HIST 1111: Central Asia and Western Europe & Byzantium (Unit 9)

Which of these was the politically weakest, most decentralized state for most of the eleventh century?

West Francia, what is today called France

Which of the following best describes the status of knights in the eleventh and twelfth centuries?

Because armor, horses, and weapons were expensive, knights gradually became part of a warrior aristocracy, with more rights than peasants.

Although many of the papacy's efforts at Church reform in the eleventh century were successful, one consequence was that

Catholic and Orthodox churches were split from one another

What does Pope Urban II think about the exercise of violence in his sermon at the Council of Clermont?

He says that war by Christians against Muslims to bring Jerusalem under Christian control will be a holy and meritorious act.

The Turkic peoples gradually abandoned their shamanistic religion for

Islam

Western Europe's economy began to grow in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries because nobles had a demand for luxury goods and

Italian city-states largely cleared the Mediterranean of Muslim pirates

Perhaps the most significant geographical feature of Central Asia is

The Great Eurasian Steppe, a set of broad, flat grasslands that reach from Eastern Europe to the region of Mongolia to the north of China

How did the Il-Khans finally resolve the disputes between the Mongol rulers of Persia and the Middle East and their Muslim subjects?

The khan Mahmud Ghazan converted to Islam

Which of the following was not a military advantage enjoyed by the nomads of the steppes?

The steppe peoples were the first peoples in the world to perfect the technology of the rifle. Firing rifles from horseback, the Mongols combined both firepower and mobility

After the 751 Battle of Talas River,

an Arab Muslim victory over the Chinese meant that Islam would come to dominate Central Asia, although its language and culture remained Turkic

The Crusades were

an effort by Western European Christians to seize control of the holy places of the Middle East, particularly Jerusalem, from Muslims and put them under Christian rule

Between 1315 and 1322, Western Europe suffered from famine

and also death of livestock from Anthrax, Rinderpest, and other diseases

In the eleventh century, Western Europe

became more economically prosperous

Timur (1370-1405)

conquered an empire in Central Asia and also waged destructive wars on India and the Ottoman Empire, but he did not seek to conquer the latter two

Over the thirteenth century, the Mongols

conquered nearly all of Asia except for India and Japan

In his writing, Thomas Aquinas

gives both possible answers to a question before providing his own solution

In his youth, Temujin (who would later come to be known as Genghis Khan)

had a sense that he was destined for glory and to rule over many other peoples

When Genghis Khan sent an envoy to the Khawarazmian Turks, their leader, Khwarazmshah Ala al-Din Muhammad II

had this envoy executed, which precipitated an invasion of Khwarazmian territory by Genghis Khan

When Genghis Khan conquered northern China

he originally intended to demolish its cities and kill its people to turn it into grazing land for his horses, but a Chinese bureaucrat convinced him that it would be more profitable to keep cities and tax their residents

After Normans conquered England in 1066, the Kingdom of England

moved closer to France in language, institutions, and culture, but retained a relatively centralized bureaucracy

Both Timur and Genghis Khan's Mongol armies were known for constructing

pyramids of severed heads

One of the main ideals of Renaissance Humanism was to

reject medieval commentaries on ancient texts and return to a study of the texts themselves

Ibn al-Athir's account of the Christian capture of Jerusalem

says that the Franks were able to capture the city because the Muslims had been fighting among themselves

Over the thirteenth century, the power of the French government

strengthened until by the mid-1200's, the French government was able to launch a war with Egypt

In the late twelfth century, the Byzantine Empire

suffered from several military setbacks, until 1204, Constantinople itself fell to an army of Western European crusaders

Over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Genoese and Iberian merchants increasingly devoted more and more of their efforts to

the Atlantic around the west coast of Africa

The four Crusader States were the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and

the County of Tripoli

The Holy Roman Empire mainly was located in

the German-speaking regions of Central Europe

As a result of the third crusade,

the crusaders established control over the coast of the Levant, but were unable to take the city of Jerusalem

After the Muslim-ruled city of Toledo fell to Christian armies in 1085,

the libraries of Toledo furnished Western Europeans with an immense number of philosophical texts, both of the ancient Greeks and of the Medieval Arabs

"Within these walls, which constitute the boundary of four miles, stands the palace of the Great Khan,

the most extensive that has ever yet been known."

The Turkic peoples originated in

the steppes of Central Asia

The name Genghis Khan means

universal ruler

In Western Europe of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, castles

were initially made of wood, but later came to be constructed out of stone