The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  However, half a century after its defeat in the second war, Carthage once again was rich and, some Romans claimed, dangerous. In the senate the fiery Marcus Porcius Cato constantly demanded action, thundering, “Carthage must be destroyed!” On at least one occasion he flourished figs from Carthage as proof of the enemy’s revival. He overstated the danger, but the Romans chose to think him right. They sent another army to Carthage and in 146 B.C. destroyed the city. Much of North Africa became yet another province of the growing Roman Empire.

  The conquest of the western Mediterranean was just the start. To the east of Rome were the three big chunks of Alexander’s empire that his generals had taken for themselves. One by one, the Romans struck them. Even before the third war with Carthage, they seized Macedon and Greece. Then they took what had been the western end of Persia’s empire, and then Egypt.

  By now the Romans’ aims had changed. No longer were they backing more or less reluctantly into wars and conquests. More and more they sent their armies into other lands because they had acquired an empire-building impetus. They fought to help their allies, fortify their borders, conquer markets for their goods, provide themselves with jobs, keep their armies busy, and, indeed, to slake their thirst for triumphs.

  Two and a half centuries after the Carthaginian wars began, the Romans ruled the whole Mediterranean basin, all the lands that bordered on the sea. This had been a huge achievement. The Mediterranean is 2,300 miles long; in ancient times it took two months to sail the length of it.

  And yet the Romans were not satisfied. In northern Europe, past the Alps, were tribes that often raided the borders. The Romans had to deal with them. In the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. the Romans battled long and hard against these tribesmen in their fens and forests. When these wars were over, Rome had won a strip of Europe that stretched from Britain to the Black Sea.

  One place that the Romans couldn’t conquer marred their map of Europe. This was Germany, which a Roman writer called “a region hideous and rude…dismal to behold or cultivate.” In the year A.D. 9, tribesmen in a northern German forest slaughtered a Roman army. The 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions never again appeared in the Roman army list because, given their bad luck, no one would have served in them. Rome gave up on ruling most of Germany.

  In the meantime, Rome endured an episodic civil war among its mighty generals. In Rome’s early centuries a general had been a gifted amateur like the semilegendary Cincinnatus. When the country needed him, he left his plow to lead an army. He beat the enemy in a single day and went home to his bean fields. Now, however, when the Romans had an empire, generals commanded troops in distant provinces for many years. On the far frontiers they ruled like kings and often formed some big ideas, and when they journeyed back to Rome they brought their armies and ambitions with them. For decades men like these led coups and civil wars. General after general seized power in Rome, pushed the Senate to the side, and made himself the empire’s soldier-despot — till another general grabbed his place.

  It was one such army chief, the rich Augustus (meaning Blessed), who ended this long struggle. Not only did he push aside or crush his rivals, rising in this way to power as other generals had, he also kept that power, because Augustus wasn’t just an able soldier but an able politician. Rather than destroy the Senate, as he could have done with ease, he stroked it. Rather than offend the Romans by eliminating ancient offices, he simply filled them all himself. Augustus was simultaneously commander of the armies, consul, censor, tribune, and chief priest. But far from wanting anyone to bow to him, he was easily approached and liked to be known simply as First Citizen.

  Augustus ruled for forty-five years, and this was long enough to accustom Romans to one-man government. When he died, his power passed quite smoothly to his stepson. After his death, the next emperor was picked, in effect, by the prefect of the palace guards. Such an event could only lead to trouble. The man the prefect chose, Caligula (meaning Little Boot), clearly was a dreadful choice; he soon became a vicious madman. And yet Caligula took power as emperor with no trouble. For better or for worse, the form of government had changed, and everyone accepted that. From Augustus on, an emperor ran the empire.

  Even when the rulers were incompetent, Rome gave its people what they wanted: order and civilization. Everybody profited from Roman laws, which were clear and firm. “Let justice be done,” ran a Roman maxim, “though the heavens fall.” Everybody also gained from Rome’s amenities, such as its famous roads. These ran from Scotland to Arabia, dead straight wherever the terrain was flat, and built to last. Along them towns sprang up by the thousands. These towns boasted not only forts and victory arches but also law courts, schools, libraries, theaters, temples, piped-in water, public baths, and fountains — even sewers and central heating.

  In the A.D. 200s, the empire began to face some worrisome problems. One of these resulted from the dreadful system, which really wasn’t any system, for choosing emperors. In earlier centuries emperors had risen to power in various ways; usually a ruler chose his son or someone else to take his place. But now it often happened that a striving general seized the throne, just as generals had done before Augustus. Typically, his soldiers would acclaim him, raising him on his shield, and he would then assassinate the ruling emperor and force the Senate to approve the change.

  Most of these usurpers came from Roman provinces: the Balkan Peninsula perhaps, North Africa, even distant Syria. They knew no other life outside the army, and they hadn’t any notion how to rule an empire. Often that didn’t matter much, for after they had taken power they rarely stayed alive long enough to make things worse than they had found them. Out of twenty-six emperors during one half century (235 to 284) all but one was killed or took his own life. The evil wasn’t what these power grabbers did but that they had no chance to do anything.

  Another problem came to light during the 200s: disloyal armies. Formerly the government had raised its troops at home in Italy, but now it drew them from the very peoples that the army was supposed to fight: tribesmen from North Africa, the Danube valley, even Germany. It was men like these who stared out from the wall the Romans built across the narrow waist of Britain, or from their forts in Europe, or from the lonely guard posts on the sands of Syria and Egypt.

  Stationed far from Italy, which they never saw, these men cared nothing for the welfare of the empire, though they sometimes helped their generals to interfere in politics. They often fought each other rather than the enemies who pressed against the borders. Those enemies, especially Germanic tribes who swept down from the north, were almost more than Rome could handle. Because of their attacks, defenses on the borders crumbled. Undefended farmers left their lands, and these reverted back to swamp or sand. Lack of confidence in borderland defenses reached the point that Emperor Aurelian, known as “Hand on Hilt,” built walls around the city of Rome itself.

  Around A.D. 300, the tough and able emperor Diocletian tried to bring back order. To judge by statues and his portrait on his coins, he was a tall and hard-mouthed man. He had risen to the throne the usual way, through the army, but above all Diocletian was an energetic manager. He decided that the empire had become too big for one man to govern and defend. The biggest military problems were in the east, but it took three weeks to sail from Italy to Egypt or the Black Sea.

  So Diocletian split the Roman Empire. He chose another man to rule the west and took the eastern half himself. Later each of them would choose another man to govern part of his domain, resulting in four “princes of the world.” They might have quarreled with each other but Diocletian made them work together.

  As Diocletian saw it, to stave off anarchy he had these tasks: he had to build a larger bureaucracy to help him govern, and he had to double the size of the army and pay the soldiers more. In this way he could keep the army out of politics and help it to keep the peace and fend off invaders. But to pay the added troops and bureaucrats would cost a lot. So Diocletian did the only thing he could; he
raised the already heavy taxes.

  These taxes caused such hardships that in order to avoid them many farmers, businessmen, and workmen fled their farms and shops. The response of Diocletian was a set of laws that tied the ordinary subject to his place of work. This measure probably was hardest on the farmers. Throughout the empire peasants found themselves forbidden to desert the land they rented, and their children might not leave after their parents’ deaths. So in effect, the laws turned farmers into serfs, whom one purchased when he bought the land they worked on.

  It was the army that enforced these laws. The army now wasn’t just the empire’s protector but its tool of oppression. In this grim era, common punishments were breaking legs and gouging eyes. So the empire was preserved, but only by grinding down its people and making them machines for paying taxes.

  After twenty busy years Diocletian, of his own free will, gave up the throne. He retired to a palace on the Adriatic Sea, and it’s said he spent his final years raising vegetables. A younger general named Constantine now fought his way to power and made himself the ruler of not only the eastern half but all the empire. He quickly made two big decisions: he would live in the eastern half of the empire, and he would build a new, eastern capital city, one that was splendid to behold, centrally placed, and easy to defend.

  He chose a good location for his capital: the ancient town of Byzantium, near the entrance to the Black Sea. Strategically this location is important since whoever holds it commands the only route by water from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Since it filled a spit of land nearly ringed by water, it was splendidly defensible. Within a few years Constantine built walls that made it almost unconquerable. He filled the town with palaces and churches and adorned the streets with statues grabbed from other cities. He modestly renamed it for himself — Constantinople, meaning Constantine City.

  The Roman Empire’s older, western European half survived another hundred years. Then Germanic tribes broke through the border. Like ants to sugar they were drawn to cities full of goods to loot. They ravaged all the land, and in the year 410 and again in 455 they sacked the city of Rome itself. They set up kingdoms of their own, which would later be dynamic European nations. But the Roman Empire in the west was gone.

  Historians sometimes say the eastern half survived another thousand years. But what survived was not always an empire. Neighbors nibbled on it, until nothing remained but Constantinople itself. And in 1453 a Turkish army blasted through its walls with cannons.

  Not before, not again, have we seen the like of Rome. Its immensity and amenities, its laws and length of life make the Roman Empire one of our great achievements.

  THE MEN WHO built the Roman Empire knew little or nothing about the Mongol tribes who roamed on Asia’s far-off grasslands. Before the Mongols began their conquests in the 1200s, many centuries after the breakup of the Roman Empire, they were simple nomads. On sturdy little horses they wandered on their treeless plains in search of grass for horses, sheep, and yaks to graze on. They also lived by pillaging from other Mongol tribes. They lived in yurts — round tents made with sticks and felt — and fed on bits of meat and curdled mare’s milk. Because they held that water was divine and must not be polluted, they never washed. Their filthy leather jackets shone with grease, and their southern neighbors, the Chinese, said the Mongols smelled so awful that no one could come near them.

  In the late 1100s a tall young Mongol named Temüjin mastered his clan in a bloody struggle, and he then began to conquer other Mongols. He ruled from Karakorum, in north central Mongolia, but was usually on the move. By the year 1206, when he was in his forties, he called himself the ruler “of all tribes who live in yurts.” At a meeting of Mongol chiefs that year he was given the title Genghis Khan, which apparently means “ruler vast as the ocean.” (But had the Mongols ever seen an ocean?) He planned to rule the world.

  Rule the world! That anyone should dream of such a goal, much less a nomad in this rarely heard-of corner of the earth! He had to justify this project to his people, since it would require enormous effort and great loss of life. He had his shaman (his go-between with heaven) tell the Mongols that he, the shaman, had soared to heaven on a dappled horse and spoken to the Mongols’ god. Eternal Blue Heaven had decreed that Genghis Khan should rule the world.

  So the mandate came from heaven, and the Mongols must obey their chief. Later Genghis Khan would many times remind the world that Eternal Blue Heaven had ordered him to rule all men. It followed that any person, anywhere, who opposed him also opposed Eternal Blue Heaven, and could only count on death.

  On one occasion, though, Genghis Khan explained the reason for his endless warring differently. He didn’t say he fought to satisfy Blue Heaven. It was simply in our nature to delight in mastering our fellow humans. “Man’s highest joy,” he said, “is in victory: to conquer one’s enemies, to pursue them, to take what is theirs, to make their loved ones weep, to ride on their horses, and to embrace [his word] their wives and daughters.”

  Once he had the Mongols under his control, Genghis Khan rode south and struck his neighbor, China. In an early battle he used a ploy that many Mongol victims later on would fall for. Pretending to retreat, he left behind a small detachment in a valley. The Chinese general could not resist this decoy; he attacked it. Suddenly the horde of Mongols charged the Chinese from behind the hilltops, racing down from every side at once, shooting storms of arrows, screaming, slashing with their swords. The stink of Mongol men and horses shocked their Chinese enemies. Victory was quick and the slaughter that ensued was dreadful.

  Other victories followed this until the nomad horsemen conquered all of northern China. But how could so few defeat so many? Of course, the Mongols had a military genius in their khan. He never lost a battle, and selected other generals who knew the way to win. Another reason for success: the Mongols traveled very far very fast. A Mongol army once rode 270 miles across Hungary in just three days. If they were in a hurry, the Mongols slept while riding on their rugged horses. If they hadn’t eaten they would cut their horses’ jugular veins, suck the blood, close the wounds, and journey on. When they struck, they gave their enemies no time for preparations, and they quickly overwhelmed them.

  The Mongols had another edge in warfare: they weren’t at all averse to slaughter. When they overcame a town they often murdered every woman, man, and child. Sometimes they would spare them, only to drive them out in front when they attacked another town, forcing them to fight their enemies and in this way getting rid of captives and saving Mongol lives. To the Mongols, massacres made sense. Their number wasn’t big, so they couldn’t spare the troops to pin down peoples they had beaten. It was better just to kill them. And it didn’t hurt to earn a name as savages; future enemies might give up quickly in the hope, most likely vain, of being spared.

  After they had conquered northern China, Genghis Khan turned west. The Mongols conquered what is now Afghanistan and Iran. Then they raided Russia, the first partly European country to confront them. North of the Black Sea, Mongol raiders overwhelmed an army led by Russian princes. They massacred the ordinary Russian soldiers, but they killed the princes as they always slew aristocrats, avoiding bloodshed. They buried them alive beneath a floor of planks, on which they held a party while the princes suffocated.

  Genghis Khan died in 1227 while making war in China. The Mongols bore him northward to his homeland, killing everyone they met along the way to prevent the news of his death from reaching enemies. They buried him in a nest of coffins in a range of sacred hills, and permitted no one to approach the site. No one knows today on which of the hills his people buried Genghis Khan.

  The khans who followed him were able men, even if they couldn’t match his genius. They had a vaster store of human lives to work with, since, if they didn’t choose to kill them, they could draft more troops among the many conquered peoples. With larger armies, they could fight on several fronts.

  Southern China fell. The Chinese heir apparent fled a
nd drowned near what is now Hong Kong. Baghdad, capital of the Mesopotamia region, fell. Mongol horses trampled on the caliph. A Persian poet wrote, “The world appeared as tangled as the hair of an Ethiopian. Men were like wolves.” Much of Russia fell. According to a Russian epic, “No one remained to weep for the dead…for all without exception lay lifeless.”

  The Mongol empire now was twice as big as Rome’s great empire at its biggest. It covered most of Asia from the Black Sea to the coast of China.

  As Emperor Diocletian had split the Roman Empire in four parts, the Mongols too divided theirs in four, each one governed by a khan. One of them, the Great Khan, not only governed China, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet but was also overlord of all the empire. He kept in contact with the other khans by using a vast system of couriers. (The Persians had done the same, and so would the Incas, in their South American empire, two centuries later.) Frequently the khans permitted conquered kings to keep on ruling, provided they took orders and paid tribute. The awful notion of a second visit by the Mongols was enough to keep these kings in line.