A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  There were a few advances in technology. Alchemists stumbled upon new methods for handling metals, although ‘scientific mineralogy was all but destroyed by the superimposition of occult practices’. 41 There were improvements in the manufacture and handling of glass, and a microscrew permitted accurate measurements. There were improvements in writing materials, particularly with the acquisition of knowledge from China on how to make paper. The ‘Byzantines knew several simple machines (levers, rollers, cog wheels, wedges, inclined planes, screws and pulleys) which were used mainly as parts … of capstans, treadwheels, scooping machines, weightlifters and catapults’. 42 Yet these advances seem to have been employed only in two limited fields – to provide luxuries for the ruling class (such as a mechanical singing bird made by Leo the Mathematician for the royal court) and for military purposes. Even in the military field, the Byzantines advanced very little beyond the knowledge acquired in Alexandria a millennium earlier.

  There was not even a limited advance in science. A few manuscripts survived which detailed the discoveries in mathematics and astronomy of Greek Alexandria, but only a handful of scholars ever took them seriously. Mainstream thinkers relied on interpretations of the Book of Genesis in the Bible for their understanding of the physical world and saw the world as flat, not round. 43

  Above all, there seems to have been virtually no advance in the techniques used to gain a livelihood by the vast majority of the population who worked on the land. ‘The methods and instruments’ of cultivation ‘showed little or no advance on ancient times’. 44 Tilling was still performed by a light plough pulled by oxen, fields were not manured systematically, and the harnesses employed until the twelfth century choked animals so that two horses could only pull a load of about half a ton – several times less than is possible with modern harnesses. The result was that however hungry the peasants were, the surplus available to maintain the state and provide for the luxuries of the ruling class did not grow. This simple fact lay at the basis of the stagnation of so much of the rest of Byzantine society. It had survived the crisis which destroyed the old Roman Empire in the west. But no new ways of producing had emerged and no new class which embodied those new ways. So it could not escape the same pressures which had led to the great crisis of the west in the fifth century.

  The empire had survived in the east, basically because this was the area of most abundant agriculture. After Constantinople became the imperial capital in 330, successive emperors were able to keep control of Asia Minor, Syria, the Balkans and the all-important grain-producing Nile Valley – which now supplied the needs of Constantinople as it had previously supplied Rome. The economies of the empire’s provinces were in the hands of large local landowners, running virtually self-contained estates, which in Egypt ‘came to resemble miniature kingdoms, equipped with police, courts of justice, private armies and elaborate postal and transport services’. 45 But the imperial army was sufficiently powerful and tightly enough organised to keep them providing the funds the empire needed.

  This structure virtually collapsed barely 50 years after Justinian’s final attempt to reconquer the west and the completion of St Sophia in the sixth century. The armies, the spate of public building and the luxuries of the court and church depended on all the wealth of the empire draining to the top. The continued impoverishment of the peasants and discontent among the less wealthy inhabitants of the provincial cities led to ‘savage clashes between rival factions in all the cities of the empire’. 46 The empire and the church alienated vast numbers of people by their attempts to impose religious conformism. The bishops, ‘backed by the violence of the monks’, ensured ‘Paganism was brutally demolished’ by attacks on temples. 47 There were repeated attacks on the Jews and bloody persecution of adherents of the ‘Monophysite’, ‘Arian’ and Nestorian interpretations of Christianity (which, between them, had near-majority support). There was little support for the empire when it was attacked in the early seventh century by Persian and then Arab-Islamic armies in Syria and Egypt, and by Slav peoples in the Balkans. It was reduced to a rump consisting of Constantinople itself and part of Asia Minor, with a few towns, a much reduced population in the capital, and a general decay in the level of literacy and learning.

  The truncated empire was just able to survive because its rulers reorganised the economy so as to provide for its defence. They attempted to dismantle the large estates and to settle whole armies as smallholding peasants in frontier areas. This system, they believed, would provide them both with militias to defend the empire and with a sure tax base.

  They were able to hold the core of the empire intact in this way and even, by the tenth century, to recover some of the Balkan lands inhabited by the Slavs. But they could not overcome the basic weaknesses of the system, and Constantinople was in decline again by the mid-eleventh century. The empire rested on an inbuilt contradiction. The aim was to build an independent peasantry which could be taxed. But taxation continually drove the peasants to abandon the land to those who were wealthier and more powerful.

  The smallholding peasants faced ‘the annual invasion of a cruel and rapacious body of tax collectors, accompanied by a posse of soldiers … Defaulters were summarily flogged and their goods distrained’. 48 Sometimes they would be jailed and tortured – and in twelfth-century Cyprus hungry dogs were set on them. Yet even in the best of times they lived on the edge of insolvency. It only required a bad harvest for the most industrious peasants to be forced to sell their land and flee. So peasants could end up welcoming subordination to some powerful landowner as a form of ‘protection’. Significantly, when there was a peasant rising in 932, it was led by an impostor who claimed to be the son of a great aristocratic family. 49

  The imperial bureaucracy did succeed in preventing the urban masses ever organising independently. The merchants and artisans were organised into guilds under state control, which rigorously limited their profits. This ‘delayed the growth of a strong native bourgeoisie’, 50 so that when openings for trade did emerge they were taken up by foreign merchants whose activities increased the weaknesses of the empire.

  A class of free wage labourers could not develop either, because of the persistence of slavery in the cities. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries, ‘the great victories … flooded the markets with cheap human merchandise. It was not until the hard facts of military defeat, closed markets and declining wealth had stopped the sources of slaves in the 12th century that slavery began to die out and give the free worker … economic power’. 51

  The other side of the splendour of Constantinople and the wealth of its rulers was the poverty of masses of its inhabitants. Vast numbers lived in squalid tenements or huts, with many sleeping outdoors even in the coldest winters. But, lacking an independent economic base, the poor could not act as an independent force. They could cause brief mayhem by rioting. But even their bitterness was all too easily manipulated by groups with very different interests to their own. So the huge ‘Nike’ riot early in Justinian’s reign, which went on for a fortnight and led to the burning of half the city, was utilised by aristocratic forces opposed to Justinian’s taxes on them. From then on emperors were careful to provide cheap grain for the urban masses, and riots were normally in favour of the emperor and against his enemies.

  There was even an institutionalised form of rioting which deflected the urban masses from raising class demands of their own. This was the organisation into rival Green and Blue ‘factions’ of groups of spectators at the various games in the Hippodrome arena. Several hundred youths from each side would occupy special seats, dressed in elaborate clothes in their own colours, cheering and booing appropriately and coming to blows, which would, on occasion, lead to large-scale bloodshed and rioting. Troops would sometimes have to be used to restore order, but the sponsorship of the factions by various dignitaries, including the emperor and empress, ensured that far from endangering the empire the system merely served to let off steam. 52

  It was only whe
n the system of providing cheap corn broke down in the twelfth century that riots reflecting the class interests of the urban dwellers began to occur. Interestingly, it was then that various ‘guilds’ and associations of artisans and tradesmen played a role. 53

  Byzantium survived as a last bastion of Graeco-Roman culture because the imperial bureaucracy was run by a layer of literate Greek speakers. But it was a group that lived off the production of others rather than contributing to or organising it. It therefore prided itself on its remoteness from the material world, and was afraid of any class emerging whose closeness to production might lead to it diverting some of the surplus into its own pockets. It is this which explains the sterile, pedantic character of Byzantine culture. It also explains the strength of superstitious and magical beliefs among all social groups. The priests were usually at least half-illiterate, and their message relied upon simplified stories of the saints, tales of miracles, and faith in the magic of holy relics. Where Paganism had provided people with local gods, Christianity now provided them with local patron saints. The cult of the mother goddess became the cult of the Virgin Mary. Fertility rites became Shrove Tuesday carnivals and Easter ceremonies.

  Along with the superstition went the most barbaric practices. By the eighth century ‘we find mutilation of the tongue, hand and nose as part of the criminal system … The church approved of this because the tongueless sinner still had time to repent’. 54 In the cities the austere moralism of the church meant there was ‘rigorous seclusion of women. No respectable woman ever appeared in the streets unveiled’. 55 But there was also prostitution on a massive scale.

  The fundamental weakness of Byzantine civilisation was shown early in the thirteenth century when Constantinople fell to a band of thugs and adventurers from Europe. The participants in the Fourth Crusade found the city a better prize than their intended destination of Jerusalem. They pillaged it and then ruled it as a feudal kingdom. They were driven out in 1261, but the renewed Byzantine state was a pale reflection of its former self and finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

  A certain sort of civilisation had been preserved for 1,000 years. But the only contact of the supposedly cultivated ruling class with the masses who did the work was via the tax collector on the one hand and the barely literate rural priests on the other. Such a civilisation could be no more than a living fossil, passing on the achievements of one epoch to another, but adding nothing itself.

  No class capable of revolutionising society and giving a free rein to the forces of production had ever developed in Graeco-Roman society. The Dark Ages were the result in western Europe; 1,000 years of sterility were the result in the Balkans and Asia Minor.

  Chapter 4

  The Islamic revolutions

  The stagnation of Byzantium after Justinian’s time did not just lead to the sterility of the rump Roman Empire. It also led to a series of dramatic upheavals elsewhere in the Middle East which did contribute something to humanity’s stock of knowledge and techniques – and also produced one of the great world religions.

  The starting point was the unlikely venue of Mecca, a trading town in the generally barren lands of the Arabian peninsula. The area was dominated by nomadic pastoralists who used the camel (domesticated about 1000 BC) to travel from oasis to oasis with their herds, and to engage in a certain amount of trade and looting. They were organised into clans, loosely linked in tribes run by assemblies of clan elders, which fought each other and launched periodic raids on settled peoples beyond the edge of the desert.

  But there were also settled cultivators around the oases and in some of the coastal regions – especially in the south, 56 where there was a civilisation at least 1,000 years old which maintained contact with the equally old Ethiopian civilisation just across the Red Sea. Some of the nomadic families also began to settle in trading centres as they acquired wealth, using camel caravans to carry luxury goods between the Roman Empire and the eastern civilisations. Mecca was one such settlement and had become a thriving town by the beginning of the seventh century.

  The traditional values of the nomadic clans centred on the courage and honour of the individual man and his clan. There was no state, and obligations were to one’s kin group, not to society at large. Assaults, murders and robberies were regarded as infringements on the family or clan, to be dealt with through retaliation and blood feuds. Religion was a matter of identification with an individual deity which would travel with the tribal group – rather as the Ark of the Covenant travelled with the ‘Children of Israel’ in their Old Testament wanderings through the desert.

  Such values did not provide any easy way to deal with tensions and conflicts which arose as some of the nomads took to a settled life. Long-established peasants and townspeople had long broken with them. Christianity flourished in southern Arabia, and many oasis cultivators had converted to Judaism or one of the varieties of Christianity. In a town like Mecca the mingling of nomads, merchants, artisans and peasants was matched by arguments between the different religious viewpoints. These were arguments which had practical implications, since the old values and gods ruled out the establishment of any single code of law or behaviour which overrode loyalty to clan and tribe.

  The crisis was heightened by what was happening in the two great empires bordering on Arabia, Byzantium and Persia. Persia had briefly seized Egypt and Syria from Byzantium at the end of the sixth century, bringing to an end 900 years of Graeco-Roman domination. But Persian society itself was in deep crisis, caused by its landed aristocrats neglecting the Mesopotamian irrigation systems that had allowed cities to flourish. The ravages of war made things worse. In both empires there was mass impoverishment and social unrest. 57 The whole world seemed to be in a state of chaos.

  This was the world in which Mohammed, a Meccan orphan from one of the less important trading families, grew up and attempted, not very successfully, to make a living as a merchant. He experienced the chaos of the world around him as mental turmoil, in which none of the conflicting worldviews and values seemed to make sense. He felt driven to try to bring some coherence to his own life and to the society in which he lived. He had a series of religious visions in which he believed God ( Allah in Arabic) spoke to him. These moulded the various religious conceptions he had come across into a new pattern. He recited the words to others, who wrote them down as the Koran, and gradually built up a group of followers, mainly younger members of the different Meccan merchant families.

  The message Mohammed preached had much in common with the Christianity and Judaism of the Arabic cultivators and townspeople. It opposed a single god to the many competing gods of the nomadic herders. It substituted belief in ‘universal’ obligations to all fellow believers for the old clan and tribal codes. It appealed to the poor by praising protection against arbitrary oppression, but did not spurn the rich providing they showed charity. It also, like early Christianity, had a certain appeal to urban women (there were women in Mohammed’s group whose husbands were bitterly hostile to it). Although it assumed women were inferior to men (accepting, for instance, the veiling of women prevalent in the Byzantine Empire), it preached that men, as their ‘superiors’, had to respect rather than mistreat women, and it gave them certain property rights.

  Its purely religious aspect involved the incorporation of a range of biblical myths and religious practices from both Jews and Christians. But in one important respect the message differed from the versions of Christianity of the time. It was not simply a set of beliefs or rules for moral behaviour. It was also a political programme for reforming society, for replacing the ‘barbarism’ of competition, often armed, between tribes and ruling families, with an ordered umma (community) based on a single code of laws.

  This political aspect of Mohammed’s teaching led to clashes with the ruling families in Mecca, to the enforced emigration of his group to the town of Medina, and to his eventual return with an army to Mecca in AD 630 to begin to establish a new state. He was successful because he w
as able to build a core of young men committed to a single worldview, while forming tactical alliances with groups whose purpose was very different – with townspeople and cultivators who merely wanted peace, with merchant families who relished the profits a powerful Arab state would bring them, and with tribal leaders hoping for loot from fighting for his cause.

  The new state was well positioned to take advantage of the twin crises of the great empires. Mohammed died in 632, but his first two successors, or ‘caliphs’, Abu Bakr and Umar – longtime disciples from merchant families – also knew how to combine religious principle and political pragmatism. They deflected the energies of feuding pastoralist tribes and clans into attacks on the wealthy cities of the two great empires and in the process discovered how weak those empires were. One by one their cities fell to Arab armies – Damascus in 636, the Persian capital of Ctesiphon in 637, the Egyptian city called Babylon (now part of Cairo) in 639, and Alexandria in 642. Within ten years Mohammed’s followers had created a massive empire out of the lands of the historic civilisations of the Middle East.

  The successes were, in part, a result of very clever use of the fighting potential of the pastoralist tribes. The Islamic commanders saw that, moving through apparently impenetrable deserts at speed, cavalrymen on camels could hit the cities in the bordering empires unexpectedly and with great force. They could use the vast space of the desert much as the gunboats of the old British Empire used the oceans, striking at will against defending armies which could only move at a fraction of their speed, 58 or as modern armed forces use paratroops to hit distant objectives at will. 59