Advantages & Disadvantages of Medieval Europe

Advantages & Disadvantages of Medieval Europe

Advantages & Disadvantages of Medieval Europe

Introduction

For many centuries Islam and other civilizations farther east were the most dynamic cultures in the world. The year 1492, however, saw the discovery of the Antilles by Christopher Columbus, the prelude to the conquest and settlement of the New World by Europeans. Six years later the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to the Indian port of Calicut. The basis of western hegemony was thus laid at the end of the fifteenth century. Two great phases of expansion, that of Arab people and Islamic civilization, and that of the European descendants of Germanic tribes who overran the Roman empire, characterize this period (Stearns, 2007, p. 186-191).

Just as the “barbarian” invasions from the 5th century  AD led to the eclipse of the classical civilization of western Europe, so the Muslim Arab expansion displaced the political domination of ancient Persian empires in the Middle East and the surviving Roman empire in the eastern Mediterranean. The intensity of the spiritual and material success of Islam is still unexplained, but there is no doubt about its significance. The unification of large parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates was a great cultural, technological, and economic operation, as well as a political achievement (Sachs, 1995, p. 1-4). The spread and usage of Arabic as a language of the Koran and of intercultural communication, education, and administration played an important role. The Bedouins of the Arabian peninsula, the Berber converts of north Africa, Arab conquerors in Andalusia, the Copts of Egypt, the Nabateans of Mesopotamia, and the converted Iranians all shared the Koranic prayers recited in Arabic and a common body of family and civil law.

Islam revitalized old urban centers and founded new ones. Both Medina and Mecca attracted a huge concourse of pilgrims each year, while Damascus became the first Islamic capital under the Umayyads, the predominantly Byzantine city being greatly enlarged by successive caliphs. Under the Abbasids, the capital shifted to Baghdad, the first planned capital city to be built by Muslims. This in turn was followed by Samarra. The great urban centers of the Islamic world included Basra, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, and Córdoba. Arab writers drew often attention to the splendors of these cities as well as to the forces of their relative decline (Nosotro, 2011, p. 4-12).

Contemporaries knew that the urban gravitation of Islamic expansion required an economic surplus and food resources. This was achieved by bringing new land under cultivation and reviving existing regions of agricultural production. Arab engineers and farmers proved skillful in constructing irrigation projects. Long, subterranean conduits brought water from the mountains to arid valleys and desert plains and made intensive cultivation of crops possible. The water-lifting machinery known as the Persian wheel also increased efficiency. New plants such as hard wheat, sugar cane, citrus fruits, vegetables, and legumes were imported from India and southeast Asia and disseminated throughout the oasis ...