Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  As if this were not enough, an unpleasant new sickness was reported in Egypt in 541. People felt feverish and their groins and armpits swelled. Within a day or so the swellings blackened and sufferers fell into comas and delirium. After another day or two most victims died, raving with pain.

  It was the bubonic plague. The sickness reached Constantinople a year later, probably killing a hundred thousand people. The risk of death was so high, Bishop John of Ephesus claimed, that “nobody would go out of doors without a tag bearing his name hung round his neck.”

  Constantinopolitans said the plague came from Ethiopia, and most historians agree. The bacillus had probably evolved long before 541 around Africa’s Great Lakes and become endemic among fleas on black rats in Ethiopia’s highlands. Red Sea traders must have carried plenty of Ethiopian rats to Egypt over the years, but because the plague-bearing fleas are only really active when temperatures are between 59 and 68°F, Egypt’s heat created an epidemiological barrier—until, apparently, the late 530s.

  What happened then is disputed. Tree rings indicate several years of uncommon cold, and Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon watchers of the skies recorded a great comet. Some historians think its tail created a dust veil, lowering temperatures and letting the plague out of its box. Others think volcanic ash was responsible for lowering temperatures. Others still think dust veils and volcanoes have nothing to do with anything.

  Yet when all is said and done, neither comets, nor strategy, nor even loose morals by themselves drove Western social development down in the sixth century. The fundamental contrast between East and West, which determined how the shocks of war and disease affected development, was one of maps, not chaps. Justinian’s economy was ticking along nicely—Egyptian and Syrian farmers were more productive than ever, and merchants still carried grain and olive oil to Constantinople—but the West had nothing like the East’s booming new frontier of rice paddies. When Wendi conquered south China he deployed at least 200,000 troops; at the height of his Italian war, in 551, Justinian could find just 20,000. Wendi’s victories captured south China’s great wealth, but Justinian’s merely won poorer and often war-ravaged lands. Given several generations, a reunited Roman Empire might conceivably have turned the Mediterranean back into a trade superhighway, opened a new economic frontier, and turned social development around; but Justinian did not have that luxury.

  Geography doomed Justinian’s heroic, vainglorious reconquest before it even began, and his efforts probably only made that doom worse. His troops turned Italy into a wasteland and the traders who fed them carried rats, fleas, and death around the Mediterranean.* The plague slackened after 546, but the bacillus had taken root, and until about 750 no year passed without an outbreak somewhere. Population fell, perhaps by one-third. As had happened when the Old World Exchange unleashed epidemics four hundred years earlier, mass mortality initially rebounded to some people’s benefit; with fewer workers around, wages rose for those who survived. But that, of course, only made times harder for the rich (in a remarkably unchristian aside, Bishop John of Ephesus complained in 544 that all these deaths had made the cost of laundry services outrageous), and Justinian responded by pegging wages at preplague levels. This apparently accomplished nothing. Land was abandoned, cities shrank, taxes dwindled, and institutions broke down. Soon everyone was worse off.

  Over the next two generations Byzantium imploded. Britain and much of Gaul had dropped out of the Western core in the fifth century; war-torn Italy and parts of Spain followed in the sixth; and then the tidal wave of collapse, rolling slowly from northwest to southeast, engulfed the Byzantine heartland, too. Constantinople’s population fell by three quarters, its agriculture, trade, and revenues broke down, and the end looked nigh. By 600 only one man still dreamed of remaking the Western core: King Khusrau II of Persia.

  Rome, after all, was not the only Western empire that could be re-created. Back around 500 BCE, when Rome was still a backwater, Persia had united most of the Western core. Now, with Byzantium on its knees, Persia’s time seemed to have come again. In 609 Khusrau broke through the decaying frontier fortresses and the Byzantine army melted away. He took Jerusalem in 614, and with it Christianity’s holiest relics: fragments of the True Cross on which Jesus had been crucified, the Holy Lance that had pierced his side, and the Sacred Sponge that had refreshed him. Another five years brought Khusrau Egypt, and in 626, ninety-nine years after Justinian had come to power, Khusrau’s armies gazed across the Bosporus at Constantinople itself. The Avars, nomadic allies he had recruited from the western steppes, swept through the Balkans and were poised to attack from the other shore.

  But Khusrau’s dreams collapsed even faster than Justinian’s. By 628 he was dead and his empire shattered. Ignoring the armies outside Constantinople’s walls, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius had “borrowed” gold and silver from the church and sailed off to the Caucasus, where he used the loot to hire his own nomadic cavalry from the Turkic* tribes on the steppes. Horsemen, he reasoned, were what mattered; and since Byzantium no longer had many, he would rent some. His hired Turks beat off the Persians sent to stop them and devastated Mesopotamia.

  This was all it took to send the tidal wave of collapses rolling over Persia, too. The ruling class fell apart. Khusrau’s own son locked him up and starved him, then surrendered the lands Khusrau had conquered, sent back the relics he had captured, and even accepted Christianity. Persia dissolved into civil war, going through eight kings in five years, while Heraclius was hailed as the greatest of all great men. “Immense joy and indescribable happiness seized the entire universe,” gushed one contemporary. “Let us all with united voice sing the angelic praises,” wrote another: “Glory in the highest to God, and peace on earth, goodwill to mankind.”

  The wild swings of fortune in the century after 533 were the death throes of the ancient Western empires. Absent a new economic frontier like China’s, Khusrau could no more turn around Western social development than had Justinian, and the harder each man tried, the worse he made things. The last of the Romans and the last of the Persians hollowed out the Western core with a century of violence, plague, and economic decline. Just a decade after Heraclius rode into Jerusalem in 630 to restore the True Cross to its rightful place, all their triumphs and tragedies had ceased to matter.

  THE WORD OF THE PROPHET

  Without knowing it, Justinian and Khusrau had been following very ancient pattern books. Their struggles to control the core destabilized it and once again drew in people from the margins. Khusrau brought Avars to Constantinople, Heraclius led Turks into Mesopotamia, and both empires hired Arab tribes to guard their desert frontiers, since that was cheaper than paying their own garrisons. The same thinking that had Germanized Rome’s borderlands and Xiongnuized China’s now Arabized Byzantium’s and Persia’s mutual boundary, and across the sixth century both empires became more and more involved with Arabia. Each built up Arab client kingdoms, Persia absorbed southern Arabia into its empire, and Byzantium’s Ethiopian allies invaded Yemen to balance this. Arabia was being drawn into the core, and Arabs were creating their own kingdoms in the desert, building oasis towns along trade routes, and converting to Christianity.

  The great Persian-Byzantine wars convulsed this Arab periphery, and when the empires fell apart, Arab strongmen battled over the ruins. In western Arabia, Mecca and Medina (Figure 7.6) fought through the 620s over trade routes, their war bands fanning out across the desert to find allies and ambush each other’s caravans. Old imperial frontiers meant little in this game, and by the time Medina’s leader took over Mecca in 630, his raiders were already fighting in Palestine. There Arabs loyal to Medina clashed with Arabs loyal to Mecca while other Arabs, paid by Constantinople, fought both groups.

  Most of this would have seemed familiar to, say, an Aramaean tribesman operating in these same desert margins back when the Egyptian and Babylonian empires had collapsed after 1200 BCE: it was simply what happened on the frontiers when states broke down. But o
ne thing would not have seemed familiar to the Aramaean. That was Medina’s leader, one Muhammad ibn Abdullah.

  Around 610, as Persia was beginning its cataclysmic war on Byzantium, this Muhammad had had a vision. The Archangel Gabriel had appeared and commanded: “Recite!” Muhammad, understandably flustered, had insisted he was no reciter, but twice more Gabriel had commanded him. Then words, unbidden, had come to Muhammad:

  Figure 7.6. Jihad: the Arabs almost reunite the Western core, 632–732. The arrows show the major Arab invasion routes.

  Recite! In the name of your Lord who created—created man from clots of blood.

  Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know.

  Muhammad thought madness or demons must have possessed him, but his wife convinced him otherwise. Across the next twenty-two years Gabriel returned again and again, sending Muhammad into shivering, sweating fits and comas and setting God’s words free from the prophet’s reluctant lips. And what words they were: their beauty, tradition says, converted people the instant they heard them. “My heart was softened and I wept,” said ’Umar, one of the most important converts. “Islam entered into me.”

  Islam—submission to God’s will—was in many ways a classic second-wave Axial religion. Its founder came from the margins of the elite (he was a minor figure in a nouveau riche trading clan) and the margins of empire; he wrote nothing down (the Koran, or “Recitations,” was assembled only after his death); he believed that God was unknowable; and he built on earlier Axial thought. He preached justice, equality before God, and compassion toward the weak. All this he shared with earlier Axial thinkers. But in another way, he was a whole new creature: an Axial warrior.

  Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism, or Christianity, Islam was born on the edge of collapsing empires and came of age amid constant warfare. Islam was not a religion of violence (the Koran is a good deal less bloody than the Hebrew Bible), but Muslims could not stand aloof from fighting. “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you,” Muhammad had said, “but do not attack them first. God does not love the aggressors”—or, as the American Muslim Malcolm X put it in the twentieth century, “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.” Compulsion had no place in spreading religion, but Muslims (“surrenderers” to God) were obliged to defend their faith whenever it was threatened—which, since they were pushing and plundering their way into collapsing empires at the same time as spreading the word, was likely to be quite often.

  Thus did Arab migrants find their own advantages of backwardness: the combination of salvation and militarism gave them organization and purpose in a world where both were scarce.

  Like many another peripheral people seeking a place in a core, Arabs claimed to have been born to it, as descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael. With their own hands, Muslims claimed, Abraham and Ishmael had built the Ka‘ba, Mecca’s holiest shrine; Islam was in fact Abraham’s original religion, from which Judaism had diverged. The Koran presented Judaism as simply the cousin of Islam; “Who,” it asked, “but a foolish man would renounce the faith of Abraham?” All the prophets, from Abraham to Jesus, were valid (although Jesus was no Messiah), and Muhammad was simply the final prophet, putting the seal on the Lord’s message and fulfilling the promise of Judaism and Christianity. “Our God and your God is one,” Muhammad insisted. There was no necessary conflict between the religions of the book: in fact, the West needed Islam.

  Muhammad sent letters to Khusrau and Heraclius explaining all this, but never heard back. No matter; Arabs kept moving into Palestine and Mesopotamia anyway. They came in war bands rather than armies, rarely more than five thousand and probably never more than fifteen thousand strong, hitting and running more than fighting pitched battles; but the few forces that resisted them were rarely much bigger. The empires of the 630s were bankrupt, divided, and incapable of meeting this confusing new threat.

  In fact, most people in southwest Asia do not seem to have cared much whether Arab chiefs replaced Byzantine and Persian officials or not. For centuries both empires had persecuted many of their Christian subjects over doctrinal fine print. In the Byzantine Empire, for instance, since 451 the official position had been that Jesus had had two natures, one human and one divine, fused in a single body. Some Egyptian theorists retorted that Jesus had really had just one (purely divine) nature, and by the 630s so many people had died over this question that plenty of One-Nature* Christians in Syria and Egypt positively welcomed the Muslims. Better to have infidel masters to whom the question was meaningless than co-religionists who would unleash holy terror over it.

  Just four thousand Muslims invaded Egypt in 639, but Alexandria surrendered without a fight. The mighty Persian Empire, still reeling from a decade of civil wars, collapsed like a house of cards, and the Byzantines retreated into Anatolia, surrendering three-quarters of their empire’s tax base. Across the next fifty years Byzantium’s high-end institutions evaporated. The empire survived only by quickly finding low-end solutions, relying on local notables to raise armies and on soldiers to grow their own food instead of receiving salaries. By 700 barely fifty thousand people lived at Constantinople, plowing up suburbs to grow crops, going without imports, and bartering instead of using coins.

  In the space of a century the Arabs swallowed up the wealthiest parts of the Western core. In 674 their armies camped under Constantinople’s walls. Forty years later they stood on the banks of the Indus in Pakistan and crossed into Spain, and in 732 a war band reached Poitiers in central France. The migrations from the deserts into the heartland of empires then slowed. A millennium later Gibbon mused:

  A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal distance would have carried the Saracens [Muslims from North Africa] to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

  “From such calamities Christendom was delivered,” Gibbon added, with no little sarcasm. Conventional wisdom in eighteenth-century Britain, like that in seventh-century Constantinople, saw Christianity as the West’s defining value and Islam as its antithesis. The rulers of cores probably always picture those who move in from the fringes as barbarians, but Gibbon understood full well that the Arabs were actually part of the larger second-wave Axial transformation of the Western core that had begun with the triumph of Christianity. We can, in fact, out-Gibbon Gibbon, putting the Arabs into a still-longer tradition going all the way back to the Amorites in Mesopotamia in 2200 BCE, and seeing them as they saw themselves: as people who had already been drawn into the core by its conflicts, and who were now claiming their rightful place at its head. They came not to bury the West but to perfect it; not to thwart Justinian’s and Khusrau’s ambitions, but to fulfill them.

  Plenty of political pundits in our own century find it convenient, like Gibbon’s eighteenth-century critics, to imagine Islamic civilization as being outside of and opposed to “Western” civilization (by which they generally mean northwest Europe and its overseas colonies). But that ignores the historical realities. By 700 the Islamic world more or less was the Western core, and Christendom was merely a periphery along its northern edge. The Arabs had brought into one state roughly as much of the Western core as Rome had done.

  The Arab conquests took longer than Wendi’s in the East, but because Arab armies were so small and popular resistance generally so limited, they rarely devastated the lands they conquered, and in the eighth century the West’s social development finally stopped falling. Now, perhaps, the largely reunited Western core could bounce back like the Eastern
core had done in the sixth century, and the East-West gap would narrow again.

  THE CENTERS DO NOT HOLD

  But that did not happen, as Figure 7.1 shows very clearly. Although both cores were largely reunited by 700 and enjoyed or suffered rather similar political fortunes between the eighth century and the tenth, Eastern social development continued to rise faster than Western.

  Both the reunited cores proved politically rickety. Their rulers had to relearn a lesson well known to the Han and Romans, that empires are governed through fudging and compromise, but neither China’s Sui dynasty nor the Arabs were very good at this. Like the Han dynasty, the Sui had to worry about nomads (now Turks* rather than Xiongnu), but thanks to the growth of the Eastern core they also had to worry about threats from newly formed states. When Koguryo in what is now Korea opened secret negotiations with the Turks to cooperate in raiding China, the Sui emperor decided he had to act. In 612 he sent a vast army against Koguryo, but bad weather, worse logistics, and atrocious leadership brought about its destruction. In 613 he sent another and in 614 a third. And as he was raising a fourth, rebellions against his demands tore his empire apart.

  For a while the horsemen of the apocalypse seemed to be breaking loose again. Warlords divided China, Turkic chieftains played them against one another and plundered at will, and famine and disease spread. One epidemic arrived across the steppes and another, sounding nastily like bubonic plague, came by sea. But just as bungling idiocy had been enough to start the crisis, good leadership was enough to end it. One Chinese warlord, the Duke of Tang, talked the major Turkic chieftains into backing him against the other Chinese warlords, and by the time the Turks realized their mistake he had proclaimed himself ruler of a new Tang dynasty. In 630 his son exploited a Turkic civil war to extend Chinese rule farther into the steppes than ever before (Figure 7.2b). State control was restored; population movements, famines, and epidemics died down; and the surge in social development that created Wu’s world got under way in earnest.