Chapter 1: The Americas, Europe, and Africa Before 1492
Key Terms
- Beringia
- an ancient land bridge linking Asia and North America
- Black Death
- two strains of the bubonic plague that simultaneously swept western Europe in the fourteenth century, causing the death of nearly half the population
- chasquis
- Incan relay runners used to send messages over great distances
- chattel slavery
- a system of servitude in which people are treated as personal property to be bought and sold
- chinampas
- floating Aztec gardens consisting of a large barge woven from reeds, filled with dirt and floating on the water, allowing for irrigation
- Crusades
- a series of military expeditions made by Christian Europeans to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries
- feudal society
- a social arrangement in which serfs and knights provided labor and military service to noble lords, receiving protection and land use in return
- Inquisition
- a campaign by the Catholic Church to root out heresy, especially among converted Jews and Muslims
- Koran
- the sacred book of Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century
- matriarchy
- a society in which women have political power
- mita
- the Incan labor tax, with each family donating time and work to communal projects
- polygyny
- the practice of taking more than one wife
- quipu
- an ancient Incan device for recording information, consisting of variously colored threads knotted in different ways
- Reconquista
- Spain’s nearly eight-hundred-year holy war against Islam, which ended in 1492
- serf
- a peasant tied to the land and its lord
