A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  In his desire to join the East and the West in one vast empire, Alexander adopted Persian dress, gave orders for Persians to be enlisted in his army, and encouraged his soldiers to marry Persian women. He also allowed conquered people to run their country as long as they remained loyal to him. However, his continual warmongering eventually took its toll. When his army reached India in 326 BC, his troops, exhausted by years of battle, refused to go any further and Alexander was forced to head back home, only to die in Babylon three years later.

  The Indian Mauryan Empire (321–185 BC)

  When Alexander returned from India, he left a power vacuum into which stepped Chandragupta, the first emperor of the Indian Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta became the undisputed ruler of northern India and, for the first time in Indian history, gave the area a degree of political unity.

  After ruling for some 25 years, Chandragupta Maurya, according to various sources, became a monk and starved himself to death. His son, Bindusara, extended his empire, but it was Bindusara’s son Ashoka who, after waging a brutal war of expansion against his enemies, gained remarkable fame in India through his conversion to Buddhism – a way of life that had gained many adherents since its introduction in the 6th century BC. Shocked by the aftermath of a major battle, Ashoka renounced all violence and preached Buddhism and peace throughout his kingdom and abroad. Upon his death in 232 BC his family managed to hold on to power for another half a century or so before the last Mauryan emperor was murdered and India became divided once again. Periodically invaded, northern India would only become prosperous and stable again under the Gupta Empire in the 4th century AD.

  Buddhism

  Buddhism is a philosophy17 or way of life – although some people call it a religion – that originated in the 5th or 6th century BC (there is still disagreement about exactly when the Buddha lived). It is currently followed by over 300 million people on Earth.

  Born into a royal family, Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama, realised that material wealth did not guarantee happiness and left the comforts of his home at the age of 29 in order to understand the meaning of the suffering around him. After six years of study, meditation and self-denial, he is said to have awakened from the sleep of ignorance and become the Buddha, or ‘the Enlightened One’.

  For the following 45 years he taught the principles of Buddhism throughout northern India; if one lived a moral life, was mindful of one’s actions, and developed wisdom, he taught, it was possible to dispel ignorance, rid oneself of desire and reach Nirvana, or a state without suffering.

  His attempts at explaining injustices and inequality, and his teachings on how to avoid suffering, were met with a ready audience and spread rapidly around the world. Adopted by Ashoka in India in the 3rd century BC, Buddhism spread along the great trade routes from India into central and southeast Asia where it generally prospered, though it gradually became less popular in India itself.

  Alexander’s Successor Kingdoms

  Alexander had not nominated an heir or successor, and although one person claimed the empire he left, it was rapidly sliced up by his key generals. The outcome was a number of separate kingdoms that more often than not waged war upon each other. Of the two largest to remain, one was the Seleucid Kingdom, founded by one of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus, which included most of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Persia. The other was the Ptolemaic Kingdom, founded by his general Ptolemy, which consisted of Egypt. With the exception of much of Persia, most of these lands and successor kingdoms were later swallowed by the Roman Republic.

  In Egypt, Ptolemy established the last dynasty that would rule the country with the title of Pharaoh. For the following two and a half centuries the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Greeks would successfully rule Egypt, mingling Greek traditions with the legacy of the Pharaohs. Ptolemy and his descendants adopted Egyptian royal trappings and added Egypt's religion to their own, worshipping the gods and building temples in their honour, some even going to the extent of being mummified after death. Of all Alexander’s successor kingdoms, Egypt was to last the longest, and was only finally added to the Roman Empire in 30 BC following the suicide of Cleopatra – the last Ptolemaic queen.

  One of the many legacies of Alexander’s reign, born of a desire to dominate Egypt, was the city of Alexandria, which was founded on the northern coast of the country in the 4th century BC. With Athens declining and Rome not yet developed, Alexandria occupied the key junction between the western and eastern worlds. It became one of the greatest cities in antiquity, the busiest port in the world, and a cultural melting pot of Greek, Roman and Egyptian thought and trade.18 The city would not be eclipsed in its importance within Egypt until Cairo was established in the 10th century.

  The Unification of China (221 BC)

  Over in the east, by 400 BC, the multitude of separate states in present-day China had been consolidated into thirteen, and for the next 175 years they fell into a protracted struggle referred to as ‘the Warring States Period’. The state that emerged as the strongest, partially thanks to its use of iron over the bronze weapons of its neighbours, was the western Chou state of Qin (pronounced Ch’in) from which, some have suggested, we get the name China.

  The leader who brought all these states together, and in effect became the first emperor of China in 221 BC, was named Shi Huang-Ti. Emperor Shi Huang-Ti gained a terrible reputation, ruthlessly crushing any resistance to his rule. He also instigated the building of the Great Wall of China19 – the largest man-made structure in the world at over 6,000 km long – in order to protect his empire from the Huns, the same people that would attack the West several hundred years later. Obsessed with immortality and fearing retribution by the spirits of all those he had killed, Shi Huang-Ti ensured that he was buried with over 6,000 terracotta warriors to protect him in the afterlife.

  As a result of his cruelty, the Qin Dynasty was rapidly overthrown after his death and the Han Dynasty ruled China for the following 400 years.20 This was a time of peace that witnessed Confucianism – a way of life expounded by Confucius and his followers since the 6th century BC – adopted as the state philosophy. It was during the Han Dynasty that the great trade route of the Silk Road was established, a route that saw Asia trading silk and other luxuries with Persia and India, and with a new empire that was gaining ground in the west – an empire which would grow by conquest and assimilation to rule the western world: Rome.

  The Roman Republic (509–27 BC)

  Rome started as a small town on the banks of the river Tiber in the 8th century BC. Legend has it that the city was founded in 753BC by the twins, Romulus (hence Rome) and Remus, who were both saved from death by a wolf who suckled them. The area was ruled by Etruscan kings until 509 BC, when a more representative form of government was established under the Republic of Rome. The Republic proceeded to grow rapidly, wisely incorporating the people it conquered as ‘citizens’ as opposed to ‘subjects’, a strategy which effectively reduced chances of rebellion.

  Rome was not without competition, however; the dominant power in the Mediterranean at the time was a Phoenician trading colony founded in the 9th century BC on the north coast of Africa in modern-day Tunisia: Carthage. Carthage had become independent after the Persians had conquered the Phoenicians in the 6th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, the Carthaginian Empire had grown to become the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, stretching from northern Africa and Sicily to the southern Iberian peninsula in present-day Spain.

  Looking to expand its power base beyond the Italian mainland, Rome interfered in the Carthaginian sphere of influence. Over the course of 118 years, from 264 to 146 BC, the Roman and Carthaginian empires waged a titanic struggle against each other for control of the western Mediterranean on both land and sea. Named the Punic Wars from the word Peoni, the Latin word for Phoenicians, they drained both sides of money and manpower. While there were three major Punic Wars in total, the most famous of these was undoubtedly the second, as it involved a full-scale invasion of R
oman territory, an invasion in which the Romans suffered a number of severe losses and from which they only just managed to snatch victory.

  Hannibal and the Punic Wars (264–146 BC)

  In 221 BC, the leadership of the Carthaginian forces in Iberia passed to a 25-year-old named Hannibal, who had succeeded his father. In the autumn of 218 BC he invaded Italy from the north, crossing the Alps in winter with a number of elephants and tens of thousands of men. Arriving in Italy, he repeatedly smashed the Roman armies he came across, conquering most of the north within two months and causing several of the Republic’s cities to rebel.

  The Romans eventually retaliated by attacking Iberia and making much of the area submit to their rule before crossing into Africa and taking the war back to Carthage itself. The city sued for peace and Hannibal was driven into exile where he eventually killed himself. Carthage was turned into a dependent state, only to be razed to the ground by the Romans 50 years later following an attempt to reassert itself.

  Rome now controlled the whole of the western Mediterranean, including northern Africa, and had grown from a minor regional power into an international empire. Its dominance was secure to such an extent that the Mediterranean became known to the Romans as ‘Mare Nostrum’ or ‘Our Sea’. Another result of the Punic Wars was the occupation of the kingdom of Macedon by the Romans in 168 BC as punishment for the support that the Macedonian king, Philip V, had given the Carthaginians. After this, the mighty Greeks of history became mere citizens of a Roman province.

  Julius Caesar (100–44 BC)

  Fast-forward a century to 80 BC, and Julius Caesar’s exceptional oratory skills had come to the attention of many. Politically adept, Caesar formed an alliance known as ‘the First Triumvirate’, with Gnaeus Pompey, who was Rome’s greatest general at the time, and Marcus Crassus, Rome’s richest man. With little opposition they were able to split the empire into three separate power bases; Crassus receiving Syria, Pompey receiving Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) and Caesar receiving northern Italy and south-east Europe, with southern Gaul later added.

  Caesar grew famous through his successful campaigns in Gaul (roughly equal to modern-day France) between 58 BC and 50 BC, which brought the local population under Roman control through a campaign that was brutal even by Roman standards. The Gauls united under Vercingetorix – recognised today as the first national hero of France – with the aim of ejecting the Romans, but failed. By the time the war ended, according to the Greek historian Plutarch, up to a million Gauls lay dead and another million of them were enslaved. Caesar also launched a minor invasion of the British Isles but Britain had to wait another hundred years before it felt the full force of the Roman Empire under Emperor Claudius.

  Caesar’s achievements upset the balance of power and threatened to eclipse those of Pompey. The balance of power was further upset by the death of Crassus, who had been killed – along with 30,000 of his men – while attempting to invade neighbouring Parthia. The Parthians were a Persian tribe that had risen to fill the power vacuum left by the weakening Seleucid Empire, and they became a major problem for the Romans.

  With Caesar as a potential threat, Pompey persuaded the Senate to order him back to Rome. Caesar did return, but not as a loyal soldier, deciding instead to wage war on an ungrateful Rome. Caesar marched from Gaul to Italy with his legions and crossed into Roman territory at the river Rubicon in northern Italy, a river that served as the boundary between Rome and the provinces. If any general crossed it uninvited with an army, it was a sign that he entered Italy as an enemy. Since then the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ has survived to refer to any individual committing himself to a risky course of action.

  Caesar’s action sparked a civil war from which he emerged as the unrivalled leader of the Roman world. In response to Caesar’s invasion, Pompey was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Roman army with instructions to defeat Caesar, only to be assassinated by the Egyptians in Egypt, where he had fled with Caesar in hot pursuit. Before returning to Rome, Caesar was seduced by Cleopatra – a descendant of Alexander’s general, Ptolemy – and had a child with her, whom he named Caesarion. He also helped Cleopatra defeat her brother, the Pharaoh, whom she had been forced to marry, installing her as ruler in his place.

  Upon his return to Rome, Caesar’s victories were celebrated; he was appointed dictator for ten years and the Senate bestowed further honours on him, including a decree that the month of July be named after him21 and that his image be stamped on coins – a traditional symbol of monarchy, and an action that did not go unnoticed among the notoriously anti-monarchical Romans.

  Caesar was popular with the people as a reformer, but he was equally if not more unpopular with a number of senators who were keen to maintain the status quo and afraid of losing their wealth and power. It was these senators who conspired to murder Caesar under the pretext that they feared he was trying to become king, an institution that Rome had abolished back in 509 BC. They succeeded in doing so on 15th March 44 BC, otherwise known as the Ides of March, thrusting a dagger into Caesar’s heart and plunging Rome into a succession of civil wars that would end with the collapse of the Roman Republic and lead to the establishment of the Roman Empire.

  Octavian, Mark Antony and Cleopatra

  Before Caesar was murdered he had appointed his grandnephew Gaius Octavius, known as Octavian, as heir to all his possessions, including his name. After much antagonism between Octavian and Mark Antony – Caesar’s former right hand man and an experienced soldier in his own right – the two joined forces to bring Caesar’s murderers to justice.

  However, the mutual distrust soon resurfaced between them. Antony’s infatuation with the East and with Cleopatra, with whom he had three children, led to his final undoing and his vilification in Rome. Rumours circulated that he was celebrating victories in Alexandria as opposed to Rome, that he wanted to be buried there, and that he was bequeathing parts of the Roman Empire to Cleopatra and her children – including Caesarion, a bequest that effectively challenged Octavian’s place as heir to Caesar.

  Portraying Antony as an Egyptian pawn, Octavian declared war on Cleopatra and, by implication, on Antony. The two forces met at Actium in north-west Greece in AD 31, where Octavian won a decisive naval battle. The following year both Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, and Antony took their own lives and Egypt, like Greece before it, became a Roman province.

  The Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 476/1453)

  The Roman Empire, as opposed to the Roman Republic, was founded in 27 BC when the Roman Senate bequeathed to Octavian the name Augustus, meaning the exalted or holy one. As a matter of course, Octavian also became Princeps Senatus or leading man of the state. This later became the official title of the Roman emperors and gave us the word ‘prince’. One of his many titles, Imperator, initially awarded only to victorious generals, became associated with the ruler and was henceforth linked to leaders of empires (emperor, empereur, etc.).

  Emperor Augustus Caesar ruled with absolute power. Any concerns about this held by diehard Republicans were offset by the political and social stability that Augustus managed to introduce after decades of civil war. In fact, with the exception of a few minor interruptions and wars, and helped by the fact that Rome’s largest potential enemy, Parthia in the east, was also beset by political turmoil, the Roman Empire was to know two centuries of relative peace, referred to as the ‘Pax Romana’. Trade was brisk. In addition to imports of wheat from Africa, wine from Gaul, and oil from Iberia, spices and textiles were imported from Arabia, India and China via Asian caravans along the Silk Road.

  A huge territory with up to 50 million people, the empire was difficult to administer and expensive to run, requiring regular new sources of tax to fund its running costs. Augustus was fortunate that the state treasury received an influx of wealth and tax revenue from the newly occupied territory of Egypt, which became the new breadbasket of the Roman Empire. A major economic revival resulting from a period of peace and increased trade a
lso boosted tax revenues. In fact, there was enough money in the Roman coffers to allow Augustus to embark on a major public building programme and boast ‘I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.’22

  The tax base may have increased but it still needed to be collected. One of the ways of ensuring tax revenue was to perform a census that would confirm how many people lived in the empire and which of these could pay tax. According to the Christian New Testament, it was to register for such a census that Joseph and his wife Mary came to Bethlehem, a town in Judea in present-day Israel, where Mary gave birth to their son, Jesus.

  Jesus: The Birth of Christianity

  Jesus was born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC. Very little is known about the man until he began his ministry some 30 years after his birth. At this time Jesus began spreading a message of love and peace in a period during which Judea was under the domination of a Roman occupying army. He challenged and angered the established Pharisee leaders, who successfully called for the Roman occupiers to crucify him for blasphemy. According to the Bible, he angered them specifically by his claims that he could forgive sins, which they believed only God could do.23

  Jesus gained a group of Jewish followers, partly through his teachings but also because many of them believed he was the Messiah – the great leader whose return was foretold in the Torah and who would liberate his people and usher in a time of peace. His crucifixion in circa AD 28-29 was a catastrophe for his devotees. Shortly after his death, however, a large number of them claimed he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them. His resurrection became the basis of Christian belief from then on.