Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  In the end, the fate of the empire came down to the wind. In summer 468, as Basiliskos closed on Carthage, the breezes should have been blowing westward along North Africa’s shore, pushing Basiliskos’ ships along. But at the last moment the wind shifted and trapped them against the coast. The Vandals sent burning hulks into the packed Roman vessels, just the tactics that the English would use against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Ancient ships, with their tinder-dry ropes, wooden decks, and cloth sails, could turn into infernos in seconds. Piled on top of one another, panicking to push the fireships away with poles, and with no room to escape, the Romans lost all order. The Vandals came in for the kill, and it was all over.

  In Chapter 5 I talked about the great-man theory of history, which holds that it is unique geniuses, such as Tiglath-Pileser of Assyria, not grand impersonal forces, such as the Old World Exchange, that shape events. The other side of the great-man coin is the bungling-idiot theory of history: What, we have to ask, would have happened had Basiliskos had the wits not to get trapped against the coast?* He probably would have retaken Carthage, but would that have restored the Italy–North Africa fiscal axis? Maybe; the Vandals had been in Africa for less than forty years, and the Roman Empire might have been able to rebuild economic structures quickly. Or then again, maybe not. Odoacer, king of the Goths, the strongest strongman in western Europe, already had his eye on Italy. In 476 he wrote to Zeno, the emperor in Constantinople, observing that the world no longer needed two emperors. Zeno’s glory was sufficient for everyone, Odoacer said, and he made a proposal: he would run Italy—loyally, of course—on Zeno’s behalf. Zeno understood full well that Odoacer was really announcing his takeover of Italy, but also knew it was no longer worth arguing about.

  And so the end of Rome came, not with a bang but a whimper. Would Zeno have been any better placed to defend Italy if Basiliskos had recovered Carthage than he actually was in 476? I doubt it. By this point preserving a Mediterranean-wide empire was beyond anyone’s power, and the fifth century’s frenzied maneuvering, politicking, and killing could do little to change the realities of economic decline, political breakdown, and migrations. The classical world was finished.

  SMALLER WORLDS

  The Eastern and Western cores had each split in two. In China, the Eastern Jin dynasty ruled the southern part of the old empire, but saw themselves as rightful heirs to the whole realm. Similarly, in the West a Byzantine Empire (so called because its capital, Constantinople, stood on the site of the earlier Greek city Byzantium) ruled the eastern part of the old Roman Empire but claimed its entirety (Figure 6.8).

  The Eastern Jin and Byzantine Empires remained high-end states, with bureaucrats, taxes, and salaried armies. Each boasted great cities and learned scholars, and the farms of the Nile and Yangzi valleys were richer than ever. But neither compared with the Roman and Han empires in their heydays. Their worlds were shrinking as northern China and western Europe slid out of the cores.

  Disease, migration, and war had dissolved the networks of managers, merchants, and money that had bound each of the earlier empires into a coherent whole. The new kings of fourth-century northern China and fifth-century western Europe were determinedly low-end, feasting with their long-haired warrior lords in the grand halls they had captured. These kings were happy to take taxes from conquered peasants, but without salaried armies to pay, they did not absolutely need this revenue. They were already rich; they were certainly strong; and trying to manage bureaucracies and extract regular taxes from their unruly followers often seemed more trouble than it was worth.

  Figure 6.8. The divided East and West: (a) the Eastern Jin and China’s major immigrant kingdoms, around 400 CE; (b) Byzantium and Europe’s major immigrant kingdoms, around 500 CE

  Many of the old, rich aristocratic families of northern China and the western Roman Empire fled to Jiankang or Constantinople with their treasures, but even more stayed amid the ruins of the old empires, perhaps holding their noses like Sidonius, and made what deals they could with their new masters. They swapped their silk robes for woolen pants, their classical poetry for hunting, and assimilated to the new realities.

  Some of those realities turned out to be quite good. The superrich aristocrats of former times, with estates scattered over the whole Han or Roman Empire, disappeared, but even with their properties restricted to a single kingdom, some fourth-and fifth-century landowners remained staggeringly wealthy. The old Roman and Chinese elites intermarried with their conquerors, and moved from the crumbling cities to great manors in the countryside.

  As the drift toward low-end states accelerated in the fourth century in northern China and the fifth in western Europe, kings allowed their noblemen to seize as rent the surpluses that peasants had formerly handed over to the taxman. If anything, these surpluses might have been growing as population fell and farmers could concentrate their efforts on the best lands. Countryfolk had lost few of the skills they had learned across the centuries and had indeed added new ones. Drainage techniques in the Yangzi Valley and irrigation in the Nile Valley improved after 300; ox-drawn plows multiplied in northern China; and seed drills, moldboard plows, and watermills spread across western Europe.

  But despite all the nobles’ ostentation and the peasants’ ingenuity, the steady thinning of the ranks of bureaucrats, merchants, and managers who had prospered so mightily under the Han and Roman empires meant that the larger economies kept on shrinking at both ends of Eurasia. These characters had often been venal and incompetent, but they really had performed a service: by moving goods around they capitalized on different regions’ advantages, and without these go-betweens, economies grew more localized and more oriented toward subsistence.

  Trade routes contracted and cities shrank. Southern visitors were shocked by the decay of cities in northern China, and in some parts of the old Roman Empire the decline was so sharp that poets wondered whether the great stone ruins decaying all around them could have been built by mortals at all. “Snapped rooftrees, towers tottering, the work of Giants,” reads an English verse of around 700 CE. “Rime [mold] scours gatetowers, rime on mortar; shattered are shower shields, roofs ruined. Age underate them.”

  In the first century CE the emperor Augustus had boasted that he had turned Rome from a city of brick to one of marble, but by the fifth century Europe reverted to a world of wood, with simple shacks thrown up in open spaces between the crumbling shells of old Roman town houses. Nowadays we know quite a lot about these humble homes, but when I started going on digs in England in the 1970s, excavators were still struggling to develop techniques careful enough to recover any traces of them at all.

  In this simpler world, coinage, counting, and writing lost their uses. With no one mining copper to supply their mints, the kings of northern China first tried reducing the metal content of their coins (to the point, some claimed, that the coins were so light they could float) and then stopped issuing coins altogether. Account-keeping and census-taking shriveled up and libraries rotted. It was an uneven process, and drawn out across centuries, but in most of northern China and western Europe population fell, thistles and forests reclaimed fields, and life grew shorter and meaner.

  PATIENCE AND PUSILLANIMITY

  How could this have happened? To most Easterners and Westerners, the answer was obvious: the old ways and old gods had failed.

  In China, as soon as the frontiers crumbled, critics had accused the Han of losing the mandate of heaven, millenarian healing cults had convulsed the land, and the most creative minds within the educated elite had begun questioning Confucian certainties. The “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a group of third-century freethinkers, became icons of a new sensibility, reportedly passing their days in conversation, poetry, music, drinking, and drugs rather than studying the classics and serving the state. According to one story, the sage Ruan Ji, caught in a scandalous breach of etiquette (walking unchaperoned with his sister-in-law), just laughed: “Surely you do not mean to suggest that li”—cust
om, the foundation of Confucianism—“applies to me?” He expanded on his theme:

  Have you ever seen the lice that inhabit a pair of pants? They jump into the depths of the seams, hiding themselves in the cotton wadding, and believe they have a pleasant place to live. Walking, they do not risk going beyond the edge of the seam; moving, they are careful not to emerge from the pants leg; and they think they have kept to the rules of etiquette. But when the pants are ironed, the flames invade the hills … then the lice that inhabit the pants cannot escape.

  What difference is there between the gentleman who lives within a narrow world and the lice that inhabit pants legs?

  The moral seriousness of Han court poets now appeared ludicrous; far better, said the new generation, to withdraw into pastoral, writing lyrical descriptions of gardens and forests, or even to become a hermit. Aesthetes who were too busy to retreat to the distant mountains might just play at being hermits in the gardens of their own villas, or—like Wang Dao, chief minister at the court in Jiankang around 300—could hire people to be hermits on their behalf. Painters began celebrating wild mountains, and in the fourth century the great Gu Kaizhi raised landscape to the status of a major art form. The Seven Sages and other theorists elevated form over content, studying the techniques of painting and writing rather than their moral message.

  This third-century revolt against tradition was largely negative, mocking and rejecting convention without offering positive alternatives, but toward the century’s end that changed. Eight hundred years earlier, while Confucianism and Daoism were just getting started in China, Buddhism had also been spreading across South Asia. The Old World Exchange brought Buddhism to Chinese attention, probably when Eastern and South Asian traders mingled in central Asia’s oases, and it is first mentioned in a Chinese text in 65 CE. A few cosmopolitan intellectuals took it up, but it long remained just one among many exotic philosophies washing in from the steppes.

  That changed in the late third century, thanks largely to the central Asian monk-translator Dharmaraksa. Traveling regularly between Chang’an and the great oasis of Dunhuang, he attracted Chinese intellectuals with new translations of Buddhist texts, putting Indian concepts into language that made sense in China. Like most Axial sages, the Buddha had written nothing down, which left endless scope for debate over what his message was. The earliest forms of Buddhism had emphasized disciplined meditation and self-awareness, but the interpretation that Dharmaraksa promoted, known as Mahayana Buddhism, made salvation less onerous. Dharmaraksa presented the Buddha not as a spiritual seeker but as the incarnation of an eternal principle of enlightenment. The original Buddha, Dharmaraksa insisted, was just the first in a series of Buddhas on this and other worlds. These Buddhas were surrounded by a host of other heavenly figures, particularly Bodhisattvas, mortals who were well on the way to enlightenment but had postponed nirvana to help lesser mortals perfect themselves and escape the cycle of rebirth and suffering.

  Mahayana Buddhism could get extreme. Most Buddhist sects believed that a Maitreya (“Future”) Buddha would one day lead the masses to liberation, but starting in 401 a stream of wilder-eyed Chinese devotees identified themselves as Buddhas and, teaming up with bandits, rebellious peasants, and/or disaffected officials, went on rampages intended to bring salvation to everyone right now. All ended bloodily.

  Mahayana Buddhism’s most important contribution, though, was to simplify traditional Buddhism’s burdensome demands and open salvation to all. By the sixth century all that the popular “Heaven-Man Teaching” required was for devotees to walk laps around statues of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, worship relics (especially the many teeth, bones, and begging bowls said to have belonged to the Buddha), chant, act compassionately, be self-sacrificing, and follow the Five Precepts (thou shalt not kill, steal, commit adultery, drink, or lie). Its teachers conceded that this would not actually lead to nirvana, but it would deliver health, prosperity, and upwardly mobile rebirth. The “Pure Land School” went further, claiming that when believers died, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, working with the Amitabha Buddha, would interrupt the cycle of rebirth and guide them to a Western Paradise where they could pursue nirvana away from the cares of this world.

  Indian seekers after nirvana regularly took to the road, begging as they went. Holy wanderers (as opposed to well-heeled hermit-poets) were alien to Chinese traditions, and did not catch on, but a second Indian path toward enlightenment—monasticism—did. Around 365, Dao’an—a native Chinese Buddhist trained as a Confucian, rather than a central Asian immigrant—drew up a monastic code to fit Chinese society. Monks would wear the tonsure and both monks and nuns took vows of chastity and obedience, earning their keep through labor while pursuing salvation through prayer, meditation, and scholarship. Monasticism could get as extreme as millenarian Buddhism: many monks and nuns injured themselves, imitating—in a small way—the Bodhisattvas’ self-sacrifice, and a few even burned themselves alive, sometimes before audiences of thousands, to redeem others’ sins. Dao’an’s great contribution, though, was to shape monasticism into a religious institution that could partly fill the organizational void created in China by the breakdown of state institutions in the fourth century. Monasteries and convents built watermills, raised money, and even organized defense. As well as being centers of devotion they became oases of stability and even islands of wealth as rich co-religionists gave them land and tenants and dispossessed peasants fled to their protection. Thousands of monasteries popped up in the fifth century; “Today,” an official wrote in 509, “there is no place without a monastery.”

  Buddhism’s conquest of China was remarkable. There could have been only a few hundred Buddhists in 65 CE; by the sixth century most Chinese—perhaps 30 million people—were believers. Yet astonishing as this is, at the other end of Eurasia another new religion, Christianity, was growing even faster.

  Classical traditions did not crumble as early in the West as in the East, perhaps because Rome’s frontiers held longer, and although Western healing cults did arise after the great epidemics of the 160s, they did not favor the kinds of violent revolution popular among Chinese versions. Yet the chaos of the third century did unsettle old ways in the West. Statues carved all over the empire bear silent witness to a new mood, abandoning the stately principles of classical art in favor of strangely proportioned forms with huge, upward-staring eyes, seemingly gazing on another, better place. New religions from the empire’s eastern margins—Isis from Egypt, the Undefeated Sun from Syria, Mithras (whose followers wallowed in bulls’ blood in underground chambers) perhaps ultimately from Iran, Christianity from Palestine—offered eternal life. People were asking for salvation from this troubled world, not rational explanation of it.

  Some philosophers responded to the crisis of values by trying to show that the scholarship of past centuries was still relevant. In their day, scholars such as Porphyry and Plotinus (the latter perhaps the greatest Western thinker since Aristotle) who reinterpreted the Platonic tradition to fit modern times were among the biggest names in the West, but increasingly thinkers were looking for entirely new answers.

  Christianity offered something for everyone in this troubled age. Like Mahayana Buddhism, it was a new twist on an old Axial Age idea, offering a version of Axial thought more in tune with the needs of the day. Christianity took over Judaism’s sacred books, announcing that its founder, Jesus, was the Messiah predicted there. We might call both Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity “second-wave” Axial religions, offering new kinds of salvation to more people than their first-wave predecessors and making the path toward salvation easier. Equally important, both new religions were ecumenical. Neither Jesus nor the Buddha belonged to a chosen people; they had come to save everyone.

  Jesus, like the Buddha, wrote no sacred texts, and as early as the 50s CE the apostle Paul (who never met Jesus) was struggling to get Christians to agree on a few core points about what Christianity actually was. Most followers accepted that they should be baptized
, pray to God, renounce other gods, eat together on Sundays, and perform good works, but beyond these basic premises, almost anything was possible. Some held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was merely the last (and lowest) in a series of prior gods. Others thought the world was evil and so God the Creator must be wicked too. Or maybe there were two gods, a malevolent Jewish one and Jesus’ wholly good (but unknowable) father. Or two Jesuses, a spiritual one who escaped crucifixion and a bodily one who died on the cross. Maybe Jesus was a woman, some suggested, and maybe women were equal to men. Maybe new revelations could overrule the old ones. Maybe Jesus’ Second Coming was imminent, in which case no Christian should have sex; maybe its imminence meant Christians should practice free love; or maybe only people who were martyred in horrible ways would go to heaven, in which case sex was irrelevant.

  The Buddha was widely believed to have been pragmatic about transcendence, recommending that people use whichever of his ideas helped and ignore the rest. Multiple paths to nirvana were not a problem. For Christians, however, getting into heaven depended on knowing who God and Jesus were and doing what they wanted, and so the chaos of interpretations forced believers into a frenzy of self-definition. In the late second century most came to agree that there should be bishops who would be treated as descendants of the original apostles with the authority to judge what Jesus meant. Preachers with wilder ideas were damned into oblivion, the New Testament crystallized, and the window on revelations closed. No one could tinker with the Good Book and no one could hear from the Holy Spirit unless the bishops said so; and no one had to renounce marital sex or be martyred, unless they wanted to.