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By Root 1101 0

of the empire in 1922 was preceded, and in many ways precipitated, by vicious ethnic and religious bigotry, sectarianism, and violence, particularly in the Balkans. Muslims attacked Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians persecuted Greek Uniate Christians, and still others scapegoated and killed Jews. These ethnic horrors culminated in the Armenian genocide of World War I, in which an estimated 800,000 Armenian Ottoman subjects were slaughtered during and after their expulsion from the empire.13

MING DYNASTY CHINA

In the early fifteenth century, the Ming government sent the Muslim eunuch Admiral Zheng He, together with a fleet of three hundred giant “treasure ships” carrying more than 28,000 men, on seven spectacular ocean voyages through the Indian Ocean. At that time, the Ming dynasty had a much better shot at world dominance than any European power. Having inherited a united China from the Mongols, the Ming emperors ruled over more subjects than the Ottomans and the monarchs of Europe combined. Technologically, Ming China was far ahead of backward Europe, having already invented the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Fifteenth-century China outshone Europe in other respects too: At the Ming inauguration of their new capital, the Forbidden City, 26,000 guests were served a ten-course banquet on the finest porcelain; at the wedding feast of England's Henry V and Catherine of Valois, six hundred guests ate salted cod on “plates” consisting of stale bread.

As late as 1421, the Mings’ massive naval might dwarfed that of any other power in the world. Altogether, the imperial fleet totaled more than 4,000 vessels, including not just the colossal nine-masted treasure ships, but 1,350 patrol ships, 400 warships, and 400 freighters just for carrying grain, water, and horses. A pertinent contrast is the “royal fleet” assembled by Henry V to conquer France; it consisted of four fishing boats, each capable of ferrying just a hundred men across the channel at a time. The Ming ships were teak leviathans, armed with enormous iron cannons, able to carry four hundred times more cargo than their largest European counterparts. Their rudders alone were often as long as the entirety of the Nina, Christopher Columbus's flagship.14

But Ming China declined to seek global dominance. After 1424, the Ming emperors took a pathological turn inward, breaking up their own navy and rejecting foreign trade and foreign ideas. By 1600, the Chinese had fallen far behind Europe technologically, militarily, and commercially.

After driving out the Mongols in 1368, the early Ming rulers devoted their energies to domestic agricultural reform, ignoring the commercial world beyond China. Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, banned “foreign” hairstyles and clothing in his court, twice issuing orders that his subjects model their appearances after those in the seventh-century Tang dynasty. (It is ironic that Emperor Zhu saw the Tang dynasty as quintessentially “Chinese,” given that it was founded by a prince who was probably half Turkic.) Born to a poor peasant family and enduring near-starvation conditions as a youth, Emperor Zhu believed that the government's primary duty was to protect farmers, on whom the state depended for all its wealth. He established an impressive agrarian tax system by registering China's entire immense population, and froze taxes at fourteenth-century levels. He also repeatedly banned overseas voyages by private merchants.

All this changed abruptly in 1403 with the ascension to the throne of Yongle, Emperor Zhu's son. Seizing power after a palace struggle with his nephew—whom his father had designated to be the next emperor—Yongle was conscious of being a usurper. To establish his legitimacy and grandeur, Yongle immediately embarked on a series of monumental projects. Partly to guard against the continuing Mongol threat in the north, Yongle ordered that China's capital be moved from Nanjing to Beijing, a task that required a massive repair of the Grand Canal, the construction of forty-seven new locks linking Hangzhou and