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«In the 900s, King Otto I of Germany, his son Otto II, and grandson Otto III—the three are known as the Ottonians—were the most powerful rulers in Western Europe. Otto controlled the territory of Germany and Rome but not the entire Italian Peninsula, much of which belonged to the Byzantine. Otto’s power allowed him to appoint the pope. In turn, the pope crowned Otto I emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 962
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Song dynasty (960–1276)
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«In Western Europe, Charlemagne had unified modern-day France and Germany, but after his death in 814, his kingdom split into three.»
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« where they grew wheat and millet; by 980, 62 percent lived in southern China, where they cultivated rice, a much more productive crop than the northern grains.»
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«In contrast to China’s emperor, no single monarch ruled Europe in the year 1000. In Eastern Europe, the Byzantine empire was the most prosperous power, but its military strength was rapidly declining. Although the Byzantine army grew increasingly weaker, forcing the emperor to depend on mercenaries or foreign armies, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the most advanced city in Europe.
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«The distribution of people across Europe changed, too. The population of Southern and Eastern Europe—Italy, Spain, and the Balkans—increased by 50 percent. But because of improved agricultural techniques, the growth in Western and Northern Europe—the region of modern France and Germany—was far greater: there the population skyrocketed by a factor of three, so that nearly half of Europe’s people lived in Northern and Western Europe by 1340.»
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Before the Black death 1347