Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Some see in the centuries of Mongol world domination the first great wave of globalization. Under Mongol rule, Europe and the Far East were linked for the first time by trade routes as well as by the Yam: a network of relay stations, roughly thirty miles apart that stretched from one end of the empire to the other. According to Marco Polo, urgent messages could move through this courier system up to three hundred miles a day. The Yam also catered to international merchants by providing beds—sometimes with silk sheets—food, extra horses, fodder, even travel guides.

  The Mongols, writes Weatherford, were “civilization's unrivaled cultural carriers.” They built churches in China, Islamic schools in Russia, and Buddhist stupas in Persia. “Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere.” The Mongols brought new strains of rice, millet, and other grains from China to Persia, while transporting new varieties of lemons and other citrus trees in the opposite direction. “An ever-expanding variety of peas, beans, grapes, lentils, nuts, carrots, turnips, melons, and diverse leaf vegetables” circulated the Mongol-dominated globe, as did new dyes, oils, spices, architectural styles, printing methods, card games, and fabrics such as satin, muslin, and damask silk. Muslim surgeons, supposedly the best in their day, now operated in China, while Chinese specialists in internal medicine and pharmacology cured diseases in central Asia and Mesopotamia. Russians were sent to north China, Genoese traders to the Black Sea, and Chinese merchants to Southeast Asia, where they built extensive commercial networks surviving to this day. From Arab mathematicians to Tajik carpets to Chinese acupuncturists, the Mongols “searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.”43

  Khubilai, the last of the great Mongol rulers, died peacefully in 1294 after a reign of thirty-four years. In many ways, he differed from Genghis Khan. He lacked his grandfather's knack and drive for military expansion. He was also much more humane. Even on the campaigns he did lead, Khubilai never committed the ruthless massacres that earned his predecessors their terrible name. But like his grandfather, Khubilai was unhampered by ethnic or religious chauvinism. He freely admired and shrewdly drew on the knowledge, ingenuities, and cultural achievements of his subject peoples. He allowed all creeds to flourish, and he treated Chinese civilization like a jewel, even while infusing it with learning and technology from India and the Muslim lands.

  Perhaps more consciously than his grandfather, who remained at heart a steppe nomad, Khubilai was a globalizer, seeking to create one world system. By synthesizing Arab, Chinese, and Greek expertise, Khubilai's astronomers and cartographers produced the world's most sophisticated maps, nautical charts, and terrestrial globes, far outstripping their European counterparts. He embraced international commerce, religious coexistence, free communication, and cultural exchange. Fittingly, two of Khubilai's most passionate ambitions were to establish a universal alphabet, encompassing all the languages of the world, and a universal calendar unifying the lunar calendar of the Arabs, the solar calendar of the Europeans, and the twelve-year animal cycle of the Chinese.44

  INTOLERANCE AND DECLINE

  As is the case with every empire, the collapse of the Great Mongol Empire was fueled by many factors, among them incompetent leaders, corruption, revolts, decadence, factional struggles, assassinations, external attacks, and bad luck. Not all parts of the empire fell at the same time. Mongol rule in China ended in 1368, when the new Ming rulers—triumphantly ethnic Chinese—sent Genghis Khan's descendants fleeing back to the steppe. Mongol rule in the Persian Ilkhanate, long in disarray, had already collapsed three decades earlier. By contrast, the Mongols who ruled central Asia undertook a series of bloody new conquests in the late fourteenth century, eventually founding the Mughal Empire, which governed India until the British took over in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the Mongols of Russia, known as the Golden Horde, lost their power and territory gradually, breaking into smaller and smaller hordes over four centuries.

  But throughout the Mongol-dominated lands, the decline of the empire was marked by one consistent feature: a stark turn toward intolerance, especially religious intolerance, both officially and among the general Mongol population. For a variety of reasons—most saliently, the spread of the bubonic plague, which killed seventy-five million people, extinguished international trade, and effectively cut off the four Mongol khanates from one another—the Mongol rulers of the fourteenth century aligned themselves with powerful religious factions within their territory. Abandoning the principles of religious freedom established by Genghis Khan, they embarked on paths of zealotry, scapegoating, and, in some cases, mass murder.

  Within each khanate, the details of intolerance differed. The Mongols of Russia were the first to convert to Islam. They soon joined the Egyptian Mamluks in their holy war against Christendom, at several points even attacking their fellow Mongols in Persia, who for their part were increasingly oppressing their Muslim subjects. Then, in 1295, Ghazan, the Mongol khan of Persia, also converted to Islam, the religion of most of his subjects. Unfortunately, one of Ghazan's most influential advisors was Nawruz, a Muslim general and fanatical bigot.

  Nawruz purged the Ilkhanate of Buddhism, destroying its temples and statues and forcing its adherents—only a tiny, mainly Mongol minority—to convert to Islam. Jews and Christians were ordered to wear special clothing so that Muslim mobs could harass and assault them. Religious riots broke out; churches were sacked and Christians arrested, beaten, or killed. Even shamanism, the original religion of the Mongols, was harshly suppressed. Nawruz eventually lost favor with Ghazan, who had the general cut in half. But the Mongols of Persia still ruled in the name of Islam, and religious strife continued to debilitate the Ilkhanate until it ultimately collapsed in 1335.45

  In China, Khubilai Khan's descendants, surrounded by rising popular discontent, decided that they had weakened themselves by becoming “too Chinese.” Members of the imperial court recounted dreams in which Genghis Khan urged them to rule the Chinese more harshly. Whatever the cause, the late Yuan emperors increasingly defined themselves against their Chinese subjects, isolating themselves, stressing their Mongol identity, and rejecting the Chinese language and culture. Traditional Chinese storytelling and Chinese opera, once vigorously promoted by Khubilai, were prohibited. As in the other khanates, the Mongol rulers renounced their predecessors’ religious neutrality. But in China, it was Buddhism, in its mystical Tibetan, Tantric form, that was elevated above all other religions.

  The last decades of Mongol rule in China were sordid and chaotic. Rumors began circulating throughout the country that behind the palace walls the Mongol rulers were plotting to exterminate Chinese children and participating in bizarre sexual rituals. The latter rumor was at least partly true. At the urging of the Tibetan clergy, the Mongol ruling family engaged in lurid sexual dances, supposedly part of the path to Tantric enlightenment. Outside the Forbidden City, paranoia and xenophobia mounted. Along with other foreigners of influence, Tibetan monks, who received glaring imperial privileges, became objects of popular hatred. In 1333, Toghon Temur, a boy of thirteen, ascended the Mongol throne. Around the same time, the bubonic plague struck China, leaving 90 percent of the population dead in Hebei province. By 1351, as much as two-thirds of China's entire population had died. Meanwhile, trade and commerce dried up, hyperinflation set in, and peasant revolts broke out.

  According to Bayan, one of Toghon Temur's ministers, the root cause of all these problems was excessive sinicization. As a solution, he reportedly proposed that all Chinese throughout the empire surnamed Chang, Wang, Liu, Li, and Chao be executed. This plan, which would have eliminated 90 percent of China's population, was never carried out, but it illustrates the intolerant atmosphere that marked the Yuan dynasty in its last years.

  Toghon Temur was China's last Yuan emperor. Anti-Mongol uprisings erupted across southern China, and a charismatic ethnic Chinese rebel by the name of Zhu Yuanzhang
asserted his claim to the Mandate of Heaven. In 1368, after his forces drove Toghon Temur's army from China, Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty.

  Over the next three hundred years, China would sink ever deeper into ethnocentric isolationism. When it became clear to the Ming emperors that they could not subjugate the “barbarians” surrounding them, they built massive walls to seal the Chinese in. Foreign merchants were expelled, and travel abroad was prohibited. At the same time, there was a crackdown on non-Chinese customs, religions, and ideas. Foreign languages were banned, while traditional Confucianism and Taoism were reinstated as official orthodoxy. Not until the twenty-first century would China again be as open, cosmopolitan, and outward-reaching as it was during the Mongol era.46

  It was Genghis Khan's genius to create a single people out of the warring tribes of the Mongolian steppe. Unlike the Achaemenid Persians, Genghis Khan succeeded in establishing a new political identity—the Great Mongol Nation, or “People of the Felt Walls”—but this identity embraced only the nomadic peoples of the steppe. It was not intended to include, and had no appeal whatsoever to, non-Mongol peoples and nations, who regarded their Mongol conquerors as the crudest of barbarians.

  As Genghis Khan's descendants went on to annex huge swaths of Persia, China, India, Russia, and eastern Europe, the peoples of these lands never remotely saw themselves as Mongols, “People of the Felt Walls,” or proud subjects of the Great Mongol Empire. On the contrary, a fascinating thing happened.

  Instead of imposing a Mongol identity on their vast empire, the Mongol rulers increasingly took on the culture of their more “civilized” subjects. In China, Khubilai Khan adopted a Chinese title, established a Chinese dynasty, and surrounded himself with Chinese art, music, and drama. In central Asia, the Mongol khans became Muslim and made Persian their official language. No “glue” held these increasingly divergent kingdoms together. Within a short time, the once world-dominant Mongol empire broke into four large chunks, each turning increasingly intolerant and religiously fanatic. Before long, the Great Mongol Empire had disintegrated.

  THE

  ENLIGHTENING OF

  TOLERANCE

  FIVE

  Inquisition, Expulsion, and the Price

  of Intolerance

  [W]e are informed by the inquisitors and many other people, religious, churchmen, and laymen, of the great harm suffered by Christians from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith…[We] decree that all Jews male and female depart our kingdoms and never return…And if they do not observe this and are found guilty of remaining in these realms or returning to them, they will incur the death penalty.

  — EXPULSION DECREE, MARCH 1492

  On October 19, 1469, in a private ceremony shrouded in secrecy and intrigue, the seventeen-year-old heir to the crown of Aragon married the eighteen-year-old heiress of Castile. From the union of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had first met just four days earlier, a unified Spain would ascend to great heights of glory. At the time of the wedding, and for much of the preceding two hundred years, Spain was one of the most religiously diverse societies in Christian Europe. Ferdinand himself had Jewish ancestors on his mother's side.1 Twenty-three years later, as Jewish-funded Spanish ships reached the shores of America, Ferdinand and Isabella would famously order the expulsion of Spain's Jews. Spain's turn to increasingly virulent intolerance— not just against Jews, but against converted Jews, Muslims, converted Muslims, Protestants, and eventually even Jesuits—fatally undermined its rise to power, destroying any chance for world domination.

  Unlike any of its northern European neighbors, medieval Spain had a large Muslim minority, the result of centuries of earlier Islamic rule. In Aragon, some 35 percent of the total population of roughly 200,000 were Mudejars, the term for Muslims living in Christian lands. In some rural areas, Muslims were actually a majority. Spain was also home to the overwhelming majority of Christian Europe's Jews, who had been expelled at various points from England (1290) and France (1306,1322, and 1394) and massacred repeatedly in Germany (1298, 1336-38, and 1348). As a result of this unusual coexistence of religious communities, Spaniards were worldlier about non-Christians than many of their fellow Europeans. “No Iberian writer fantasized, as the German Wolfram von Eschenbach did, that the offspring of a Christian-Muslim couple would be mottled white and black; they knew better.”2

  Of course, Spanish tolerance should not be overstated or confused with the “respect for difference” that tolerance implies in the twenty-first century. Jews and Muslims were often confined to separate quarters and required to wear special identifying emblems. Intermarriage with Christians was punishable by imprisonment, torture, or even execution. Although there was no fear of mottled offspring, Muslim women caught fornicating with Christian males were sometimes stripped naked and whipped in the streets. Popular anti-Semitism, frequently fomented by the clergy, periodically erupted in violence and waves of forced conversions. The latter created a significant class of so-called conversos (converted Jews), who would then be suspected—often correctly—of secretly continuing to practice Judaism. The spasms of anti-Semitic violence could be shockingly brutal. In June of 1391, Jews were massacred in Seville; the pogrom quickly spread to Cordoba, Toledo, Valencia, and Barcelona, resulting in mass throat-slitting and thousands of conversions.3

  But once again, what matters is relative tolerance, and despite such bursts of horrific violence, Spain was for most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the best place—sometimes the only place—for non-Christians to live and prosper in western Europe. Many of Spain's Muslims benefited from special treaties, granting them the right to practice their own religion and to be governed by their own laws. In places like Valencia, Mudejars lived largely autonomously, interacting only with other Muslims and speaking only Arabic. In other locales, Muslims were much more integrated into Christian society. In Aragon and Catalonia, for example, Muslims and Christians lived side by side, buying each other's goods and services. Mudejars came to dominate certain local industries, most prominently the building trades.4

  The situation of the Jews was quite different. Whereas the great majority of Mudejars were agricultural laborers—most of the Muslim elite having emigrated to Islamic lands—Spanish Jews were principally urban and far more acculturated. All of Spain's Jews spoke a form of Spanish, typically in addition to Hebrew and Arabic. While most Muslims were vassals of feudal and ecclesiastical lords, Spain's Jews were under the immediate control and protection of the king, paying taxes directly to the royal treasury.

  Jews in Spain participated in a striking range of economic activities. Jewish men were cobblers, grocers, tailors, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, silversmiths, butchers, chemists, beekeepers, dyers, and jewelers. Their clientele included many Christians and Muslims. Jewish women were weavers, spinners, and midwives. Some Jews were major sheepherders. Others were landowners, leasing property from small farms to large estates to great vineyards and orchards.

  Though most Spanish Jews were, like most Spanish Christians, of modest means, a disproportionate number occupied positions of respect and influence, and a few rose to astonishing heights of wealth and power. Jews were among Spain's most celebrated court astronomers, philosophers, cartographers, and doctors. A Jewish physician attended every Castilian king of the fifteenth century. Jewish tax collectors were common throughout the country, and Jewish merchants were important in Spain's import-export trade. The wealthiest Jews were royal treasurers and financiers, advising, bankrolling, and even (as conversos) intermarrying with Spanish royalty and nobility. Jewish families in Castile were apparently instrumental in arranging Isabella's marriage to a prince with Jewish ancestry. During the first few decades of Ferdinand and Isabella's rule, the inner court circle included not only conversos but a number of practicing Jews, including Abraham Senior, the treasurer of the Santa Hermandad (the centralized militia) and one of
the most powerful men in Spain.5

  The benefits Spain reaped from its relative tolerance were vital to its territorial expansion and imperial rise. Besides the intangible rewards of cultural and intellectual invigoration, Spain gained two essential advantages from its non-Christian populations: manpower and money.

  When the Spanish kings reconquered Muslim-held lands, they initially followed the same successful strategy pursued by Achae-menid Persia or ancient Rome: They allowed these communities to maintain their own customs, to practice their own faith, and in some cases to govern themselves. The immediate result was a considerable increase in the population under Spanish rule. For example, the crown of Aragon doubled in size through military conquest in the thirteenth century. By tolerating the Muslims who already lived there rather than attempting to expel or exterminate them, Spain was able both to secure its conquest and to obtain the labor it needed to farm the fertile soils of southern Spain. Indeed, the need for agricultural labor was a chief reason the Spanish kings entered into treaties with their conquered Muslim communities, allowing the latter to practice Islam.

  At the same time, by opening itself to Jews, however grudgingly, medieval Spain reaped enormous financial gains. The Jews of this period had access to one of the most extensive commercial, trading, and lending networks in the world. They dominated the global diamond industry and were major players in the early development of international finance. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Jews served as treasurers and revenue collectors for an astonishing number of Spanish kings, noble houses, bishops and archbishops—even cathedral chapters. Jewish money lending was critical to sustaining the royal fise, both in the form of direct loans to the crown and as a major source of tax revenue. (In return for the privilege of lending at interest, all Jewish loans were taxed by the king.)