To the east of the Abbasids was South Asia, including today’s Pakistan and India. Around 1200, much of northern India was ruled by an Islamic ruler known as the Sultan of Delhi. Sultans conquered vast regions of northern India. However, the Delhi Sultans had many local rivals who ruled small states. Most kingdoms were multi-ethnic and contained many religions.

Some large states also flourished in Southeast Asia. The biggest of these was the Angkor Empire. Southeast Asian states were kingdoms ruled by kings and sultans who organized strong armies and had close ties to religious organizations. States facilitated trade with neighbors. Yet many parts of Southeast Asia were organized into smaller communities, governed by chieftains or elders.

To the north and east was China, the largest and most populous state in the world in 1200. It was ruled by the Song Dynasty emperors, who used two strategies to govern the vast territory. The first strategy was a bureaucracy, or class of professional scholar- administrators.

The second strategy was to support a balance between agriculture and trade. Feeding a vast empire was difficult, and the Song Emperors were concerned about peasant farmers’ ability to grow food (especially rice). This was an era of enormous growth in Chinese cities. As the cities grew, feeding the people living in them became harder and harder.

China was so powerful and wealthy that many of its neighbors adopted elements of Chinese culture. This included Japan, the Korean kingdom, and many Southeast Asian states.

Chinese merchants engaged in the trading system of the Indian Ocean. This linked China with places as far away as East Africa. City-states traded goods from the interior of Africa in exchange for luxuries like silk and spice. This East-African region of merchants and city-states is called the Swahili Coast. Most cities were independently governed, often by a council of merchants but sometimes by a ruling family.

These merchant states had little control over the interior, where larger states were forming. Most produced gold and other minerals for the Indian Ocean market. One of the most powerful of these interior states was Great Zimbabwe. Many of these central and southern African states had relatively weak kings. Their main role was to negotiate among powerful families and clans. For this reason, we often call these states confederations. The confederation was a political model that was widely followed throughout central and southern Africa by people who shared Bantu culture.

Far to the north, Europe was politically fragmented. There were a few large centralized kingdoms, lots of small states, and some city-states. There were also remote regions where small communities were led by local elders or chieftains. Local nobles had significant power, even in large states like the Holy Roman Empire. Religious leaders like the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Pope had influence over large regions, but they were disunified. There were also many religious minorities.

The Mongols and after

The Mongol empire arose around 1200, disrupting many states and communities. The Mongols were an alliance of people from the steppes of Eurasia. They began their conquest between 1218 and 1294. This region had mobile peoples, rather than settled states and territories. The Mongols conquered most of the Islamic world, China, and all of Central Asia. Then, the Mongols were defeated in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Japan.

In the 1250s and 1260s, the Mongol Empire split into four parts to more easily govern. However, these parts maintained a close relationship with each other.

The Mongols created a unified political system in the middle of Afro-Eurasia. Mongol political innovations— road systems, forms of diplomacy, and ways of using money—carried over when the empire split. The structures of Mongol rule helped new large states rise in these areas even after the Mongol system collapsed. The Mongol years are an important period in Afro- Eurasian history.