by Chris Harman
Part three
The ‘Middle Ages’
Chronology
AD 600 to 900
‘Dark Ages’ in Europe. Collapse of trade. Failure of attempts by Franks to re-establish Roman-type empire (Charlemagne in 800–814). Invasions by Norsemen (800–900).
Feudalism in India. Collapse of trade. Dominance of brahmans and caste system in villages.
Crisis of Byzantine Empire, loss of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and Balkans. Technical and economic stagnation.
Mohammed takes Mecca (630). Islamic Arab armies conquer most of Middle East (mid-640s), reach Kabul (664), Spain (711). Abbasid revolution in 750 gives some political influence to merchants. Growth of trade and handicraft industry. High point of Islamic culture, translation of Greek texts, advances in science, mathematics, great Islamic philosophers.
Centre of Chinese civilisation moves towards rice-growing areas of Yangtze. Revival of industry and trade, flourishing of Buddhism, advances in technology.
Growth of civilisations in west and coastal east Africa.
Tenth and eleventh centuries
Recovery of agriculture and trade in Europe. Use of more advanced techniques. Serfdom replaces slavery.
Muslim Abbasid Empire loses economic momentum and splits up. Rise of mystical and magical forms of Islam. Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt.
Byzantium conquers some of Balkans, but continued technical stagnation.
West African civilisations adopt Islam and Arabic script.
High point of Chinese civilisation under Sung Dynasty (960–1279). Invention of paper, printing, gunpowder, mechanical clocks, compass, growth of influence of merchants.
Twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Crisis of Islamic Mesopotamia.
Chinese Empire splits in two (Sung and Chin).
Mongol pastoralists ravage Eurasia from Poland to Korea. Sack Baghdad (1258). Conquer China (1279).
West European ‘Crusaders’ attack Islamic Empire from west. Capture Jerusalem (1099–1187), sack Byzantium (1204).
Conquest of north Indian heartland by Islamic peoples from central Asia. New growth of trade, use of money.
Growth of agricultural output, population, trade and handicraft industries in Europe. Spread of water mills, building of cathedrals, rediscovery through contact with Islamic Spain of Greek and Latin texts, first European universities. Use of techniques discovered in China. Rise of Italian city states. Dante (born 1265) writes in Italian.
Slave-soldiers ( mamlukes ) seize power in Egypt.
Rise of Mali kingdom in west Africa. Timbuktu a centre of Islamic scholarship.
Fourteenth century
Great crisis of European feudalism. Famine, black death, revolts in Flanders, France, England, Wales, northern Italy. Rival popes. Hundred Years War between England and France.
Hunger and plague in China. Red Turbans rebellion against Mongols in China, founding of (Chinese) Ming Dynasty. Revival of agriculture.
Ottoman Turks begin to conquer Asia Minor.
Building of Great Zimbabwe.
Aztec people found Tenochtitlan.
Fifteenth century
Renewed economic growth in China, fleet sails thousands of miles to east coast of Africa.
Aztec Empire in Mexico. Incas conquer whole Andean region after 1438.
Rise of Benin in west Africa.
Slow economic and population recovery in western Europe. Decline in serfdom. Spread of market relations. Printing. Renaissance in northern Italy. Improved shipbuilding and navigation techniques. Portuguese sail down west African coast, reach Cape. Spanish monarchs conquer Moorish Granada (1492). Columbus crosses Atlantic (1493).
Chapter 1
The centuries of chaos
The fifth century was a period of breakup and confusion for the three empires which had dominated southern Eurasia. There was a similar sense of crisis in each, a similar bewilderment as thousand-year-old civilisations seemed to crumble, as barbarians swept across borders and warlords carved out new kingdoms, as famine and plagues spread, trade declined and cities became depopulated. There were also attempts in all three empires to fix on ideological certainties to counter the new insecurity. In Roman north Africa, Augustine wrote one of the most influential works of Christian doctrine, City of God , in an attempt to come to terms with the sacking of the earthly city of Rome. In China, the Buddhist doctrines elaborated almost a millennium before in India began to gain a mass of adherents, especially among the embattled trading classes. In India new cults flourished as Hinduism consolidated itself.
The similarity between the crises of the civilisations has led some historians to suggest they flowed from a global change in climate. But to blame the weather alone is to ignore the great problem that had beset each of the civilisations for centuries. It lay in the most basic ways in which those who worked the land made a livelihood for themselves and everyone else. Advances in agricultural productivity were nowhere near comparable to those associated with the spread of ironworking a millennium before. Yet the consumption of the rich was more lavish and the superstructure of the state vaster than ever. A point was bound to be reached at which things simply could not go on as before, just as it had with the first Bronze Age civilisations.
The crisis was gravest for the Roman world. The flourishing of its civilisation had depended on an apparently endless supply of slaves. The result was that the imperial authorities and the great landowners concerned themselves much less with ways of improving agricultural yields than their equivalents in India or China. The collapse was correspondingly greater.
The period which followed in Europe is rightly known as the ‘Dark Ages’. It saw the progressive collapse of civilisation – in the sense of town life, literacy, literature and the arts. But that was not all. The ordinary people who had paid such a price for the glories of Rome paid an even greater price with its demise. Famine and plague racked the lands of the former empire and it is estimated that the population halved in the late sixth and seventh centuries. 1 The first wave of Germanic warriors to sweep across the former borders – the Goths and Franks, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes – began to settle in the Roman lands and soon adopted many Roman customs, embracing the Christian religion and often speaking in Latin dialects. But behind them came successive waves of conquerors who had not been touched by Roman influence in the past and came simply to loot and burn rather than settle and cultivate. Huns and Norsemen tore into the kingdoms established by the Franks, the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, making insecurity and fear as widespread in the ninth and tenth centuries as they had been in the fifth and sixth.
Eventually all the conquerors did settle. The majority had, in fact, been cultivators in their lands of origin, already beginning to use iron for tools as well as for the weapons that enabled them to defeat ‘civilised’ armies in battle. Their societies had already begun to make the transition from primitive communism towards class division, with chieftains who aspired to be kings, and aristocrats ruling over peasants and herders who still had some remaining traditions of communal cultivation. Had Roman agriculture been more advanced and based on something other than a mixture of large, slave-run latifundia and the smallholdings of impoverished peasants, the conquerors would have successfully taken over its methods and settled into essentially Roman patterns of life. We shall see that this is what happened with successive waves of ‘barbarians’ who carved out empires in China and its border lands. But Roman society was already disintegrating as its conquerors swept in, and they simply added to the disintegration. Some of the conquerors did attempt to adopt Roman agriculture, cultivating huge estates with captives from war. Some also attempted to re-establish the centralised structures of the old empire. At the end of the fifth century the Ostrogoth Theodoric proclaimed himself emperor of the west. At the end of the eighth, Charlemagne established a new empire across most of what is now France, Catalonia, Italy and Germany. But their empires fell apart at their deaths for the same rea
son that the original Roman Empire fell apart. There was not the material base in production to sustain such vast undertakings.
Soon the cities were not only depopulated but often abandoned and left to fall apart. Trade declined to such a low level that gold money ceased to circulate. 2 Literacy was confined to the clergy, employing a language – literary Latin – no longer used in everyday life. Classical learning was forgotten outside a handful of monasteries, at one point concentrated mainly on the Irish fringe of Europe. Itinerant, monkish scholars became the only link between the small islands of literate culture. 3 The books which contained much of the learning of the Graeco-Roman world were destroyed as successive invaders torched the monastic libraries.
Such was the condition of much of western Europe for the best part of 600 years. Yet out of the chaos a new sort of order eventually emerged. Across Europe agriculture began to be organised in ways which owed something both to the self-contained estates of the late Roman Empire and the village communities of the conquering peoples. Over time, people began to adopt ways of growing food which were more productive than those of the old empire. The success of invaders such as the Vikings was testimony to the advance of their agricultural (and maritime) techniques, despite their lack of civilisation and urban crafts. Associated with the changing agricultural methods were new forms of social organisation. Everywhere armed lords, resident in crude fortified castles, began simultaneously to exploit and protect villages of dependent peasants, taking tribute from them in the form of unpaid labour or payments in kind. But it was a long time before this laid the basis for a new civilisation.
Chapter 2
China: the rebirth
of the empire
The Chinese Empire, like the Roman Empire, fell apart in the face of economic breakdown and famine within, and incursions by ‘barbarians’ from without. The fourth century was marked by droughts, plagues of locusts, famine and civil wars, a splintering into rival empires, and political, economic and administrative chaos. Something like a million people abandoned their homes and farms, fleeing south from the north China heartland to the Yangtze and beyond. They left a region of devastation and depopulation, where much land had fallen out of cultivation and productive life had reverted to self-sufficient farming, with little trade and a decline in the use of money. 4
Yet the term ‘Dark Ages’ is not appropriate for what followed. Life was extremely hard for the great mass of peasants, and a countless number died from hunger and disease. But civilisation did not collapse. The agricultural devastation of the north was soon offset by the vigorous and sustained expansion of rice cultivation in the Yangtze region. This replenished the surplus needed to sustain flourishing cities and, with them, a literate elite. While western Europe turned in on itself, southern China was opening up trade routes with south east Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Iran. In the north, rival ‘barbarian’ dynasties fought for control. But they were dynasties which recognised the benefits of Chinese civilisation and embraced Chinese culture.
What is more, the ‘barbarians’ did not simply learn from China. They had some things to teach the old civilisation. Their artisans and herders had been able to develop certain techniques precisely because their societies had not been weighed down by the costs and traditions of empire. These techniques now flowed into China – ‘methods of harnessing horses, use of the saddle and stirrup, ways of building bridges and mountain roads, the science of medicinal plants and poisons, seafaring, and so on’. 5 Such innovations opened the way for increased wealth and an increased surplus. For example, the horse had been used previously in warfare and for speedy communication. But the old methods of harnessing half-strangled it and made it virtually useless for pulling heavy loads or ploughs, tasks that were left to the much slower oxen. The new techniques from the northern steppes began to change this.
The collapse of the central empire was not wholly negative in terms of intellectual development, either. The wars destroyed libraries and irreplaceable manuscripts. But the weakening of old intellectual traditions made space for new ones. Buddhism began to gain influence, brought to China by merchants who trod the long trade routes through Tibet and on through Samarkand to Iran, or who sailed from southern China to southern India. Indian, Iranian and Greek influences began to make an appearance in Chinese art, so that some Buddhist statues show the impact of Hellenic styles. Gernet goes so far as to speak of a ‘golden age of medieval civilisation’, an ‘aristocratic world animated by intense religious fervour and permeated by the great commercial currents which flowed along the trails of central Asia and the sea routes to the Indian Ocean’. 6 Certainly, this was all very different from the European Dark Ages.
At the end of the sixth century the empire was reunited, first under the Sui and then under the T’ang Dynasty. Military victory over their enemies enabled the new emperors to extract a surplus from the mass of the population sufficient to undertake enormous public works. Two new capitals, Loyang and Ch’ang-an, were built. Loyang’s walls stretched nine kilometres east to west, eight kilometres north to south, and enclosed a rectangular city of 25 crossing avenues, each over 70 metres wide. Canals 40 metres wide and several hundred kilometres long linked the Yellow, Wei and Yangtze rivers, enabling rice from the south to feed the northern cities. Several hundred kilometres of the Great Walls were rebuilt along the north west frontier, and military campaigns extended the empire’s influence east into Korea, west as far as the borders of India and Persia, and south into Indochina.
There was an administrative structure run by full-time scholar-officials, some recruited by a system of examinations. It began to act as a counter-balance to the landowning aristocrat class, and tried dividing the land into small peasant holdings so as to ensure the surplus went to the state as taxes, not to the aristocrats as rents. 7 State monopolies of salt, alcohol and tea added to its revenues.
The state was powerful, closely policing life in the cities, and Confucianism – with its stress on conformity and obedience – was dominant within the state bureaucracy. But growing trade brought ideological influences from all over Asia. Buddhism grew enormously in importance, ‘Nestorian’ Christianity (condemned as a heresy in Rome and Byzantium) had some impact, and Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism found adherents. The coastal commercial cities of the south contained numbers of foreign merchants – Malays, Indians, Iranians, Vietnamese, Khmers and Sumatrans. Canton even had Shi’ite and Sunni mosques for its Muslim merchants. Chinese influences also radiated in all directions – with Buddhism and the Chinese language and literature spreading to Korea and Japan, and knowledge of paper-making passing through Samarkand to Iran, the Arab world and eventually, after many centuries, to Europe.
The T’ang Dynasty lasted three centuries, but then went into crisis. There were repeated quarrels at the top between the bureaucrats and courtly circles. Some rulers encouraged Buddhism, while others tried to smash it. The costs of sustaining the luxury lifestyles of the ruling class, the public works and an enormous empire soared. The state’s revenues suffered as the class of small farmers went into sharp decline with the rise of large estates worked by tenant farmers and wage labourers.
Meanwhile, the plight of the mass of peasants went from bad to worse. In one region 90 per cent of the peasants were reported to be ‘living from hand to mouth’. 8 There was a growth of banditry and ‘frequent rural riots, in which peasants participated’. In the 870s a wave of rebellion broke out, threatening the whole empire. 9 An insurgent army undertook a great march from north to south and back again to capture the imperial capital, Ch’ang-an, in 880. 10
However, it did not win a victory for the hard-pressed peasantry. Most of its members were not peasants – who were loath to leave their plots for any period of time – but people who had drifted away from the land, while its leaders came ‘partly from the rural gentry and partly from the impoverished classes’. Its leader, Hung Ch’ao, ‘had even been selected as a local candidate for the [civil service] … examination’. I
n a matter of days, the army and its leaders were following different paths. The rank and file fighters joined forces with the local poor and looted the world’s most prosperous city: ‘The markets were set ablaze and countless people slaughtered … The most hated officials were dragged out and killed.’ By contrast, Hung’s ambition was to establish a stable regime with himself as emperor. He revived the imperial system, removing from the state administration only the highest officials, leaving old aristocrats in key positions and taking vicious measures against any of his followers who complained. When someone wrote a poem ridiculing the regime on the gate of a ministerial building, Hung’s deputy ‘killed the officials serving in the department, plucking out their eyes, and hung up their bodies; he executed the soldiers who had guarded the gate, killed everybody in the capital who could compose poetry and employed all other literate people as menials. In all, more than 3,000 people were killed.’
Having turned against his own followers, Hung was unable to keep the throne. An imperial general retook the city from the remains of the demoralised rebel forces a year later. But the rebellion marked the effective end of the T’ang Dynasty, which lost any real power as rival generals fought over the empire. It fell apart into five rival states (‘the five dynasties’) for half a century, until it was reunited under a new dynasty, the Sung.