Two thousand years later, some of these aqueducts are still in working order: the Trevi Fountain in modern Rome is supplied by water from the Virgo Aqueduct built by the Gallo-Roman general Agricola in 19 BC to supply water for the public baths. From this two-dimensional beginning would emerge the magnificence of the three-dimensional dome, another Roman marvel, which would not be emulated for almost a thousand years after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. Yet not all Roman usages were a success. Greek mathematics was a sublime creation. Roman numerals, which all but eliminated the possibility of division or multiplication, soon put a stop to theoretical mathematics and other more practical mathematical advances.
Despite such glitches, the sheer organisation required to run an empire of such a scale continues to astonish. From Hadrian’s Wall to Hadrian’s Arch in the Middle East is just under 2,500 miles as the crow flies, or the Roman road would like to have travelled. (Around the same distance as from Miami to Los Angeles.) Yet the entire empire ran largely according to the dictates of a single centralised system.
An ancient Roman aqueduct
The currency was the same – based on the silver denarius. In times of severe shortage, the price of goods would be carved in stone (literally) at markets of the empire, to prevent traders from charging exorbitant prices. The economics of supply and demand was understood on a rule of thumb basis by the traders themselves, but its larger economic implications barely registered with the authorities. With so many dependent upon a subsistence level of supply, the flawed economics of slavery was irrelevant. (Pay workers and they spend, thus the economy grows.)
On the other hand, the Roman Legal Code would evolve over the years into a highly sophisticated system of jurisprudence. Our very word derives from the Latin: juris, ius (law, right), and prudentia (wisdom or knowledge). Roman law, from the original Twelve Tables of 449 BC to the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) promulgated in AD 521, would provide the foundation for a host of legal systems to come. Its influence and distinctions are still recognisable in the framework of much Western law.
Yet the Roman Empire was not on the whole a happy place. When emperors began to assume the mantle of deity, and expected to be worshipped as such, the multi-theistic quasi-superstitious religion inherited from the Greeks gradually became sapped of its spirituality. The distinctly unholy behaviour of the likes of Tiberias, Caligula and Nero – now, as then, bywords for depravity – prompted belief in a new spirituality, unsullied by any connection with temporal power. It is no accident that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ took place during the reign of Tiberias – or that Nero made the Christians scapegoats for the Fire of Rome in AD 64. Yet this secret ‘religion of slaves’ would continue to flourish, until eventually the Emperor Constantine was converted in AD 313.
The last years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire would see Rome at its cultural zenith. Although the Romans produced no match for the sheer creative intelligence of the Ancient Greeks, their culture is certainly a noble echo, making up in sophistication for what it may lack in raw originality. To mention but a few examples. The poet Ovid wrote exquisite love poems and scurrilous satire, and was banished to the Black Sea for his troubles. Lucretius’s great scientific poem, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), reintroduced the Greek philosopher Democritus’s idea of the atom as the ultimate object of matter (from a-tomos, meaning ‘un-cuttable’, or ‘indivisible’) .
The Greek physician Galen, who practised in Rome in the second century AD, established a body of medical knowledge that would last for almost one and a half millennia. The philosopher and dramatist Seneca wrote tragedies that would influence Shakespeare; and he also preached the philosophy of Stoicism, so popular amongst educated Romans, with its selfless message on how to endure adversity. Napoleon may have much admired Julius Caesar, but he refrained from reading about Ancient Rome, citing too much opening of veins. Suicide was prevalent amongst patricians who fell from favour, the prime exemplar being Seneca, who chose to open his veins rather than suffer the public disgrace of execution after he was accused of plotting against Nero.
The terminal decline of the Roman Empire began around the later third century AD, and would end with the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric the Goth. This long gradual collapse has been ascribed to all manner of reasons – ranging from moral decay to gradual enfeeblement due to lead poisoning from the hot water pipes. Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century British author of the renowned six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, blamed Christianity. Of all the many contributory factors, one stands out: the mass migration across Europe of warrior tribes such as the Goths, the Vandals and the Huns. These would seem to have been irresistible by an empire beset with civil war, plague and economic decline.
Yet the fall of Rome did not mark the extinction of the Roman Empire. By the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine had moved the capital to Byzantium, soon to be named Constantinople after him (now Istanbul). This would split off to become an Eastern Empire, which managed to hold out as the Germanic tribes and their followers overran the rest of the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire would gradually take on the tenor, as well as the name, of its capital city – becoming the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire, as such, was no more.
Sequence
‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ The answer to this question became most apparent when the Romans departed, leaving behind dilapidated outpost forts, abandoned stretches of aqueduct leading from nowhere to nowhere, villas with crumbling mosaic floors undermined by defunct heating systems, and buried pouches of gold coins that would remain undiscovered until the age of the metal detector.
It is during this period, between the sixth and eighth centuries, that the lack of communication between provinces of the former empire caused the vulgar Latin used throughout the Roman Empire to split into what became known as the Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish, which are spoken today. The term Dark Ages is now frowned upon by serious historians, yet it certainly evokes much of the period between the Fall of Rome and the tenth century. Instead, many choose to call this period ‘Late Antiquity’ or the ‘Early Medieval Era’, preferring to reference the two ages that bookend its years. Paradoxically, this dark age was a period of both cultural stagnation and mass migration.
The movement of peoples had begun with the migration of the nomadic Hun tribes from Eastern Asia across the steppes westwards into Europe. This set in motion a disturbance that would spread throughout the continent. In the face of the advancing Huns, the Germanic tribes were forced to migrate south from their homelands. In waves the Goths (originally from Sweden and Eastern Germany) swept through Eastern Europe, splitting into the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths as they passed through Southern Europe and along the shores of North Africa. The Germanic and proto-Slavic Vandals swept through France, Spain and North Africa; while the Huns (from Central Asia and the Caucasus) migrated through Hungary, France and the Balkans.
Later the Vikings (from Scandinavia) sailed to attack the shores of all northern Europe, eventually travelling as far as Greenland and the New World. Other Vikings sailed down the Volga, increasingly as traders, establishing the state of Rus, before venturing south across the Black Sea to arrive at Byzantium. Out of this chaos, in 800 Charlemagne established a Frankish Empire, which briefly ruled over much of western Europe. Meanwhile the Byzantine Empire continued to wax and wane over Anatolia and the Balkans. By now this remnant of Roman rule had become, both in culture and language, a largely Greek empire. Ancient Rome, as such, was now but a reference point in history.
Meanwhile the mantle of progress passed further east. The scattered books and learning of the classical era were taken up, and developed, by Arab scholars, in a second flourishing of Middle Eastern civilisation. Just as Christianity would receive its founding inspiration from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, so Islam would be founded by the prophet Muhammad. Islam recognised itself as following on from the two previous monotheistic religio
ns of the Middle East, namely Judaism and Christianity. The Judaic Abraham and Moses, as well as Christ, were all seen as earlier prophets, predecessors of the Final Prophet of God, Muhammad. But here the resemblance ends. Muhammad was no Jesus Christ, and the empire he founded was based on no ‘religion of slaves’. The empire of Muhammad was the empire of a fervent new religion; and was, from its outset, an empire of conquest.
8 The italic phrase meaning ‘without which not’ (essential) and the abbreviation ‘i.e.’ for id est (‘that is’), indicate how much unadulterated Latin remains in our language to this day.
9 Cave drawings dating from 3000 BC indicate that millet and grain were grown over much of what is now the Sahara Desert. Only gradually did the desert encroach on the arable land due in part to lack of water and the depredations of goats. Even during Roman times. North Africa remained ‘the granary of the empire’, producing as much as a million tons of cereals annually.
10 This Swiss author made a name, and a fortune, for himself by claiming that religion and technology were given to ancient civilisations by extraterrestrials (seen as gods) arriving in spaceships (chariots).
11 In the eye-witness account written some years later by the lawyer and author Pliny the Younger, he stated that the eruption took place on 24 August. Recent excavations indicating the dried fruit and autumn vegetables available on the market stalls, as well as the warmer clothing worn by the inhabitants at the time, have prompted historians to reinterpret Pliny’s date.
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The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates
For many Western minds, the stereotypical image of the Arab caliphates is exemplified by Scheherazade, the condemned storyteller who managed to stay alive by entrancing the Sultan of Baghdad for one thousand and one nights. Such were her fabulous and magical stories that at the end of each night, the Sultan postponed her execution so that he could hear the end of the current story, which had been interrupted by the rising of the dawn.
The name Scheherazade is of Persian origin, and her tales of the likes of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin run the gamut of the oriental world. Aladdin, for instance, despite his Arabic name (Ala ad-Din), is from China – or at least an Arabic-medieval version of this land. And the sorcerer who befriends Aladdin hails from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, the westernmost Islamic territory half a world away from China. The blend of exoticism, ancient wonder and the ever-present threat of death creates an imaginative never-never land, whose many-coloured glass stains the white radiance of historical actuality.
This latter has come down to us in such words as algebra, alcohol and alchemy (which despite its illusory aim developed many of the laboratory techniques and material distinctions of modern chemistry). In these words, the prefix al-, as also in algorithm, is the giveaway. But our language, and our knowledge, is peppered with a variety of other borrowings from Arabic. Ranging through Admiral (Emir) to zero (which would transform western European mathematics), through coffee, cotton and cork, to gauze, soda and traffic, the list goes on and on. This verbal heritage hints at the host of more realistic advances bequeathed by the era of the caliphates, when once again this Middle Eastern corner of the globe led all civilisations.
In order to grasp the rationale of the caliphates, we must first understand their religion and the import of its founder. Muhammad was born into a leading family at Mecca in western central Arabia, during the ‘Year of the Elephant’, reckoned to be around AD 570. His father died before his birth, and his mother died when he was six, leaving him to be brought up by a paternal uncle, Abu Talib, and his wife. When Muhammad was a young man, he travelled as a merchant to Syria, and later became involved in trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, where he gained a reputation as a truthful and trustworthy man, whose advice was often sought in the resolution of disputes. But he also had a deep spiritual side. Each year he would retire to a mountain cave outside Mecca to meditate and pray.
In AD 610, when he was forty years old, the angel Gabriel appeared to him, and passed on to him verses that would later become part of the Quran, a book which would come to be regarded as the word of God. Later, Muhammad would begin preaching, according to the revelations of God’s word conveyed to him by Gabriel: ‘God is one’ and islam ‘submission’. This was largely unsuccessful, as the inhabitants of Mecca were polytheistic, with each tribe having its own god or protector. Consequently, Muhammad and his followers migrated some fifty miles north to Medina in AD 622, which marks the first year of the Muslim calendar.
Here, after leading his followers through several years of armed struggle, Muhammad gathered 10,000 of his men and marched successfully on Mecca. In 632, he returned on a final pilgrimage to Mecca, thus establishing a tradition known as the Hadj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which should be undertaken once in a lifetime by all adult Muslims. Months after his return to Medina, Muhammad died at the age of sixty-two. By this time, a large part of the Arabian peninsula had been converted to Islam.
The harsh desert conditions of Arabia dictated a simple life, where a close communal existence was essential for survival. The purity, loyalty and fervent adherence to a common belief required of such a life would be embodied in the Five Pillars of Wisdom central to Islamic faith: Shahada (to profess that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah), Salat (performance of ritual prayer five times a day), Zakat (giving alms to the poor), Sawm (fasting during the month of Ramadan), and Hadj (pilgrimage to Mecca). These appear in the Hadith, words spoken by Muhammad, but only written down after his death. The Quran and the Hadith form the basis of Muslim law, often known as sharia law.
Following Muhammad’s death, the Rashidun Caliphate was established, with its leader (caliph) being chosen by a democratic consultation amongst elders, or according to the wishes of his predecessor. The fourth caliph was Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, the first to be a direct blood-descendant of the Prophet. As such, Ali is regarded as Muhammad’s rightful successor by all Shia Muslims. (The name Shia derives from Shiat Ali ‘partisans of Ali’.) Sunni Muslims recognise his three predecessors.
The Rashidun Caliphate (632–661) would include a twenty-four-year period of rapid military expansion, with Muslim Arabs completing their conquest of the entire Arabian peninsula, before spreading east across Persia. Ensuing caliphates overran territory as far as Armenia and modern-day Afghanistan, at the same time spreading west through Egypt and later the littoral of North Africa as far as Tunisia. What accounts for the success of this rapid expansion, which would continue after Ali died in 661, and the consequent establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate?
The initial important factor was Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina. Not for nothing is this seen as year one of the Muslim calendar. By moving away from Mecca, Muhammad and his followers loosened their tribal loyalties and developed a close communal bond, all defending each other against the hostility they encountered from surrounding believers in other tribal gods. It soon became clear to Muhammad that aggression was necessary for survival. At the same time, this also helped gain converts.
If Islam was to become more than a local cult in Medina, and to fulfil the promise of its core belief in a single God, it needed to expand. The belief in a single all-powerful deity renders any who believe in different gods nothing less than heretics opposed to the one true faith, who must be shown the error of their ways. As a former trader, Muhammad well understood the logistics of economic survival. His initial expansion beyond Medina involved cutting the supply lines to the inland desert cities, which relied upon caravans from the coast.
As the number of converts to this single-minded religion increased, so did their fervent belief in themselves. Again and again in history, it will be seen how a well-directed army fired by a belief in its own cause, which instils selflessness and an iron discipline, can produce an all but unstoppable force. (Just over a thousand years later, an ill-equipped French army, its soldiery inspired by a belief in the Revolution, would c
onquer Europe.)
The remnant Persian Empire (Sassanid), and the far-flung eastern edges of the Byzantine Empire, proved no match for the zealous Arabs, who quickly absorbed them, introducing their language and beliefs to new lands. The ruler Ali would transfer the capital of the caliphate to Kufa in Iraq, which was more strategically placed to rule the expanding empire. However, by the end of his five-year caliphate, a civil war had broken out between the Sunni faction, and Ali’s Shia faction, which recognised him as the only true successor to Muhammad, by way of the bloodline. In 661, whilst Ali was praying at the Great Mosque of Kufa, he was assassinated. This led to the establishment of the second caliphate, which was ruled by the Umayyad Dynasty, who were Sunnis. The first ruler of this caliphate was Muawiya, who had been the governor of Syria, and his first move was to transfer the capital to Damascus.
Despite such internal conflicts, the expansion of the caliphate continued under the Umayyad dynasty. The most notable new conquest was the expansion along the north African coast, and the invasion of the Iberian peninsula, which was at the time occupied by Visigoth Christian kingdoms. Regardless of the Islamic zeal of the conquerors, they remained mindful of Muhammad’s explicit command with regard to members of the Abrahamic faith. This included both Jews and Christians. According to Muhammad, these should be permitted to continue practising their faith, as long as they paid the jizyah tax, a tribute payable annually to the Muslim authorities. This was usually assessed on the ability of the person to pay, and was invariably more or less greater than the local Muslims paid as part of their zakat (the Third Pillar of Wisdom, concerning alms to the poor).
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