The World at 1200

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The 12th and 13th centuries were a dynamic period in world history as civilizations across the globe experienced significant growth, reorganization, and even collapse. Trade, wars, missionary work, and exploration fostered extensive and far-reaching interactions among neighboring and more distant cultures. Genghis Khan, the Crusades, the Khmer Empire, the end of the Toltec Empire, and the peak of the ancestral Pueblo occupation of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings are but a few of the forces and civilizations shaping the world at A.D. 1200. Traditionally, these civilizations and events are studied diachronically and in relative isolation from contemporaneous global developments. This course departs from tradition and adopts a synchronic analysis of the dramatic changes experienced across the globe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By examining these cultural shifts in light of simultaneous transitions in other areas of the world, new questions and answers can be generated concerning the activities and processes that shape people's lives in past and present civilizations.