A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  The plague that had ravaged both Sassanid Persia and Byzantium in the 6th century seems to have bypassed much of Arabia, possibly thanks to its deserts and lack of cities which gave less room for contagion. Muhammad had also introduced hygienic reforms to great effect. As for war, Persia and Byzantium had been so weakened by incessant battles with each other that they were unable to withstand conquering armies that were driven by religious zeal and attracted by the promise of a share in the spoils of war. Finally, many communities had become fed up with the corruption and taxes of the existing regimes and welcomed the invaders with open arms as a result.

  However, the speed of the Islamic success hid underlying problems within the community: the failure of Muhammad to appoint a successor, or even establish a procedure by which a new leader might be chosen, resulted in differences of opinion as to who should succeed him. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, was passed over in favour of one of Muhammad’s closest friends, Abu Bakr, partly because Ali was considered too young to take on the role. This decision would later prove to be a major source of division across the Islamic community; one group became Ahl Al-Sunna, those who followed the Sunna, or way of the Prophet, while the followers of Ali launched Shi’at’Ali, or the party of Ali, thereafter known as the Shiites.

  Upon Muhammad’s death Abu Bakr became caliph, or righteous heir, and determined that all Arabs in the Arabian peninsula acknowledge the leadership of the Muslim community, even if this should come about by force. He achieved his goal in an incredibly rapid two years. Having brought the tribes together, he directed them against outside enemies, and so began a bold series of campaigns from Dar al-Islam, or the ‘House of Islam’ into Dar al-Harb, or the ‘House of War’.

  The Arab armies offered comparatively easy terms to those they defeated, especially to Jews and Christians, whom they termed ‘people of the Book’ and whom they permitted to worship freely. They also did not demand that people convert to Islam; Muslims were not required to pay taxes so this meant that a larger number of converts equalled less tax revenue, not more. Essentially, as long as people accepted the sovereignty of the Arabs and paid taxes, they could continue to govern themselves. Many of the conquered had also been oppressed by their previous rulers which meant that in many instances the invading armies were welcomed with open arms.

  When the third caliph, Uthman, was murdered 22 years after the death of Muhammad, the followers of Ali saw this as a chance to proclaim Ali as caliph. However, Ali was assassinated and his son, Hasan, was persuaded by the existing Umayyad line to renounce his claims to the leadership. Having done so, Hasan was poisoned. His brother, Husayn, set out to seek power – an act that subsequently ended in his murder and the massacre of his followers, and exacerbated the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

  Over the next hundred or so years, Damascus, in present-day Syria, became the Islamic world’s capital, presided over by the Umayyad clan, under whose leadership Muslims conquered vast tracts of land. To the east, Muslim armies successfully invaded Sassanid Persia and Central Asia, and gradually gained followers as far as India. To the west, in AD 711, a small army of northern African Berbers under Arab leadership and motivated by the promise of booty, invaded the Visigoth territory of Spain and went on to conquer most of the Iberian peninsula within a decade. From that point on Spain became known as Al-Andalus – a peculiar hybrid of barbarian, Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture. The top of the Rock of Gibraltar, known then by its Latin name, Mons Calpe, was renamed after the Moor general, Tariq, as ‘Jabl Tariq’ (the Hill of Tariq), from where we get the name Gibraltar. It would take seven centuries for the Muslims to be driven off the peninsula entirely.

  For many years the Islamic armies seemed unstoppable. A turning point in their expansion into north-west Europe came only in AD 732, when the king of the Franks, Charles Martel, otherwise known as ‘Charles the Hammer’, and a coalition of troops under his leadership, defeated an Umayyad invading army near Poitiers in France. While there is disagreement as to the size of this invading army, world history may have turned out very differently indeed had it not been defeated.

  The Fall of the Umayyad Dynasty (AD 750)

  Around that time things weren’t going too well for the Umayyads in Damascus either. With the wealth that the Umayyad Empire generated through trade and conquest came a decadent lifestyle that alienated the vast majority of its subjects and led to mounting opposition. Complaints had begun to be aired that the booty of conquest was being held in Damascus and not being disseminated to the men who carried out the actual fighting. Finally, the Umayyad Dynasty was dominated by Arabs while there was demand for an Islamic rule where all Muslims would be equally represented.

  This disquiet offered a great opportunity for the non-Arab Muslim and Shiite dissenters to encourage an uprising. It was the efforts of the Umayyads to put down this uprising that led to their eventual downfall. Led by Abu l’Abbas al-Saffah, the great-great-grandson of the Prophet’s uncle, the dissenters rebelled, proclaimed Abu l’Abbas caliph and, in AD 750, having invited all the members of the Umayyad clan to a feast, slaughtered all of them except one, Abd ar-Rahman, the grandson of a former caliph. Abd ar-Rahman fled via Africa to Spain, where he defeated the governor of Al-Andalus, a supporter of l’Abbas, and established an independent emirate based out of Cordoba.

  Early African Empires

  From the 7th century, the Muslims also explored much of Africa, many centuries before the Europeans parcelled the continent up between them. Our knowledge of this continent’s history is hampered by an absence of written records. The lack of a major transport infrastructure, such as that created by the Romans and the Chinese, makes its history very disparate, and this is not helped by the lack of archaeological evidence. We do know, however, that the growth of Carthage stimulated trade across the desert, and that this trade grew further under the Romans, who named the continent Africa after a tribe living near Carthage called the Afri.

  It was Muslims who introduced the camel in great quantities, which helped develop trade further and indirectly aided the growth of regional powers such as the great West African empires of Ghana,28 Mali and Songhai, between the 7th and the 16th centuries. Much of what we know about African states in the 14th century comes from the writing of Abu Abdalla Ibn Battuta, a famous 14th century explorer, who spent almost 30 years travelling through the Islamic world, including northern Africa, India, Central Asia, China and the Middle East.

  The Chinese Century (AD 650 – 750)

  While Europe was mired in darkness, China was very much at the forefront of civilisation on earth. After the collapse of the Han Dynasty in AD 220, much of China was united again only in 581 under the Sui Dynasty. While, this dynasty was short-lived, it lay the foundations for one of the longest enduring empires in Chinese history and possibly the greatest empire of the medieval world – the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

  With enlightened and leadership and efficiently run and powerful armies that subdued its neighbours in the north and northwest, China thrived. Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and Persian cultures and religions were absorbed by the court and tourists and commerce flooded into the capital, Chang’an (modern day Xi’an), which rapidly became the largest city in the world. Such were the advancements in art, literature and poetry that early 8th century China is traditionally regarded as the Golden Age of Chinese history. It was also during this time that tea became established as the national drink of China.

  The Tang Dynasty suffered a number of natural disasters and, like the Sui dynasty that preceded it, eventually became less tolerant and more divided. It subsided into anarchy and eventually collapsed completely.

  The Islamic Golden Age (8th–11th Centuries)

  In the Middle East, the new Islamic dynasty came to be known as the Abbasid Caliphate and is synonymous with the golden age of Islam. The Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdad and through trade with the East and through its agricultural wealth, the city soon became one of the richest citie
s in the world. It remained the political and cultural capital of the Islamic world from that time until the Mongol invasion in 1258.

  Great wealth encouraged the Abbasids to support learning and the arts; under a succession of great caliphs in the 8th and 9th centuries – predominantly under the caliphs al-Mansur, al-Rashid, and al-Mamoun – significant efforts were directed towards gathering knowledge from around the world. This created the conditions for the great flowering of Muslim culture and intellectual achievement in the caliphate between the 9th and 11th centuries.

  During this period Islamic lands were more open, cultured, sophisticated and richer than any kingdom in the West, where there remained a suspicion of learning that was not considered religious in essence. As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.’29

  The Abbasids encouraged a great interest in the writings of the ancient Greek world. Caliph al-Mamoun opened the Bayt al-Hikmah, or ‘House of Wisdom’, where scholars from different lands gathered and studied. Books on mathematics, meteorology, mechanics, astronomy, philosophy, medicine and many other subjects were translated into Arabic from Hebrew, Greek, Persian and other languages, thereby preserving the ancient classics that were of little or no interest to the barbarians in the West. In fact, a number of these works are known to us today only through Arabic translations.

  Legend has it that the Muslims learned how to make paper from a Chinese artisan captured in battle in the mid-8th century. Whether or not this is true, paper was clearly in use in Muslim lands by the 8th century and this only served to aid the rapid spread of ideas and knowledge. They even had a book trade while many Europeans were still writing on animal skins or even bark.

  The commands of the Qur’an helped fuel many inventions. For example, Muslims were required to pray to Mecca five times a day. In order to do this they needed to know the time and the direction in which to pray – information that could only be understood through scientific enquiry. Improvements in map-making and navigation were just two of the many outcomes fuelled by the demands of the Qur’an.

  As Jonathan Lyons explains in his book, ‘The House of Wisdom’, ‘Koranic injunction to heal the sick spurred developments in medicine and the creation of advanced hospitals.’30 Christians viewed illness and disease such as the plague as divine punishment to be cured by such acts as persecuting Jews and scourging the body, while the Muslims looked for physical causes that could be treated. Lyons further explains that ‘western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism in contrast to the Arab’s advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology and epidemiology. Westerners had no knowledge of ‘hygiene’ and sanitation’.31 As a result, the first hospitals were established in Baghdad, and their learnings subsequently transmitted to Europe, rather than vice-versa.

  In the 11th century Ibn Sina, a Persian writer known in the West as ‘Avicenna’ wrote a vast treatise on medicine, bringing together all the medical knowledge of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic world available at that time. This was referred to widely in medical facilities of Christian Europe right up until the 17th century.

  The Islamic culture that developed over in Al-Andalus was dramatically different from that which grew around the Abbasid Caliphate. Not to be outdone, after AD 900, the Umayyad emirate attracted scholars from the East in a deliberate attempt to compete with the Abbasids, thereby creating their own golden age in Cordoba. ‘At its prime, the Muslim Emirate of Al-Andalus with its capital at Cordoba, became the most prosperous, stable, wealthiest and most cultured state in Europe.’32 Indeed, much of the knowledge from the Muslim world passed to the rest of Europe through present-day Spain.

  Charlemagne (AD 742–814)

  Meanwhile, in western Europe, the Frankish kingdom reached its apogee under the grandson of Charles Martel, Carolus Magnus, better known by his Gallic name, Charlemagne. Crowned sole king of the Franks in AD 771 at the age of 29, he is often recognised as the greatest king of the European Early Middle Ages, and with good reason: he united the Frankish tribes and kingdoms in the West into the largest European empire since Rome, an empire which included much of present-day France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium Switzerland, Austria, Poland and Italy.

  Charlemagne was rewarded for being on good terms with the Pope, whom the Franks had helped on more than one occasion, by being crowned Roman emperor in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome on Christmas Day in AD 800. Although Charlemagne reigned for 46 years his empire was short lived; his son split the empire into three parts – one for each of his own sons – and the result was an empire divided into numerous feudal states and threatened by enemies on its frontiers – Muslims to the south, Slavs to the east and Vikings to the north.

  One of Charlemagne’s accomplishments was to bring back to public consciousness the idea of a renewed and reinvigorated Roman Empire. While his immediate successors failed to do justice to the title, the coronation of the German king, Otto I, by Pope John XII in AD 962, marks the beginning of an unbroken line of emperors that lasted for the next eight centuries, nominally ruling a territory encompassing most of present-day Germany and parts of Italy. In 1157, Frederick I added the word ‘Holy’ to ‘Roman Empire’ in recognition of his role as defender of the faith.

  German sovereigns who ruled over a confederation of hundreds of independent entities, large and small, held this title at all times. The largest of these ruling families was the Austrian House of Habsburg, with which the title stayed from 1452 until 1806. Looking back on the Empire in the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, rightly commented that it was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire’.

  Viking and Norman Invasions (AD 793–1066)

  In AD 793, while Charlemagne was doing his best to rule his vast kingdom in Europe and while the Abbasid Caliphate was blossoming in the East, a group of sea warriors – or Vikings – from Scandinavia landed on the small island of Lindisfarne off the east coast of England. After summarily butchering the local population and robbing the monastery of its treasures, they departed. This marked the beginning of a large number of raids throughout Europe, raids that gradually grew in both magnitude and frequency.

  The key advantage the Vikings had was the element of surprise; their boats had shallow keels, allowing them to penetrate farther up rivers than other boats of the time. Not only were they skilled sailors, but also ruthless warriors.

  The Vikings were also explorers, traders and settlers, and in their wanderlust they travelled farther afield than any other Europeans, discovering Greenland and Iceland and even establishing a short-lived settlement on the northeast coast of America around AD 1000. This made the Vikings, not Columbus and his men, the first Europeans to land in America. In general, those travelling west – from present-day Denmark and Norway – were driven by the search for loot and conquest, while those travelling south – generally from present-day Sweden – were driven predominantly by trade, venturing south along the great rivers that conveniently flowed in a north-south direction and linked the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas.

  Those travelling south were known to the Arabs as the ‘Rus’, and were instrumental in establishing the principalities of Kiev in present-day Ukraine and Great Novgorod in present-day Russia. The development of trade around these cities laid the foundation for the Russian nation. The city of Kiev dominated the state of Kievan Rus for the next two centuries, and its trade links with Constantinople played a significant role in bringing the Eastern Orthodox religion to the area in AD 988.

  Vikings from Norway established a Norse kingdom in Ireland and a few decades later Danish conquerors settled in eastern England. Such were the attacks on France that, in AD 911, a Viking leader named Rollo, who had previously conquered parts of northern Fr
ance, was bribed with even more land to protect the Franks against further Viking incursions. This land eventually became Normandy and served as the launch pad for the invasion of England by Rollo’s great-great-great grandson, William the Conqueror, in 1066.

  Despite the valiant efforts of King Alfred33 of England to defend the island in the 9th century, the Anglo-Saxons were so weak that the Danish king, Canute, was able to combine the crowns of Denmark, Norway and England and create a large northern empire during the early part of the 11th century; however, as with most over-extended empires, that of Canute became too large to manage. When a Viking invasion force tried to invade northern England after the death of King Edward in 1066, it was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and expelled.

  The problem for the English was that the Battle of Stamford Bridge against invading Vikings in the north took place in the same month as the attack on England by the Normans in the south. William, the Duke of Normandy, had come to claim his right to the English throne. After defeating the Danes, Edward’s successor, King Harold, had to rush 200 miles south in order to defend the island against the Normans at the Battle of Hastings. Had the two invasions not occurred within one month of each other, the English may well have had a stronger and less exhausted army, thereby increasing their chances of repelling the Normans. But they didn’t. Harold was struck in the eye by an arrow, the English were defeated and a battle which involved only a few thousand men changed the course of English history, earning William of Normandy the epithet ‘William the Conqueror’. Importantly, 1066 was the last time the English fought a battle on their own soil against a European enemy.