by Andrew Marr
Many others would follow Edward Gibbon in calling this the greatest period of civilized peace the world had known to that point, despite the disappearance of anything like democracy, the slave revolts and the distant clash of war on the tribal margins. Yet as Gibbon’s work tried to explain, this disciplined world would fragment and collapse. Many theories have been offered as to why. One that was not discussed in the eighteenth century can be added: climate change. Now, our better knowledge of Chinese history of the time makes the argument for it more persuasive. The world grew considerably colder between AD 200 and 500, after the so-called Roman warm period that had spread farming north and east through Europe and increased food production.
This climatic shift not only hit farmers and produced periodic famines, it forced the tribes of central Asia to move, or else die. They were highly mobile, and so they moved, shoving earlier migrants west until they broke into the empire. As noted, migration and trade spread unfamiliar viruses, and appalling plagues broke out across the Roman world, attacking every generation after the 180s. At the worst times, in the 250s, thousands were dying in Rome every day.18 Hunger, disease and the challenge of armed and desperate migrants were factors that Roman Europe struggled to cope with. Han China suffered from the same perils – poor harvests, plagues and the consequent pressure of nomad tribes, in their case the Xiongnu. And although the Han had nothing like the disruptive impact of Christian zealots to cope with, they faced huge peasant rebellions and began to lose ground faster than did the Roman emperors.
Their empire would break apart, and a period of semi-anarchy and ferocious disputes between rival claimants for the Mandate of Heaven would ensue. Both the Western and the Chinese empires suffered severe inflation and a shrinkage of agriculture, and both suffered invasion and revolt. In China, the Han state broke into three kingdoms, those of the Wei, the Wu and the Shu Han. But this was only the beginning: the north collapsed, and small, unstable invader states replaced Chinese rule. The Jin dynasty, still claiming the Mandate of Heaven, retreated to the south and clung on, rather as the Byzantines clung on to Roman ways. The original promise of Zheng, the First Emperor, of an unchanging central state, which had been pursued with skill by the Han, now remained only a dream, an aspiration, as was the Holy Roman Empire. But unlike in the West, it was a dream Chinese rulers would re-establish.
Climate, living standards, economic development and politics cannot ultimately be disentangled. Measurements of historic pollution (and therefore of human activity) in ice cores and lake sediments show a sharp decline after AD 200, as both the Mediterranean and the Chinese civilizations shrivelled. Ian Morris writes that in the Roman world ‘bones from cattle, pigs and sheep become smaller and scarcer after 200, suggesting declining standards of living, and by the 220s wealthy city-dwellers were putting up fewer grand buildings and inscriptions’.19
In the West, the decline of the old gods of classical times led Roman citizens to turn to Egyptian cults, beliefs going back to Zoroaster in Persia and extreme versions of Greek philosophies, mixed with new faiths arriving from the Middle East. Augustan stability, all those roads and ports, spread these belief systems faster. Some seem to have mingled ancient beliefs with Buddhist and Hindu thinking – the ‘New Age’ faiths of two millennia ago. Public culture had become cold and brittle, empty of deep human meaning. In China, there had been uprisings by Daoist religious groups, such as the ‘Five Pecks of Rice’ movement, which declared that a deep corruption had infected the court. It called for equal distribution of land, and proclaimed the need for personal moral reformation.
That too may sound familiar. The urge to find a personal meaning produced an urge for confrontation and martyrdom in China, as well as the West. But ideas in the West and East were different enough to take them in different directions. One idea, above all others, was to shake the Roman world, leaving the Chinese world untouched.
We return to monotheism. Cleopatra, on her way home from visiting Antony, had stopped en route to meet a local king. He later boasted that she had tried it on with him. The king was Herod, whose rule would become notorious around the world, thanks to the story of a thinker about to be born in Judah.
The Agitator Triumphant
Not even great conquerors can always foresee the results of their actions. One of the Greek cities taken under Roman rule by Pompey was the bustling Asian settlement called Tarsus, now in Turkey. This was where Antony had summoned Cleopatra and had been awed by her golden barge. Its people had been granted Roman citizenship; among them was a thriving industry of tent-makers, including Greek-speaking Jews, and to one of these families, of the tribe of Benjamin, a boy called Saul was born. Saul would become St Paul, declared by many theologians to be the real founder of Christianity as a world religion, and the transmitter of that religion to people all around the western Mediterranean, Jew and Gentile both.
Few have had as much influence on mankind as the Tarsus tent-maker, who was alive at the same time as Christ but who never met him. Paul had been, as he freely admits in one of his famous epistles, an outstandingly pious Jew, frequently in Jerusalem to study the Law of Moses. He tells the Galatians, who had just founded a church, how much damage he had done to early Christians and ‘how I stood out among other Jews of my generation, and how enthusiastic I was for the traditions of my ancestors’. He may have been present for the first Christian martyrdom, of Stephen, stoned to death for declaring Jesus to have been the Messiah, a few years after the Crucifixion.
A man with more than a touch of fanaticism, Paul was a member of the populist Pharisee sect, and had done his best to round up and crush this small but irritating local heresy. Partly because he was a Roman citizen, free to move around the imperial world, and a Greek-speaker who could easily converse with its educated people, Paul would do more than anyone else to turn the little local problem into a global faith, a global movement, one that would help bring an end to the old Roman world and transform the West.
His letters to the various Christian communities that he helped found are the earliest Christian writings to have survived; the seven epistles generally considered certainly to be by him date from no more than twenty years after Christ’s death. They tell us about Paul himself only in asides; much of our biographical knowledge comes from his friend Luke in The Acts of the Apostles, compiled perhaps fifty years later. Paul and Luke were both admirers of Rome, and writing in the aftermath of the tragic Jewish revolt against its rule. Though they were Jews, the thrust of their work was to take what had been Jesus’s message to fellow Jews and pass it out into the rest of the world – to Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and anyone else who would listen, a light to lighten the Gentiles. One biblical scholar argues that without Paul, the Nazarenes – as the early Christians were called – would have remained ‘a Jewish sect which sought only to remain within Judaism and did not intend to found a new religion’.20
Famously, Paul was travelling to Damascus from Jerusalem to root out Nazarenes when ‘there came a light from heaven all round him. He fell to the ground and then he heard a voice saying, “Saul. Saul, Why are you persecuting me?” He asked who the voice was: “I am Jesus . . .” ’21 Blinded, he was led into the city to await further instructions. Albeit reluctantly, a member of the Nazarene church in Damascus, Ananias, restored his sight and baptized him into the new faith. Paul says that then, chosen by God, he hurried off to Arabia to consider his new life. Luke, on the other hand, says that he stayed in Damascus and learned about Christianity from the believers there.
It has often been said that Saul suffered some kind of epileptic fit or hallucination, and that his moral extremism simply flipped sides from Judaism to Christ. Believers, of course, would say that Christ did appear to him. But the tent-maker and former persecutor was shaken enough to change his life and his name – to the Roman, Paul – and to spend twelve to fifteen years criss-crossing the Middle East in a furious eruption of energy that would only end when he was executed in Rome during one of Nero’s crackdowns
on religious troublemakers. By his own account, he was at various times whipped nearly to death, stoned, shipwrecked; starving, thirsty, chilled to the bone; in danger from pagans and Jews, brigands and wild animals, ‘so-called brothers’ and natural perils. He had some mysterious but apparently disgusting illness and was frequently imprisoned.
Paul tried all the time to keep friendly connections with his old Jewish faith, and engaged in confrontations with Jews as he attempted to explain why Christ’s message superseded their beliefs. He baptized uncircumcised Greeks and Romans, including a centurion. The single, mobile and class-blind God of the Jews, whose worship had already been spread, although thinly, throughout the classical world, would now have another attribute: he would become everybody’s God.
The timing was almost perfect. Two years after the fires in Rome and Paul’s death, reputedly by beheading (since he was a Roman citizen, he was spared crucifixion), the Jewish revolt against Rome began, with riots in Caesarea. It had been sparked by religious arguments and protests over taxes, but as the legions converged on the mutinous cities it became a full-scale rebellion that would be put down with exemplary Roman savagery. After a long and heroic siege Jerusalem fell to the legions in the year 70, and its inhabitants were either killed or sold as slaves. Herod’s famed Second Temple was destroyed, and the Jews were to remain scattered until modern times. Had the Nazarenes been at that point still a Jewish sect based in Jerusalem, their religion would probably have been snuffed out and never heard of again, except by religious scholars. The faction of Christ-worship that was exclusively Jewish, originally led by Jesus’s brother James, was indeed scattered in the ruins of the revolt, and soon disappeared from history.
Gentile ‘Christianity’ (the word appeared first in Antioch, used by Latin-speakers as an insult) was smuggled into the wider Mediterranean just in time. Its infancy was that of a rebel child of Judaism, but as Paul’s writings show again and again, it was forced to define itself against traditional Jewish thought. Though he ended up on a Roman executioner’s block, Paul admired the Roman state. He deliberately chose important Roman centres like Corinth, Antioch and Philippi to spread his message, and may well have hoped to win substantial support in Rome itself when sent there as a prisoner. Christians would be persecuted and exiled for a long time to come, but the possibility of an eventual deal between secular Roman power and the new religion could be glimpsed from early on. Unlike the rebellious Jewish leaders calling themselves Zealots, or the leaders of the revolt of 66–71, Jesus had shunned politics and spoke of giving Caesar what was Caesar’s. Paul, a good Roman citizen, agreed.
Because Paul’s reshaping of the Nazarene message was so influential, he has been blamed for much that followed – for Christian sucking-up to worldly power, for misogyny, fear of sex, intolerance. He was capable of great humane poetry: ‘Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful.’ He was trying to get his message across to traditional communities at a time of huge turbulence, almost hysteria. Like his fellow believers, he thought the Messiah would return in glory, very soon, almost certainly in his own lifetime, to save believers and condemn the rest. Having faith, and concentrating hard on it at the expense of almost everything else, was an urgent necessity that could not be put off.
In the same letter to the Corinthians that contains his hymn to quiet love, he also warns Christians that ‘our time is growing short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . those who are enjoying life should live as though they had nothing to laugh about; those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own . . . I say this because the world as we know it is passing away.’ His words show him to be a control freak, a man with a temper and an authoritarian streak, and convinced that there is little time to waste; yet he can also be kindly, self-critical and thoughtful. He can sound like a twentieth-century revolutionary, darting between cells and factions, trying to hold them to the ‘correct’ ideological line and deploying a mixture of threat and flattery – fire and brimstone with a dash of charismatic charm. It is hardly unknown for the convert to become the most zealous hardliner, or the revolutionary leader to show a weakness for self-dramatization.
After Paul’s death in Rome, and probably after the execution of St Peter there too – who is said to have requested upside-down crucifixion so that his death could not be compared to that of Jesus – a Christian community began to grow in the imperial capital. It was a time of great religious confusion. Judaism was reorganizing itself and different versions of Christianity were competing around the classical world. The scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out how odd it is that Rome, the centre of anti-Christian persecution, became the great Christian city, rather than Baghdad. Indeed, Christianity could easily have become an eastern rather than a western religion. Over the next centuries Christian communities saw robust growth in Egypt, in Syrian and Judean cities such as Antioch, Gaza and Caesarea, in Anatolia in what is now Turkey, and in Rome itself, where the Christians were largely migrants. But Christianity did not take root easily in North Africa or Greece: despite the help Paul gave to the Ephesians, Corinthians and Thessalonians, it is possible that all three Christian communities failed to survive.22 The well rooted Jewish communities and the common language of Greek had a lot to with the spread of the new religion; so too did the unifying effect of persecution. This seems a paradox, but many movements have been strengthened in their early stages by repression. From European Jews to Protestants to Islamists, the experience of repression, as the etymology of the word suggests, has meant a pressing-back, but also a pressing-together; it has intensified belonging and commitment.
Lines and Spirals: The Other Quarter
These stories have referred to, very roughly, three-quarters of the world’s human population at any one time – the quarter in the Roman world, the quarter ruled by the Chinese Han, and the quarter living in India under the Guptas and their successors. What of the rest?
In the Americas, civilizations were emerging that were several thousand years behind Eurasia in their development, but impressive in their own right. The city of Teotihuacán, in Mexico, possessed an array of pyramids and temples that the Egyptians would have admired; and the great Mayan civilization of Yucatán and Guatemala produced sophisticated writing and a superb calendar system based on the stars, which divided the world into very long periods of time. Its nearest equivalents had been produced in Mesopotamia, more than two millennia earlier.
But lacking wheels and many of the animals of Eurasia, the Mesoamericans would, in general, pass on few fresh ideas to world culture. They had talented builders and sculptors, but their religions were mainly darker, more blood-soaked and more pessimistic than those of the cultures across the Atlantic. When the Spanish eventually arrived, they were horrified by the Aztec cult of mass human sacrifice, so extensive that it had forged a new war-making style, based on capturing enemies in order for them to have their hearts torn out on Aztec altars. There was no moral or spiritual equivalent to a Kongzi or a Jesus native to the American cultures – an absence that is worth pondering on.
One theory has already been discussed: the different distribution of animals and plants, which made agriculture slower and left Mesoamerican cultures far behind their European rivals. Another, often cited, difference is in the geographical shape of the two human-colonized landmasses. Eurasia, curling around the globe from east to west, has fewer climatic differences than the north-to-south stretch of America, which would allow for easier transmission of cultures. Yet these reasons are clearly not enough on their own. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians certainly had a dark side to their imaginations, but grew nothing like the pessimistic, gore-splattered religions to the west of the Atlantic. And even if the American cultures were one to two millennia ‘behind’ the European and Chinese, by the 1400s you might have expected something to match the Greek golden age, or
the Jewish religious revolution. But there is nothing remotely similar.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in two other differences, which go a long way to explain the gap. One is geological, rather than merely geographical: the world’s tectonic plates are responsible for much greater instability in the Americas, including earthquakes and volcanoes. This may well have produced a darker human imagination, as people struggled to deal with a greater number of natural disasters (including the climatic cycles of the Pacific). These may have seemed inexplicable, other than as the massively punitive swipes of angry gods requiring to be placated. All through mankind’s story human sacrifice has been the ultimate gift to a truly scary deity. As recently and trenchantly argued by the Cambridge historian Peter Watson, this may have combined with the greater proportion of mind-altering or psychoactive drugs in the Americas to create a bleak, ecstatic theatre of pain and death, rather than religions in the European, or Indian, sense.23
The greatest contribution the American cultures would bring to the world would be mainly through the new plants they domesticated, the corn, tomatoes, cacao, potatoes and squash which would be so eagerly adopted by others, radically changing populations, as well as tastes, in Europe and Africa. The mostly lost culture of the pre-Roman Celts is in some ways more typical of the people living at the edges of the advanced empires. Whether in south Indian forests, Africa, the Russian steppe or the plains of northern America, the little evidence we have points to tribal groups retaining ancient shaman- and nature-centred beliefs, combined with some sophisticated farming technologies and, in some areas, creating small urban centres.