The Chinese thrived like mice in a breadbasket, and their numbers swiftly rose. By the early 1700s, they had made good the earlier losses, and their numbers kept on rising. Growth like this can bring boom times for all. Everybody — peasants, potters, merchants, weavers, builders — profited by selling to each other.
They prospered until well into the 1700s, but then they ran into trouble. The population kept on rising, and by the end of the 1700s the Chinese numbered 300 or 400 million — about twice their number at the start of the century. Now they had too many mouths to feed, and hunger, the normal lot of many, started to return.
Meanwhile, as will not surprise the reader, the Qing began to lose the Mandate of Heaven. Bungling and crooked officials took over the bureaucracy, and a handsome young army officer became an emperor’s favorite and scooped up huge amounts of money for himself and his friends. Sections of the Grand Canal, which ran for 850 miles through the North China Plain, silted up. The government allowed the grain supplies reserved for famines to run out. Chinese armies struggled with insurgent groups whose names — White Lotus, and Heaven and Earth Society — were charming but whose deeds were not. Border wars with Burma and Vietnam went badly.
As the century neared its end, so did China’s Golden Age.
Chapter 6
Some attempt to rule us all.
EMPIRES. THE WORLD has known some big ones. Seven centuries ago the Malinke people built the empire of Mali, which nearly filled the western half of the grasslands below the Sahara Desert. Caravan trails across it ran many hundred miles from the salt fields of Taghaza and the markets of Gao and Timbuktu to the gold sands of Bambuk and Bondu. At about the same time, the Incas in South America won and ruled a swath of land that stretched along the Andes Mountains for 2,500 miles. These were no petty polities, the empires of the Incas and Malinkes.
This chapter, however, deals with even grander conquerors and empire builders. These are people who long ago fought for mastery in the biggest arena: the wide band of densely lived-in land that stretches across Europe, North Africa, and southern Asia. They conquered lands that stretched from continent to continent; they yoked together civilizations. Why, we will ask, did they want these giant pools of humans, how did they conquer them, and why did their empires finally collapse?
Empires of Antiquity
Persia ruled the Middle East and Egypt. Rome surrounded the Mediterranean. The Mongols ruled central Asia, Russia, China, and more. (Eurasia is 6,000 miles wide.)
IN ABOUT 1000 B.C., groups of Aryans from somewhere to the north drifted downward to the parched plateau east of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and west of ancient India. The new arrivals rode on horses and were armed with short, strong bows and quivers full of arrows. Their speed and weapons gave them an advantage, and they pushed aside the natives. They named their conquered home Iran, “Land of Aryans.”
Half a millennium later, Cyrus II ruled one of these Iranian peoples, the Persians. In 550 B.C. he led an army of horsemen northwest from their mountain home against their neighbors, the Medes, who were also Aryans and had themselves already begun to build an empire. With the help of two Median generals who defected to him, Cyrus beat the Medes and carried off their treasures. Then he rode farther to the north and west and conquered Asia Minor (most of modern Turkey).
Herodotus tells a tale about Cyrus’s chief enemy in western Asia Minor. This was wealthy Croesus, king of Lydia, who gave us the expression “rich as Croesus.” Croesus made the fatal error of sending his army across the Halys River to attack Cyrus. He had been encouraged to do so by an oracle who prophesied that “if Croesus crosses the Halys he will destroy a mighty empire.” Croesus didn’t understand the prophecy: the mighty empire was his own.
With the wealth of Croesus in his coffers, Cyrus now attacked in the opposite direction, to the east. He subdued most of the tribes and peoples of his own Iranian plateau and what is now Afghanistan. Next he turned to the west again and, seemingly unbeatable, captured Babylon and all the region of the Tigris and Euphrates. Then he pushed down into Syria and Palestine, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. “I am Cyrus,” he proclaimed, “king of the world, great king, legitimate king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four rims [of the world]…. All the kings of the entire world…brought their tributes and kissed my feet in Babylon.”
After two dazzling decades of conquest, Cyrus turned again toward central Asia, and he fought some nomads east of the Caspian Sea. In their final clash, the Persians and the nomads fought each other first with bows and arrows, till they had no arrows, then with spears and daggers. The simple tribesmen beat the Persians and killed the mighty Cyrus.
The Persian Empire, though, continued to grow. Cyrus’s son Cambyses conquered Egypt, and his successor Darius won the Indus Valley on the western edge of India. Darius and his two successors tried to conquer Greece, but, as we saw in chapter 4, they failed. So Persia ended where Europe began. How big this empire was! It held most of what is now the Middle East: southwest Asia and northeast Africa.
One has to wonder why the Persians wished to rule so much. For Cyrus the motive was probably nothing more than love of war and conquest. His courtiers once suggested to him that he move the Persian people from rugged Iran to some flat and fertile land, but Cyrus told them that they missed the point. If the Persians moved, he said, they would become slaves, not rulers, because “Soft countries breed soft men.” As for the motive of his successors, they may have believed simply that it was their duty to keep expanding the empire, as Cyrus had done. Or perhaps they felt endangered, as conquerors always do, by still-unbeaten peoples past their borders, and thought they’d better conquer them as well.
The Persians proved to be judicious rulers who did the things they must to hold their lands intact. For example, to improve communications they built a Royal Road that ran 1,600 miles from near the Persian Gulf to near the Aegean Sea. Messengers in relays rode the length of it in less than seven days. Herodotus reports, “Not snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
What was most distinct about the Persian rulers was that they let others do the ruling for them. They split the empire into many provinces and let their governors do as they thought best as long as they sent in the things required of them: recruits for the army; gold, silver, ivory, and ebony; wheat; frankincense; boys and girls; and eunuchs. Governors allowed the conquered peoples to preserve their laws and customs. For the ruling of so many different peoples no other policy was as sensible as tolerance.
AFTER TWO CENTURIES, an able foe appeared on Persia’s western flank: Alexander of Macedon, known to history as Alexander the Great. We saw in chapter 4 how Philip of Macedon conquered Greece and how he then prepared to go to war with Persia. Probably he aimed to win no more than Asia Minor’s western coast, a fraction of the Persian Empire. Before he could begin, a Macedonian aristocrat murdered him.
Philip left a son named Alexander, who had grown up fast. At sixteen he had served as regent of Macedon while his father was away at war. He is said to have fretted that his father would leave him nothing to conquer. At eighteen he led the cavalry of Macedon in a battle that gave his father mastery of Greece. At twenty, when Philip died, Alexander succeeded him and eagerly took over Philip’s project, war with Persia.
At about the age of twenty-two, in the spring of 334 B.C., Alexander crossed from Europe into Asia Minor with an army of 35,000. He battled south along the western coast of Asia Minor; then he zigzagged eastward through it, winning battle after battle till he held it all. The Persian emperor Darius III sent a message: if Alexander would agree to peace, the emperor would give him money, all his lands west of the Euphrates, and his daughter in marriage. A grizzled Macedonian general named Parmenion told the young conqueror that if he were Alexander he’d accept. Alexander gibed that if he were Parmenion he too would probably accept. At about this point Alexander decided to go on and conquer
all the Persian Empire.
Others generals might have asked themselves if so few men, so far from home, conceivably could win so much, but Alexander had no doubts. Already he had proved, and he would prove again and then again, how good he was at making war. His rugged body, often wounded, stood up well in hard campaigns. He moved his army swiftly through terrain that he had never seen, outthinking and out-daring enemies. Most important, he simply would not lose.
With Asia Minor in his hands, Alexander led his army south to Syria and Palestine, conquered them, and then took Egypt. He now had taken all of Persia’s western provinces. Next he led his army eastward to the Tigris and Euphrates region, where he routed Darius. He marched past Babylon and eastward to Iran, the heart of Persia. (How easily a historian can write “he marched” and “took,” as if no effort and no hardships were involved.)
At the royal city of Persepolis he burned the palace that Xerxes had built a century and a half before. This, said Alexander, was his revenge for Xerxes’ burning of Athens. Darius fled before him until one of his own governors murdered him. Alexander gave the emperor a royal burial and put the murderer to death. Then he headed even farther east, skirting deserts, threading through the barren mountains. At times his men could reach the forts of enemies only by scaling snow-clad rocks with ropes and iron pegs.
And then he plunged down into India. What a daring venture, to attack that strange and densely populated land with some 30,000 men! (Of course, he had no maps and no idea how large India really was.) We can only speculate about his reasons. For one thing, Persia once had ruled the northwest fringe of India, along the Indus River, and Alexander must have felt he had to conquer that at least. He was always curious, and probably he wanted to explore this exotic land. And of course he was a conqueror; conquering was what he did. So he led his army to the Indus, and near the river he defeated a king who had attacked him with 200 trumpeting, terrifying elephants.
Legend has it that while he was in India, Alexander met some holy men, living in a forest, who told him that his conquests had no meaning. He owned only what they did: the land he stood on. He applauded what they said.
The conqueror now told his men that they would push through India. (He probably believed that he was near the eastern edge of the earth. The Greeks believed the earth to be a disk surrounded by a river called Ocean.) When he revealed his plans, his troops were stunned. They were now 3,000 miles from home, depleted by the heat, exhausted after years of war. They asked, would he never halt?
The unthinkable occurred: Alexander’s loyal army told him they would march no farther. He argued with them, and for days he stayed inside his tent. Finally he yielded and agreed to go no farther, and they turned around. Suffering from heat and lack of food and water, Alexander and his army struggled rearward to Iran.
What did Alexander plan to do with all that he had conquered? His actions when he reached Iran provide some clues. He wed the daughter of the murdered Darius, and at his order 80 of his officers and 10,000 of his soldiers married Asian women. Alexander saw these weddings as a measure to unite the peoples he had conquered. With that same intention he had told his generals long before to unify his army. He was now delighted to review a force of 30,000 Persians trained to fight beside his men. At a banquet with the representatives of all the peoples that he ruled, Alexander told them what — perhaps — he really wanted. Apparently he prayed for peace, and that the peoples of his empire might be partners (and not merely subjects), and that all the peoples of the world might live in harmony and unity.
From Iran he marched his army west to Babylon, which he planned to make his capital, but here he sickened with a fever. His resistance had been weakened during years of hardships and by many wounds and much hard drinking. He was near to death. When they heard how ill he was, the king’s devoted troops insisted on seeing him. He couldn’t speak, but as his soldiers — every one — filed by in silence Alexander’s eyes uttered his farewells. He died in June 323 B.C., at the ripe old age of thirty-two.
In a decade, never losing any battle, he had won an empire that spread over all the Middle East and Egypt. But the truth is that he had not done much with it. He may have dreamed of unity and global peace, but he had not yet achieved them. He lacked the time, perhaps the skill, and probably the will.
He left no heir to sit upon his throne. When someone asked him on his deathbed who should take his place he simply said, “the strongest.” Not surprisingly his generals could not agree on who that was. So three of them cut his empire into smaller states, based in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, and each took one. For the next two hundred years, these men and their heirs waged war with one another, and with any of their provinces that tried to win its freedom. So much for Alexander’s dream of unity and peace.
EVEN AS HIS empire fell apart, another Mediterranean people built a greater one. But their story really begins back in the late 500s B.C., just when the Persians were finishing their conquest of the Middle East. Far to the west of Persia, on the Tiber River in central Italy, was the farming city of Rome. The rulers of the Romans were a people north of them, the busy, luxury-loving Etruscans.
According to a legend, in 510 B.C. the son of the king of Rome raped a Roman woman. The angry Romans took up arms, expelled their rulers, and began to rule themselves. Since they were determined to have no more kings, they founded a government run by wealthy landowners who stayed aloof from ordinary Romans. Then, however, “plebes,” who farmed the fields and formed the backbone of the tiny army, threatened to depart and form a rival city-state. So the “patricians” then allowed the plebes to choose their own officials who had the right to veto the decisions of the patricians.
The Romans fought one enemy after another. Close to Rome they mastered local “tribes” of semicivilized peasants and shepherds. In the north they absorbed the former masters of the region, the Etruscans, and in the south of Italy they conquered colonies of Greeks. Usually they went to war reluctantly, to save their skins, but they also wanted land. By about 265 B.C. they commanded all of Italy but the far north, and the nearby islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia.
Now came the turning point, when Rome strode out of Italy and began to make itself the greatest empire that the world has ever known. At this moment two big powers dominated the western end of the Mediterranean. One of course was Rome, which was strong on land in Italy but nowhere else. The other power was the Romans’ fated enemy, seagoing Carthage. Its leaders were not farmers, like the Romans, but businessmen who dealt in ivory, pottery, gold, and cloth. Their capital, on the Mediterranean’s African coast, occupied a point of land that juts toward Italy. With their potent navy they had all but made the western half of the sea a Carthaginian lake.
Here then was the classic matchup: a land power faced by a sea power, like Sparta and Athens two centuries before. The inevitable began when Carthage conquered land on Sicily that gave it control of the strait that separates the island from the toe of the Italian boot. The Romans claimed that now they had no choice; they had to fight to stay alive. In 264 B.C. they went to war.
In the early fighting on the island the Romans battled hard and well. But they had only a meager navy, and Carthage proved itself the master of the sea. So Rome decided to transform itself. The Romans built a fleet of galleys — ships that one could sail or row with oars — bigger than the Carthaginians’. In a naval battle north of Sicily, the Romans latched their ships to the Carthaginians’ with grappling irons. Then they swarmed across on boarding bridges, and they beat the Carthaginians in the brutal melées that their foes had always been so good at. After much more fighting, the Romans won the war and took the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.
The Carthaginians, however, were not finished. In a second war, they showed that if the Romans could fight on the sea, they could fight on land. Carthage’s commander was the brilliant Hannibal, twenty-five years old, whose father, when Hannibal was a little boy, had made him swear an oath of everlasting hate of Rome.
Hannibal’s army won the southern half of harsh Iberia and added half-wild swordsmen to their ranks. Then, complete with elephants from Africa, they marched through southern Gaul, across the Alps in winter, and down to Italy. They ravaged the peninsula. When the Romans tried to stop them, they shattered them three times.
For Rome the hour was dark. After one defeat the Senate ordered grieving women to remain indoors. It ordered human sacrifices, a savage rite the Romans barely knew of. Slaves were drafted to guard the capital, armed with sacred weapons from the temples. The Romans raised more troops to take the places of the fallen, and staggered on. Despite his triumphs, Hannibal couldn’t win the war.
The Romans found the leader whom they needed. Publius Cornelius Scipio was strikingly like Hannibal: he too was a general’s son; he too took command when twenty-five years old; he too was supremely confident. He first defeated the Carthaginians in Iberia, and then he crossed the sea and brought the war to Carthage. When he learned of this, Hannibal and his army hurried home from Italy, but in 202 B.C. Scipio defeated them, and the Carthaginians surrendered. The Romans gave them easy terms but joined Iberia to their growing empire. Hannibal had fled, but they pursued him till he swallowed poison rather than be caught.
The Human Story Page 10