AP World History — 1200–1750 flashcards
10 of 76 cards free to study here · 4 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
Units 1–4 of AP World History: Modern — states of Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, the Mongols and trade networks, the gunpowder empires, and transoceanic empires — asked as cause, comparison and continuity questions.
Learn deck · part of AP World History: Modern · written against: College Board AP World History: Modern Course and Exam Description (nine units, c. 1200–present). Updated 2026-10-10.
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How did the Song dynasty use the civil-service examination to hold its state together?Song emperors staffed a large scholar-official bureaucracy recruited through exams on the Confucian classics, so office depended (in principle) on merit and loyalty to the throne rather than on aristocratic birth.Global Tapestry › East Asia
Why: a trained, centrally appointed bureaucracy let the Song govern a population of roughly 100 million. -
What was Neo-Confucianism, and what did it borrow from rival traditions?A Song-era revival of Confucian thought, associated above all with Zhu Xi, that absorbed Buddhist and Daoist ideas about the self and the cosmos while keeping Confucian ethics of filial piety and hierarchy at its core. It became the basis of the exam curriculum and spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam.Global Tapestry › East Asia
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Why did the arrival of Champa rice matter to Song China?Champa rice, a fast-ripening, drought-resistant strain from Vietnam, allowed two harvests a year in parts of southern China. The extra food supported rapid population growth, bigger cities and a more commercial economy.Global Tapestry › East Asia
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Why did trade on the Silk Roads expand after about 1200?Mongol conquest put most of the route under one set of rulers (the Pax Mongolica), who protected merchants and travelers. Rising demand for Chinese luxury goods such as silk and porcelain kept it profitable.Networks of Exchange › Silk Roads and Mongols
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Which commercial practices made long-distance overland trade easier in this period?Caravanserai (roadside inns spaced along routes), bills of exchange and other forms of credit, paper money, and banking houses that let merchants avoid carrying large amounts of coin.Networks of Exchange › Silk Roads and Mongols
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Name the four major khanates the Mongol Empire split into.The Yuan dynasty in China, the Il-Khanate in Persia, the Golden Horde in Russia and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia.Networks of Exchange › Silk Roads and Mongols
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Why are the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal states called 'gunpowder empires'?Each used firearms and cannon to conquer territory and to overpower rivals still fighting with older weapons, and each built centralized states paid for by taxing agrarian populations.Land-Based Empires › Expansion
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Why was the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 so significant?Mehmed II's cannon broke the city's walls, ending the Byzantine Empire and making Istanbul the Ottoman capital. The Ottomans now controlled key routes between Europe and Asia, adding to Europeans' motives to seek sea routes to Asia.Land-Based Empires › Expansion
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Which technologies made long European ocean voyages possible after 1450?The caravel, the lateen sail and the astrolabe (borrowed from the Indian Ocean and Islamic worlds), the magnetic compass, better maps, and ship-mounted cannon.Transoceanic Interconnections › Exploration and Technology
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Why did Portugal lead European oceanic exploration in the 1400s?With royal sponsorship from Prince Henry, Portugal sought African gold and a sea route to Asian spices that bypassed Venetian and Muslim middlemen. Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and da Gama reached India in 1498.Transoceanic Interconnections › Exploration and Technology
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About these cards
Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Topic outline follows the College Board AP World History: Modern Course and Exam Description (effective Fall 2026), Units 1–4; no text copied.
- OpenStax World History, Volume 1 and OpenStax World History, Volume 2, consulted as references; no text copied.
- Corrections in the 2026-10-13 fact-check were also checked against Yuan-Ling Chao, World History Connected 6.2; al-Umari's account of Mansa Musa in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (1981), as excerpted by Digital History (University of Houston); S. B. Aradeon, Journal des Africanistes 59 (1989); BBC Religions, Sikhism; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University, Patiala), 'Sant Tradition'; the Qingshi gao (Draft History of Qing), juan 130–131 (public domain); and the Library of Congress's China: A Country Study (U.S. government work; public domain); reference only, no text copied.
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