By 1350, virtually all Old World societies bore the complex imprint of a long legacy of inter-cultural trade, military encounter, and the movement of settlers across the landscape. Diaspora communities strung out along land and sea trade routes linked the major regional civilisations into clearly defined zones of intensive and regular interaction. During the middle to late 1300s, contact with "outsiders" also brought the Black Plague and armies of nomadic invaders from the Asian steppes into communities throughout the Old World.

Map of the Old World in 1368

Economic, social, and political problems (including the Hundred Years’ War) beset Christian Europe in the late 1300s. Threatened by military pressure from its Islamic neighbours, Europe at mid-century was contracting geographically. The Ottoman Turks, who were simultaneously absorbing the Byzantine hinterland and portions of Western Europe and the Islamic Middle East, had advanced as far as Hungary by 1396. The Reconquista, the ongoing Christian crusade to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic Moors, was at a standstill as the century closed.

Epidemics of Black Plague decimated Christian Europe demographically in the 14th century. The region recovered economically and politically quite rapidly from the initial impact and it resumed its geographical and commercial expansion in the 15th century. By this time, Venice and other Italian trading cities, having benefited from the Byzantine / Arab struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean between 650 and 1050, had captured a substantial share of trade in the region.

Islamic Turks from Afghanistan had conquered most of India north of the Deccan plateau by the late 1100s. They had expanded into India at the expense of both the old Muslim caliphates operating in the northwest border regions, and Hindu states governing areas to the south of these Muslim kingdoms. Hindu rulers maintained control of central and southern India in the realm of Vijayanagar. By the late 1300s, regional rebellion had weakened the Islamic sultanate headquartered in Delhi. Timur temporarily overran the sultanate in the late 1300s. In the 1400s, regional Muslim governors strengthened their hold on Bengal, Gujarat and the Sind, and began to assert their independence from the sultan.

As Greater India recovered politically and economically from repeated bouts of Black Plague and from the depredations of Mongol invaders, the economic focus of the maritime trade network linking Europe, China, and points between shifted from the Middle East to the Indian sub-continent. Indians, including members of the specialised Tegula-speaking and Tamilese merchant castes, began to replace Persian and Arab traders across the Bay of Bengal.

The rise of the Gujarat state in northern India had particularly important repercussions on trading networks of the period. Hindu and Muslim merchants from Gujarat played a crucial role in establishing the most important of the Indian Ocean trade centres. By the 1400s, Gujaratis constituted the largest foreign community in Malacca. The imports that Gujarati merchants brought to the area included Islamic religious ideas and social customs. From the 1200s, when Gujarati merchants introduced the faith to Sumatra, the process of religious and social conversion continued to gain momentum in the region.

Like Europe, the Islamic Middle East, and Greater India, China fell victim to the Black Plague, popular rebellions, and inter-regional warfare during the 1300s. Populist rebels overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty, established a century earlier. In 1368, a new dynasty, called the Ming, was proclaimed at Nanjing.

Long a magnet for foreign traders, missionaries, soldiers, and diplomats, China in the early years of the Ming dynasty reflected centuries of contact with alien people and ideas. Cheng Ho, who commanded a spectacular series of quasi-commercial political forays into the Indian Ocean during the early 1400s was, for example, a Muslim. His father had visited Mecca long before the fabled Ming Treasure Ships set first sail for the West in 1405.

The abrupt cancellation in 1433 of the Treasure Ship expeditions neatly symbolises China’s long-standing tradition of ambivalence towards things foreign. A 9th century Confucian poet summarised the disdain that many Chinese felt for alien cultures when he complained that "... ever since the foreign horsemen began raising smut and dust, / fur and fleece, rank and rancid, have filled Ch’ang-an and Loyang." Some T’ang authors referred to Cambodians and Malayans as "ghosts" and "demons." Throughout China’s long history, governments kept a close eye on foreign traders and dignitaries, restricting them to carefully supervised quarters in specifically designated port cities like Canton and Zaitun. Nevertheless, enticed by the lure of exotic items and ideas and eager to expand their wealth and status through territorial expansion, politics, and trade, all but the most xenophobic of China’s rulers tolerated foreigners, and quietly encouraged the cross-cultural contacts that enhanced their prestige and political power. In 1433, neo-Confucian factions within the Ming court instituted an overtly isolationist policy that was to characterise China’s trade policy into the 18th century. By this time, however, the Ming Chinese had colonised neighbouring Annam, and established permanent commercial diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.

The Islamic Middle East, unlike Christian Europe, Greater India and China, was slow to recover commercially from the disruptions that characterised the mid- to late 1300s. The region was still expanding territorially in the 1300s, but the dynamics of expansion had changed. The old intellectual, economic, and political centres of the Islamic world, centred in Persia and Egypt, were crumbling by 1350. Turkish tribes, originally from Central Asia, had overrun the Arab caliphates of the Sind in Northern India, and expanded militarily into Asia Minor, where they exercised increasing military and political power. By 1326, the Islamic Ottoman Turks had taken most of Anatolia from the decaying Byzantine Empire. By 1453, they had conquered Constantinople, and most of the Balkans. In the early 1500s, they assumed control of Baghdad and Cairo, and destroyed the old Abbasid and Mamluk caliphates.

Throughout this period, goods, services, and people continued to flow east and west along the ancient overland caravan routes through the Mongol territories of the Asian steppes. However, political developments here, along with advances in maritime technology, shifted the focus of cross-cultural commercial contacts from land to sea. An "ecumenical trading zone" connected Southeast Asian, Indian, and coastal East African trading centres with Chinese, Arabian and European cities, and states in Africa via sea lanes across the Indian Ocean.

Most objects, customs, and ideas imported through trade at first represented only exotic novelties that rulers and members of powerful elites could use as badges of status. Many imports, however, eventually assumed roles that helped to trigger important historical events, and to effect significant social and political changes during the 14th and 15th centuries. Such products of exchange included items of trade like sugar; ideas and inventions like gunpowder, moveable type, and innovations in nautical technology; and, in many cases, the customs and religious ideologies that resident alien populations brought with them. The social, cultural, and political changes that all of this cross-cultural interaction helped generate in the 1300s had, by 1500 CE, altered significantly the network of intercultural relationships criss-crossing the Old World landscape.

	Map of the Old World in 1500
	Index of Articles - Fourth Period - 1350 - 1500 CE