by Lucy Inglis
In AD 312, Emperor Constantine, on campaign, saw a vision of a cross in the sky and heard a voice say, ‘By this sign, conquer.’75 He converted to Christianity, hitherto a proscribed and persecuted sect, and captured Byzantium. There, he would create a new Roman capital in the East: Constantinople. The Roman Empire was on the rise again, and with it, a new religion. Constantine’s conversion soon spread Christianity far into the western reaches of the empire, but there, the trail of opium in Europe is lost, and the Iron and Dark ages show little evidence for its existence in the West. For our purposes, the history of opium continues in the East.
Chapter Two
THE ISLAMIC GOLDEN AGE TO THE RENAISSANCE
Silk and Spice
The history of opium in the East does not start with the drug itself, but with the infrastructure that allowed its introduction, then gave it the opportunity to flourish. The foundation of the Silk Roads of China and the maritime spice routes to southern India put in place a transport network between East and West that dominated trade until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
Opium is associated inextricably with the history of China. Yet at the time of the Roman Empire, there is no evidence that the Chinese used opium at all, but rather, cannabis. The Pen Ts’ao Ching, or Divine Husbandman’s materia medica from the second century BC, listed over 300 different plant and mineral remedies, including the first known mention of the use of Cannabis sativa.1 Famed Chinese physician Hua Tao (c.AD 145–208) performed extensive surgeries after sedating the patient with a mixture of cannabis resin, datura and wine.2
China is also home to the history of one of the most extraordinary trading networks in the world, and one that became essential to the history of opium. The Silk Roads were a set of routes covering much of Eurasia and some parts of Africa. The name arises from the large-scale movement of silk west, and goods east, by the Han Chinese 2,000 years ago. Comprising two main routes, north and south, their various branch lines expanded and contracted according to wars and famines; some were large highways carrying camel caravans hundreds of animals strong, and some were little more than mule tracks. They didn’t carry only silk, but all manner of goods, including horses and spices, and they represent the trading not only of commodities, but cultural, social, economic, religious and political values.
The Greek historian Herodotus, born c.484 BC, noted that a road network already stretched from the coast of Asia Minor to ‘Babylon, Susa and Persepolis’ whose messengers could carry messages over 1,600 miles in a week, regardless of the weather. ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents them from accomplishing the task proposed to them with the very utmost speed,’ he wrote in admiration, and explained how the messages were ‘handed from one to the other, as in the torch-race among the Hellenes’.3 This was the Royal Road of Persian King Darius I (550–486 BC), an efficient extension of earlier trading roads, which used their model of regular staging posts offering shelter and safety, as well as respite and information.
Far to the east lay the Warring States of China, occupying a far smaller area than modern China, and situated on its eastern coast. Sophisticated early towns emerged around the fertile Yellow River Valley and its extensive coastline approximately 3,000 years ago, and in the millennium before, they were already recording the histories of their various dynasties with an advanced system of writing. These Chinese had been creating beautiful silks for 2,000 or perhaps 3,000 years by the time of the Roman Empire, but constraints upon production and safe travel meant that they were restricted, mainly, to aristocratic wearers.
The Han dynasty emerged in 206 BC and lasted until ad 220, and was the first time China operated under a central government. It was a period of both peace and prosperity under which the people flourished. Han is a name used for the ethnic group of northern China, and remains in use today. The early Han emperors were concerned with creating a political, philosophical and universal order, which included the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC).
Under the energetic and splendidly portly Emperor Wu (141–87 BC), the Han had made their greatest expansions. Wu, greedy for foreign goods and determined to find a magician who could grant him immortality, took on the northern nomad tribes of the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi. Both tribes were skilled horsemen, who used bows to fight and hunt from horseback, and were frequent raiders of Chinese traders and settlements. In 119 BC, after ten years of futile and expensive battling with the nomads, Wu succeeded in forcing the tribes back to the north and pushed west from Chang’an – now Xi’an – through the Gansu corridor towards Kashgar and the Pamir Mountains, forging the three main routes of the Northern Silk Road. At Kashgar, the road split into three again, towards the Black Sea, towards Merv in Persia and towards Balkh in Bactria.
The Bactrian camel, an animal astonishingly well suited to carrying large loads over long distances in extreme conditions, was the favoured means of transport over the Silk Roads. Originating from the wild camels near the ‘great bend of the Yellow River in north-western China through Mongolia to central Kazakhstan’, they were preferable to the Arabian camel because of their dual humps and superior hardiness, including the ability to close their nostrils in dust or sandstorms.4 They could ‘carry loads of 220–270 kgs some 30–40 kms daily, or 80–100 kms if pulling a loaded cart’, the equivalent to half their bodyweight, on average, amounting to a colossal amount of pulling power.5
This new route west also allowed Wu’s envoy, Zhang Qian (c.200–114 BC), to travel outside China, with his intrepid Xiongnu guide, Ganfu. It began badly in 138 BC when they were both captured by the Xiongnu and kept prisoner for ten years. After their escape, however, with the wife and son Zhang Qian had acquired during his captivity, they went on exploring the Tarim Basin, home to the deadly Taklamakan Desert. Qian and Ganfu returned to Wu’s court in 125 BC, after another period as unwilling guests of the Xiongnu, bringing back tales of other peoples, such as the Dayuans of the Tarim Basin, who were farmers and made ‘wine out of grapes’.6 Their adventures further south are also the first recorded accounts of Shendu, or India, in Chinese history, which he describes as ‘hot and damp’ and whose ‘inhabitants ride elephants when they go in battle’.7 Their explorations laid the foundation for the Southern Silk Road, the branch line of which went off at Yarkand across the Karakoram Pass to Leh and Srinagar to reach northern India.
The Han period was also when Chinese craftsmen were creating silk of such beauty and desirability that, when coupled with the creation of stable trade routes, international demand flourished. But, as one contemporary historian noted, ‘while Chinese silk poured out of the country, all that came in return was jewels and exotic fruits, luxury goods destined for the enjoyment of the rich alone’.8 The Han Confucianists were unhappy with this seeming imbalance that new trade was bringing to China and called for a period of isolationism to restore balance to the country, a theme that persists in modern times.
Rome, meanwhile, increasingly greedy and sophisticated, was looking east for luxuries. It was already familiar with the delicious pistachios and dates of Persia, Indian spices, and cloth and essential oils from Africa, but as silk began to appear from China, they seized upon it as the newest luxury, although, for many Roman soldiers, their first sight of silk was associated more with fear than with pleasure. Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that high-quality silk was first seen by the Roman army in 53 BC, as the stunning banners of the Parthian army unfurled at the Battle of Carrhae.
It was a terrible defeat for Rome, one of the worst in the empire’s history, and it was not only Carrhae that meant Romans were mixed in their reaction to silk: some of the old guard saw it as an immoral luxury. For where the Chinese had used silk to make structured, elaborate and above all modest court robes, Rome had put it to an altogether different use. Seneca the Younger (3 BC to AD 65) was furious – ‘Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner wit
h his wife’s body’ – and Pliny the Elder raged, ‘So manifold is the labor employed, and so distant is the region of the globe drawn upon, to enable the Roman maiden to flaunt transparent clothing in public’.9 But the outrage of these austere philosophers meant nothing to the thousands of merchants already making their living on the Silk Roads.
It was not only goods that passed along these trade routes, but people too. African-born Roman historian Florus described how foreign envoys came to visit the first Roman emperor, Augustus, between 27 BC and AD 14. The Chinese came, and then the Indians, ‘bringing presents of precious stones and pearls and elephants, but thinking all of less moment than the vastness of the journey which they had undertaken, and which they said had occupied four years. In truth it needed but to look at their complexion to see that they were people of another world than ours.’10
The Indian diplomatic mission was a grand undertaking, but many of those who travelled the Silk Roads did so involuntarily. Ten thousand soldiers were taken prisoner by the Parthians at Carrhae and sent to man the eastern frontier.11 Roman inscriptions from the second or third century AD in a cave complex in eastern Uzbekistan, attributed to soldiers from Apollo’s Fifth Legion, show just how far from home people found themselves, courtesy of this extensive road network.12
Like the Silk Roads, the spice routes to the east coast of Africa and the west coast of India opened up around the first century BC. Business between Alexandria and the East became extensive when the Roman occupation of Egypt in 30 BC caused a rise in trade with both Africa and India, the main commercial centres of which were 3,000 nautical miles away.
The Red Sea was tiresome to navigate because of the perilous shoals that meant ships could travel only by day, putting in at night for safety. Once at the Bab al Mandeb, the gateway to the Arabian Sea, they had a long, if straightforward journey down the east African coast. There and back, via Zanzibar, would mean they returned home in around two years, laden with tortoiseshell, ivory, pearls and incense, as well as spices. But western India’s Malabar Coast was the centre of the spice trade, and the spices it produced were quickly in huge demand, particularly pepper. The ancient port city of Muziris, located near modern Cochin, was a centre of this trade, and contained small Roman and Jewish colonies. A guide for mariners which appeared around AD 60, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, indicated the scale of the trade: ‘Muziris, of the same kingdom, abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia and by the Greeks.’ The author of the Periplus credited first-century BC navigator Hippalus for finding the direct sea route to the west coast of India. Previously, sailors had hugged the coastline in dhows, putting in regularly to make trading stops, much like the Silk Roads traders, but the Hippalus route made it possible for the sturdy 1,000-ton Roman trading ships, with their short masts and large square sails, to hove straight across the Arabian Sea. The traders set out from Egypt to both Africa and India in July, when the south-west monsoon wind – also known as Hippalus – blew in. Pliny the Elder, though as dismissive of the goods available in India as he was of silk, recorded that, in good conditions, the journey could be done in forty days from the Gulf of Aden.13 Modern maritime historians have calculated that it could be achieved in as little as twenty.14 Despite this, the sailors would then have to wait until December to begin their return journey, when the north-west monsoon winds would be strong enough to carry them home. A round trip to Malabar or Gujarat took a year, but it was far more dangerous than the African voyage.
The maritime route across the Arabian Sea had one enormous advantage: it cut out almost all the middlemen. There were Jewish and Arab settlements on both the north and south coasts of western India, almost all of whom were merchants brokering and trading goods between Indians and the West, but the endless exchanges of the land routes, each with their added mark-ups, meant that although the sea route may have been riskier and required more initial investment, the returns were greater.
On land, the Romans traded with the Iranian Parthians, when not fighting them. After the Parthians, from 224 to 651, from the east of Syria and almost all the way to the Hindu Kush, and stretching far into both south and north, was the empire of the Sassanids. They were Zoroastrians and worshipped one god, Ahura Mazda, who had handed down his wisdom to his prophet Zoroaster. They prized urban life, and were together under the shananshah – the ultimate leader – who ruled absolutely, but with great style and charisma. They believed in the principles of Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta, or ‘good words, good thoughts, good deeds’, and were keen to absorb both ideas and people from other cultures into their growing towns and cities. Personal dress was important to all but the lowest in society and textiles flourished, including, of course, exquisite silk garments. The Sassanids were perhaps the first truly international consumers: they had money, taste and style. They had already inherited a lucky break in terms of geography and a changing world order, and they knew it. The Letter of Tansar, a Sassanid propaganda document of the sixth century, states that their land lies happily ‘in the midst of other lands, and our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings’.15
Many people of the Sassanian Empire were also shrewd. The Sogdians, an Iranian people whose territory within the empire centred on Samarkand, situated on the Silk Road from Kashgar to Merv, traded so extensively between Turkey, the rest of Iran and the East, that the word Sogdian came to mean merchant. The Uyghur people of China, originally settled in the eastern regions of the Tarim Basin, began to spread west along the Silk Roads, mirroring the Sogdian move east.
The silk and associated luxury trades had a huge effect on early Persia, but the opportunity for business was about to move westwards.
Byzantium, which became Constantinople and is now Istanbul, was about to fall to the Romans. Byzantium, built by the Greeks during a period of colonial expansion some 800 years before, was perfectly positioned for trade between the Mediterranean and the east, sitting as it did on the narrow strip of land joining Europe to Turkey. In 324, Emperor Constantine, desperate to rejuvenate the Roman Empire, had conquered the city and renamed it Constantinople, rebuilding it over the next six years and consecrating it as a Christian city in 330. A combination of position at the crossroads between East and West, the opening up of the Silk Roads, and Roman organization and fortification resulted in Constantinople rapidly becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities in the world. There were other cities with strong trading histories, such as Alexandria and Damascus, but they paled in comparison to the new imperial capital.
Constantinople merchants traded with the Sassanids in order to do business with the wider East. This is seen in coin distribution: no European coins have been found in China before the 530s and 540s, when Byzantine ones begin to appear. However, many earlier Chinese coin finds, sometimes numbering hundreds of pieces, were minted in the Sassanid Empire, and had probably been carried east by Sogdian merchants.
The Parthians were a people for whom self-improvement came not only through wealth, but also science, literature and art. Many of them spoke and wrote in Pahlavi, a prestige language of its time, and the ancestor of modern Persian, but they also worked with texts written by Coptic, Greek, Latin, Indian and Chinese scholars. The trading of goods with other peoples, their extensive travel networks and the confluence of international influences, both Western and Eastern, meant that during the Sassanid period, Parthia developed into not only a rich and cosmopolitan trading area, but also a centre for learning, and medicine.
In the Avesta, the sacred texts of the early Persians, there are three types of medicine: the knife, the plants and the sacred word. Adherence to the latter offered the best chance of avoiding the former. Running through the earliest Persian writings on medicine is a sense of wonder attached to their long history as a unique people and an ancient civilization, linked inextricably with their Zoroastrian beliefs. Early physicians attributed the introduction of medicine to the world to Jamšid, fourth of the old Persian kings, who reigned from a flying, jewel-bedecke
d throne that hurtled through the cosmos on special occasions. He ruled a ‘rude and barbarous’ land, but told the people to get out and build houses, and not to be content with cave-dwelling, and to organize themselves into professions.16 His wife introduced alcohol to mankind, by mistake, after an accident with some bad grapes. Jamšid was also in possession of a holy cup containing a mysterious elixir of immortality, which when imbibed allowed the drinker to see the seven heavens of the universe, and to observe truth.17 It may also account for the flying throne.
The recipe for this divine elixir, known as haoma in Persia and soma in India’s vedic tradition, was supposed to represent a trinity of god, plant and drink. Botanical remains found in holy vessels and strainers indicate it was a decoction of either Papaver somniferum, or Cannabis sativa, mixed with the ephedra plant.18 Haoma services were still carried out near the Iranian poppy-town of Yazd in the late twentieth century. Whatever the ingredients of these mystical solutions, they are a common element across European and Asian religions, and Persia was the place where these religions met soon after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century.
By that time, Nestorian-Christian and Greek scholars, fleeing oppression east and west, came to Sassanid cities to study; one of their foremost subjects was medicine. By the sixth century, the city of Gondeshapur was the intellectual centre of Persia and home to the first medical school of the ancient world. There had been other academies teaching medicine, such as those at Nalanda in India from 427 and Nisibis in Turkey from 489, but Gondeshapur included practical teaching from practising physicians, rather than just studying texts. One of the first true universities, it accommodated students and teachers from Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Manichaeism. Of all of these, the Nestorian-Christians were the most influential before Islam. Each of their bishoprics contained a school, library and hospital, and there was a strong emphasis on teaching and sharing of knowledge. With its curriculum of astronomy, astrology, mathematics and science, as well as medicine, and its exiled Nestorian-Christian monk tutors, the Academy of Gondeshapur was the origin of the legend of the wise monk-teacher.