The earliest outbreaks were seen in 1331, when chronicles in Hebei (around Beijing) described sudden mass deaths with swollen lymph nodes. Records from the 1330s to the 1350s describe "the great dying", with entire villages and city wards emptied, corpses left unburied, and Yuan tax collectors failing to bring any revenue back to the government because there was no one left alive to pay.

During this period, the Ottomans began training Christian boys taken as tribute in the Balkans, to create an elite infantry force known as janissaries.

Over the next half-century, the Osmanli (Ottoman) principality continued to grow into the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rüm. In the 1330s, the Ottomans captured Nicaea and Nicomedia, and in 1354 they gained their first foothold in Europe when they conquered Galllipoli, taking advantage of an earthquake that damaged the city's walls.

n Persia and Mesopotamia, the Ilkhanate conquered Baghdad in 1258 and in 1295 Ghazan Khan converted to Islam. West of this empire, beginning in 1324, Osman I began raiding the Byzantine province, Bythynia, on the southern shoreline of the Black Sea.

The "Great Charter" was drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to make peace between the unpopular king and the rebel barons who demanded that King John confirm the Charter of Liberties that had been issued in 1100 by Henry I, William the Conqueror's son.

Saladin and Richard are both remembered as brilliant generals, with Saladin being additionally remembered for his chivalry and Richard for his ferocious courage in battle and inspirational leadership of his troops.

He described the Rūsiyyah as perfect human specimens but found their hygiene and sexual practices disgusting and shameless.

Muslims were often engaged in long-distance commerce, and even when they were not, the requirement to make a pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj) once during their lifetime encouraged followers of Islam to be more interested in travel and curious about the world beyond their home regions.

Specifically, in 1099 when crusaders like Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate and established the Crusader States, they discovered sugar production as a profitable local industry in the city and surrounding regions.

Ferdowsi completed the Persian epic Shahnameh, preserving pre-Islamic Iranian legends. In Cairo, the Al-Azhar Mosque became one of the world's oldest universities and a center for Islamic learning.

The Sunni Berber Almoravids unified North Africa and invaded al-Andalus in 1086, halting Christian advances at the Battle of Zallaqa and imposing stricter Islamic practices.

In the Islamic world, the centralized power of the Abassid Caliphate was beginning to give way to more regionally-based dynasties, at the same time scientific and philosophical production was peaking.

Nearly the entire Umayyad family was then massacred at a "Banquet of Blood" in Palestine (except one prince who escaped to Cordoba), and Abu al-ʿAbbas was proclaimed caliph in Kufa mosque, beginning the Abbasid Empire.

The Umayyads were overthrown in a carefully-orchestrated coup that drew on this resentment, as well as that of Shiites angered by their violent suppression of revolts like Karbala in 680, which I mentioned previously.

But the Umayyads had their opponents, and many Muslims resented their rule. Non-Arab Muslims were taxed at a higher rate and barred from holding high office. The caliphate was treated as an inherited kingship rather than an elected office. And the lavish court in Damascus clashed with the ascetic ideals of early Islam.

An example of Umayyad architecture is the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which is the world's oldest surviving work of Islamic architecture and the oldest mosque after the Al-Haram in Mecca

Medina's tribes invited Muhammad to mediate between them and he established a multi-tribal community that agreed to provide each other mutual defense and religious tolerance.

The Canal connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, allowing goods to flow safely between the north and south without being endangered by coastal pirates.

Theodoric imagined himself as the restorer and protector of "Roman" order in the west; Justinian saw him as just another barbarian.

This forced other Germanic tribes such as the Vandals, Suebi, and Burgundians, to move westward, across the Rhine into Roman Gaul.

The Emperor, Honorius, had moved his government from Milan to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast in 402; so Rome was poorly defended.

Especially under Attila, they preferred quick raids to plunder wealth and extort tribute, rather than wasting their time capturing cities they lacked the administrative structures to govern.

Even farther east, the Chinese Empire had fallen into a chaotic period with the end of the Han Dynasty in 220 CE. In the middle decades of the third century, three kingdoms rose (Wei, Shu, and Wu), which were followed by unification for about fifty years under the Western Jin, with a capital in Chang'an

While the Council of Nicaea was a significant step forward for the legitimacy of the church in Roman society, in 325 christians were still only about 10% to 20% of all Romans. Constantine continued to favor the church, funding churches such as the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, exempting clergy from taxes, and appointing Christians to high office. But it wasn't until 380 that Emperor Theodosius declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire and banned pagan worship.

By 250 CE, between 1% and 5% of the empire's 60 million people were Christians (or, up to 3 million).

The Senate, fearing mob violence, granted the conspirators amnesty but also pardoned Caesar's allies, whom they had been planning to prosecute.

The princess, Liu Xijun, became famous in Chinese literature as the author of a poem called the "Song of Sorrow":

The envoy was captured by the Xiongnu and held for a decade, but he escaped and completed his mission, traveling over 12,000 miles through modern Xinjiang and Uzbekistan. He returned to China in 126 BCE with maps of thirty-six kingdoms, exotic goods, and credible stories of an interconnected world beyond the Pamir Mountains.

. His conquests added vast territories, wealth, and loyal legions, and the Commentarii reveals Caesar’s strategic mind. Caesar’s conquests reshaped Roman politics but sparked civil war

Carthage paid a heavy reparation (3,200 talents of silver) and the Roman navy seized the islands of Corsica and Sardinia soon after.

This paradoxical defiance-as-worship surprises Rama and because he is actually Vishnu, when he kills the demon, Ravana achieves moksha.

Xenophon had spent the war fighting as a mercenary for Persia and had been exiled from Athens as a result; so his account is considered a bit less impartial.

Ancient sources such as Xenophon and Plutarch described Spartan women as bold, athletic, and outspoken.

n which the "Hellenes" imagined themselves to have been the true Greeks, reclaiming their ancestral homelands from barbarians.

Myths of returning Trojan War heroes like Homer's Odyssey included the Nostoi (Returns), telling the stories of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, and Orestes. Other legends describe the adventures of the Trojan prince Aeneas and the Greek hero Ajax.

Although bronze armor was considered very valuable (every time a hero is killed in The Iliad, for example, a battle ensues over whether the killer will be able to loot his armor), people who could make a lot of it could field armies.

The oldest tin mines so far discovered are in Anatolia, but by 4,500 years ago tin was being produced in Cornwall, followed a couple of centuries later by mining in what is now Germany and Portugal. The rarity of tin (relative to copper) and its value in making bronze made these regions important hubs of extensive trade networks.

Important elements of the Gilgamesh story seem focused on exploring the differences and the tension between life in the city and life in the adjacent, "uncivilized" countryside

The Minoan culture of Crete used an logographic-syllabic writing system known as Linear A beginning about 3,800 years ago, which evolved into the Linear B script used by the Mycenaeans beginning about 3,450 years ago.

There are two major sites regarded as temples in the city and 19 other temple complexes nearby in the Supe Valley.

No battlements, weapons, or mutilated bodies have been found (as in other sites), but in one of the temples researchers found 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bones and 37 larger wind instruments carved from the bones of deer and llama.

China's first urban culture, called Longshan, grew in the Yellow River Valley between 5,000 and 3,900 years ago. The earliest city, Liangchengzhen, had a population of about 40,000 at its peak about 4,500 years ago.

The Indus Valley Civilization seems to have been more egalitarian than that of Egypt or Uruk, with no clear archaeological evidence of palaces, temples, or elite burials. Indus Valley cities have uniform housing and broad access to sanitary sewer systems.

By 5,800 years ago, Hierakonpolis had become Egypt's first city, with a local elite that gained control over trade routes to the Red Sea (for shells and obsidian) and the deserts (for gold and copper); and later more widely for luxury goods like cedar and lapis.

For example, Sardinian islanders who were relatively protected from the immigrants retained the largest percentage of Anatolian Early European Farmer ancestry of all Europeans.

The first places reached in Europe were in the eastern Mediterranean, where 8,500 year old sites like Franchthi Cave (Greece) and the Starčevo-Körös-Criș culture in the Balkans show signs of farmers using pottery, polished stone tools, and living in village settlements.

The ancestors of modern cattle were Aurochs, wild bovines that stood over six feet at the shoulder and had long, curved horns (they're now extinct). Ancient people had hunted aurochs for millennia

Often family descent was matrilineal, since it was easier to know who a person's mother was, than their father.

Typically in the past we collected insights from sciences like archaeology, geology, linguistics, and climatology.

Over the next couple of years, both the Fatimid caliph and the Abassid ruler in Syria died, and Saladin ended the Fatimid dynasty and had the Abassid heir (whom he had helped to claim the throne in Damascus) proclaim him Sultan of Egypt and Syria.

Muslim trade networks expanded across the Sahara, connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa, facilitating the spread of Islam to West African kingdoms such as Ghana. The kingdom known as Wagadou or the land of herds in the local Soninke language, was a prosperous empire that had become known to Islam in accounts by Arab geographers like al-Fazari and Ibn Hawqal in the ninth and tenth centuries. Ghana's wealth was based on trade in gold, salt, ivory, and slaves. Although its power was beginning to wane by the eleventh century, it would be absorbed around 1240 into the even more powerful Mali Empire, which we will cover in the next chapter.

. Ali ruled for another five years, moving his capital to Mesopotamia, until he too was assassinated in 661; leading to the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate that established its base in Damascus and solidified Sunni dominance.

But beginning in the 1st century BCE, the kingdom of Aksum (or Axum) emerged during the decline of Ptolemaic Egypt and flourished as a trade center that linked Rome, India, Arabia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

At its height, the empire had a population of about 15 million and produced wealth similar to that of Rome at the same time.

Although variations between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, revealed by Dead Sea Scrolls, have sparked debates about textual accuracy, the Greek translation was a cultural bridge that broadened the faith’s reach while subtly reshaping it.

Indian society into four classes or varna, priests and scholars, warriors and rulers, merchants and farmers, and laborers and servants.

So in addition to discovering this food source when they settled in the Amazon, early Americans had to develop processing technologies to make it useable.

Rice was developed by the ancient Chinese in the Yangtze River basin, beginning about 10,000 years ago, in a gradual shift from gathering wild rice to intensive cultivation. As they selected the best seeds to replant, farmers chose rice with larger grains that, like corn, would remain on the plant as it was harvested. Like corn, this choice made rice dependent on humans for propagation.  Although second to corn with only about half as many tons produced each year, rice is the staple food of more than half the world's population today.

This does not mean that only ancient Europeans developed music