was, according to UNESCO’s listing, continuously inhabited from the eleventh to the fifteenth century and had been since the fourteenth century the principal city of a state that controlled the gold-rich plateau, with a population UNESCO puts above ten thousand. The stone-walled Hill Ruins, the elliptical Great Enclosure and its conical tower, and the valley dwellings all still stood in use in 1400; the capital would not be abandoned until about 1450, when UNESCO records that the surrounding land could no longer feed the city. On the Swahili coast, Kilwa Kisiwani had passed its own peak of prosperity, which UNESCO dates to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but its merchants continued trading gold and ivory from the interior for silver, perfumes and Chinese porcelain along Indian Ocean routes that UNESCO traces from the thirteenth into the sixteenth century. The coral-and-lime Great Mosque there, first built in the eleventh century and enlarged in the thirteenth, still stood roofed in domes and vaults, some inlaid with the same imported Chinese porcelain the city traded for, and the palace complex of Husuni Kubwa, which UNESCO dates to construction between about 1310 and 1333, remained in use with its octagonal bathing pool. On the edge of the Sahara, Timbuktu was entering what UNESCO calls its economic and cultural apogee of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the city’s Sidi Yahia mosque was built around 1400, and its older Djingareyber mosque traced its first construction to a Mali sultan returning from pilgrimage to Mecca.

• How much gold did Mansa Musa bring to Cairo in 1324?1324
• Who built Great Zimbabwe, and why was the answer buried?1300
• Kongo's king writes to Lisbon, 1526: no slave trade in these kingdoms1526
• Four hundred men and one witness: Castanhoso in Ethiopia, 1541–15431542

West Asia

Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I, who the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates to a reign of 1389 to 1402, was pressing his campaigns in Anatolia when Timur’s advance into the region produced what one historian cited by Iranica called the Timurid shock. In 1402 Timur defeated and captured Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara, a defeat from which the Ottoman state did not recover quickly: Iranica records that in the immediate aftermath a civil war broke out among Bayezid’s sons, one of whom, Suleyman Chelebi, held power in the western provinces from 1403 to 1411 while rivals contended for the rest. Timur’s own reach by the early fifteenth century extended, in Iranica’s words, to the borders of Egypt and into Asia Minor and eastern Europe, though he did not remain to govern what he overran.

• Ibn Battuta's 29 years: what the Rihla records, and what it invents1325
• Twenty sources in the margin: the Piri Reis map of 15131513
• Chaldiran, August 23, 1514: guns behind gun-carriages, 40,000 horsemen1514
• A letter that ended a siege: Baybars at Krak des Chevaliers, 12711271

Europe

In England, Richard II, who had reigned since 1377, was deposed in 1399 by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke after Richard confiscated the inherited estates of Henry’s father, John of Gaunt; the Royal Family’s own account records that risings meant to restore Richard led to his death at Pontefract Castle. Henry took the throne as Henry IV and reigned from 1399 to 1413, the first king since the Norman Conquest whose native tongue was English rather than French.

• Where did the Black Death start? Tombstones near Issyk-Kul1347
• How did a 21-year-old sultan take Constantinople in 1453?1453
• "I, Johan Fust, have borrowed 1,550 guilders": Gutenberg Bible, 14551455
• Basel, June 1543: Vesalius's Fabrica, and the copy found in 20071543

East Asia

In Japan, the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu had retired from government duties in 1394 and in 1397 began building the Kitayama villa north of Kyoto, its most famous structure the gold-leafed Relics Hall later known as Kinkaku-ji; Yoshimitsu died in 1408 and, according to the temple’s own history, the villa was then converted by his will into the Zen temple Rokuon-ji. In Korea, Taejo had founded the Joseon dynasty in 1392 and reigned until 1398; the Cultural Heritage Administration’s Gogung museum records that Taejong, the dynasty’s third king, began his own reign in 1400 and ruled until 1418. In China the Ming fleets that would later carry the admiral Zheng He as far as East Africa had not yet sailed.

• Why did Zheng He's treasure fleets sail seven times, then stop?1405
• Twenty-eight letters, 1443: Sejong's alphabet in the Sillok1446
• A hull on the seabed off Takashima, the Mongol fleet of 12811281
• Which Empire Was the Largest in History — Was It Really Rome?1279

South Asia

In the Deccan, the Bahmani sultanate, which the Encyclopaedia Iranica traces to a revolt against Tughluq rule at Delhi in 1347, was ruled from November 1397 by Firuz Shah Bahmani, whose long reign to 1422 Iranica calls the golden period of Bahmanid rule; his court drew Iranian, Turkish and Indian officials and Firuz himself was known for learning the languages of the wives he took from each community. The sultanate’s most powerful ministers were Iranian migrants who, Iranica records, cultivated Persian poets and scholars at court alongside the Deccani language and customs of the region they now ruled. Farther south in the Deccan, the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara held the country below the Tungabhadra river; a Persian envoy from Herat would describe its seven walled rings and its markets of roses and jewels only four decades later, in 1443.

• 'Never seen a place like it': Abdur Razzaq at Vijayanagara, 14431443
• Fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood: Ibn Battuta's Delhi1334
• Twelve pieces of striped cloth: da Gama's gift to the Zamorin, 14981498
• Konark's Sun Temple: a stone chariot, and a hall filled with sand1250

Central Asia

Timur, born in 1336 near Kash south of Samarkand, had risen to power after the assassination of his rival Amir Husayn at Balkh in 1370. Between 1372 and 1388 he conquered Khwarazm, which Iranica records had until then been divided into two realms, giving him full control of Transoxania; after 1388 he took the title of sultan rather than the lesser rank of amir he had held before. From this base he crowned his empire, in Iranica’s phrase, with a splendid rebuilt capital at Samarkand, and by the early fifteenth century his campaigns had carried his power to the edge of Egypt and into Asia Minor and eastern Europe. In 1399 and 1400 he also pushed east into the Tarim basin toward Moghulistan, though Iranica records he never conquered that eastern Mongol successor state. Converting the Hijri year Iranica gives for his death, 807, into the Gregorian calendar places it in 1405; his fourth son Shahrokh then ruled Transoxania from Herat and installed his own son, Ulugh Beg, as governor at Samarkand, where Ulugh Beg later built the observatory for which he is remembered. Persian remained the language of learning at Samarkand under Timur and his heirs, even as, Iranica notes, it was being displaced by Ottoman Turkish in Anatolia in the very same period.

• A forty-meter arc under a Samarkand hill: Ulugh Beg's observatory1429
• Babur's memoir: from losing Samarkand to taking Delhi, 1497–15261504
• Merv, December 2, 1510: Shah Ismail's feint against Shaybani Khan1510
• Not as big as Saint Denis: William of Rubruck measures Karakorum, 12541254

The Americas

In the Mississippi valley, the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site describes Cahokia at its peak as a city larger than London was in 1250, a peak a century and a half in the past by 1400.

• Radiocarbon says 1420: Machu Picchu's age and its return from Yale1450
• Why did an empire of millions fall to 168 men at Cajamarca?1532
• Cliff Palace, 150 rooms and 23 kivas: Mesa Verde, 1888 to 19061250

Oceania

On Rapa Nui, UNESCO’s listing dates the culture that carved the moai and built the ahu platforms broadly to the eleventh through seventeenth centuries, a span that places 1400 well within the island’s centuries of statue-carving and platform-building rather than at either end of it. No writing existed on the island, so no event of the year itself is recorded; what is known comes from the nearly nine hundred statues and more than three hundred ceremonial platforms that survive, and from the quarries at Rano Raraku where the carving was done.

• Did the moai of Rapa Nui walk? What the 2012 experiment showed1400
• A 13-year-old's find at Wairau Bar in 1939, and a return in 20091300

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: HISTORIOGRAPHY xiv. The Ottoman Empire
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: CENTRAL ASIA v. In the Mongol and Timurid Periods
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: BAHMANID DYNASTY
• The Royal Family (royal.uk): Richard II
• The Royal Family (royal.uk): Henry IV
• Shokoku-ji: About Kinkaku-ji
• Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea, Gogung: Kings of the Joseon Dynasty
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Timbuktu
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Ruins of Songo Mnara
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Great Zimbabwe National Monument
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rapa Nui National Park
• Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site