Across the globe, the Han dynasty maintained the throne in China but never regained the power enjoyed by the earlier Han emperors. In the middle of the second century CE, a succession of child emperors took the throne. The accession of each boy-emperor led to factional disputes and court intrigues as court eunuchs and the relatives of the most recent empress or consort competed for power. In 220, the last Han was deposed and the empire was divided into three independent states, known as the Three Kingdoms.
As turmoil reigned at the top of China’s power structure, the Silk Roads remained open. Over time, first Byzantium and later the kingdoms of Western Europe replaced Rome as a market for China’s luxury goods.
In the thirteenth century, trade along the Silk Roads entered a golden age when Genghis Khan and the Mongols conquered an empire that included China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and much of Eastern Europe.
Today the ancient Silk Roads are in use again, part of a thriving trade corridor between China and the Central Asia states that were once part of the Soviet Union. Trucks carrying consumer electronics and ripe melons trundle down the roads where camel caravans once carried silk and amber.
In the Iron Age, mankind saw and realized the potential to tame a metal from deep inside the earth and use it to topple and build great empires. The advent of people power led not to a full blossoming of democracy, but to a few men exercising absolute power over vast lands and peoples—spreading war over land and sea.
This time in human history also showed that when men and women are willing to die for an idea or belief, history becomes more volatile. The divisions and conflicts born in the Iron Age would have staying power. For the people of the fifth century and immediately beyond, the dismantling of old empires led to even larger and fiercer dynasties with the weapons and armies to control all in their reach. The East arose and ushered in a new age of enlightenment, and with it, a titanic clash of civilizations.
Map of the Silk Roads
4
HOW THE EAST SAVED THE WEST
Crusaders sacked the cities of Palestine in search of fortune, glory, and a papal dispensation for their sins.
455 CE. AFTER CENTURIES OF DECLINE AND ATTACKS BY VISIGOTHS AND HUNS, CIVILIZATION’S GREATEST METROPOLIS, ROME, RECEIVES ITS FINAL, FATAL BLOW.
Vandals sack the city, kidnap its empress, and reduce its buildings to rubble. (The most important churches in the city only survive the invaders’ worst wrath because of a deal worked out by Vandal king Gaiseric and Pope Leo I.) Philosophy, history, science, plumbing, and literacy are lost in the ruins, replaced by the promise and poetry of the early Roman church. Now, in place of an empire, dozens of small kingdoms form around large landowners and tribal chieftains who can offer defense, if not security. The vaunted Roman roads stand but are hazardous to travel. It is a time remembered as the “Dark Ages.”
Though it’s a Dark Age in Europe, civilization is on the rise for peoples and lands to the east. Byzantium, capital of the eastern Roman Empire, still stands. Muhammad leads the “army of the faithful” across the Arabian Desert, spreading Islam by an inspired combination of conversion and conquest—much of it paid for by Arabia’s gold mines.
Before the end of the Middle Ages in the thirteenth century, armies of Western knights wearing the cross on their breastplates will do battle with their Muslim counterparts and turn Palestine into a bloody battlefield. Their confrontation will sow seeds of learning and commerce between East and West, while setting the stage for a clash of civilizations that will continue for centuries.
map of invasions by the Huns, Visigoths, and Vandals
IN 410 CE ALARIC, KING OF THE Visigoths, attacked the Romans with a force swollen beyond its original size with thousands of members of other barbarian tribes and escaped slaves.
The Visigoths were a contrast to the clean-cut Roman soldiers, with their armored breastplates and skirts of leather or fabric strips that protected the upper legs. The barbarians colored their bodies with paint. They left their hair and beards uncut, dressed them with oil, and braided them into shapes that looked outlandish to the Roman eye. They wrapped their legs in awkward garments called braccae (breeches). Compared to the ordered ranks of the Roman legions, there was no discipline in their ranks. They moved in chaotic clusters. They were dirty. They stank of animal grease and unwashed skin. And they were terrifying.
Alaric and his barbarian forces had besieged Rome twice before. Each time the Roman Senate had bought them off. The last time it had cost the city five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand fine silk tunics, three thousand scarlet-dyed skins, and three thousand pounds of precious pepper from the Indies. Once again, the Senate sent a pair of envoys to deal with him, threatening the king with the Roman army’s might.
Alaric shrugged. “The thicker the grass, the more easily it’s scythed.”
The envoys weren’t surprised. They’d had to buy him off before. The only question was what the price would be this time. When the answer came, it was staggering. Alaric demanded all the gold and silver in the city, everything of value, including every barbarian slave.
The envoys gasped. “What will that leave us?”
Alaric paused, then gave a wolfish smile. “Your lives.”
BARBARIANS
Who’s barbarian? Today, we use the term to mean an “uncultured brute”—two more words that require definition. The ancient Greeks, the imperial Chinese, and the Romans were much more specific.
The Greeks and Chinese labeled everyone a barbarian who spoke a language other than Greek or Chinese. As far as the Greeks were concerned, that included the Romans, no matter how many Greek slaves were employed as tutors by Roman patricians.
The Romans borrowed the term from the Greeks and adapted it to mean anyone who lived outside the limits of Roman rule. They pictured the world with the empire at the center, surrounded by barbarians. The farther away from Rome, the wilder the barbarian.
ROME FELL GRADUALLY.
The succession of inept rulers and military usurpers who sat on the imperial throne between 235 and 284 CE were unable to hold the empire together in the face of the threat of Germanic tribes from the north and west and the newly founded Sassanian Empire in Persia. Emperor Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire into four semi-independent regions ruled by “coemperors” stemmed the decay for a time. In the long run, it made things worse by dividing the empire into East and West. The Eastern Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, had all the wealth. Its emperors concentrated their resources on defending the eastern border against the Sassanian Persians’ considerable might. In the West, Rome was left to the mercy of corrupt and inadequate administrators and barbarian tribes.
The fabled Roman army was both a protection against the barbarians and a veiled threat to the emperor. Since the time of Vespasian in the first century CE, new emperors had come from the army, been approved by the army—then been pulled off their thrones by the army. Like a half-tamed beast, the army had to be fed. The need to pay the troops on time became the government’s driving force.
King Alaric and Visigoths pillaging Rome (detail).
IRELAND KEEPS
THE LAMP BURNING
Unlike England, Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire. When the first Christian missionary, Saint Patrick, arrived in Ireland from England around 432 CE, the Irish accepted Christianity, but not the institutional framework of the Roman Church. Instead of building a hierarchical structure of bishops and recognizing the primacy of the bishop of Rome, the Irish followed the example of the desert saints of the Near East, founding monasteries in wild and remote places.
Newly converted and newly literate, Irish Christians turned their monasteries into seats of learning and missionary zeal. They sent monks to convert the pagans and founded monasteries, first in northern Britain and later on the European continent.
Missionaries needed copies of the Gospels. Monasteries needed libraries. Making copies of texts became an import
ant activity in the Irish monasteries and their sister institutions from the seventh century and onward. The first books they copied were the Gospels, but they soon copied any text they could get their hands on, including ancient Roman literature, the works of the Venerable Bede and Isidore of Seville, and their own folk literature. Today, the manuscripts copied in Irish monasteries are our primary source for the literature of ancient Rome and Britain.
With Charlemagne’s rise to power around 800 CE, Europe’s cultural center moved from Ireland to France, but Ireland’s role did not diminish. According to Charlemagne’s secretary and biographer, the emperor “loved the little wandering monks.” No longer needed to convert pagan rulers to Christianity, the learned monks of the British Isles helped give birth to the “Carolingian Renaissance” and the first step out of the Dark Ages.
When the barbarians began to move across the Roman border, they were seen as a nuisance, not a threat. Romans viewed them as heavily armed migrating tribes rather than an organized invasion. The barbarians came in trickles, insinuating themselves into the fabric of Roman society. They were craftsmen seeking employment in Roman cities; warriors enlisting in the Roman legions; tribal chieftains who adopted Roman ways. By the middle of the fourth century CE, many Roman generals were members of Germanic tribes. Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, summed up the process: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would like to be like a Goth.”
Following the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, life in the empire grew increasingly unstable. In 452, Attila led the Huns almost unopposed on a rampage through the Italian peninsula, driven back by malaria and famine rather than the Roman legions.
Three years later, the Vandals finished the destruction of Rome, causing more ruin than the Visigoths.
Following Rome’s demise at the hands of the Vandals, large landowners ignored the emperor’s decrees and used the great public buildings that had been Rome’s pride as quarries for churches and private strongholds. Bandits infested the solidly built roads that had linked one end of the empire to another. The imperial curiosi, half border guard and half highway patrol, began to demand protection money from travelers. Freemen were enslaved in great numbers, seized by barbarians, and then reduced to serfdom on the estates of the great landlords who ransomed them. Rome itself, abandoned first by the emperors and then by anyone who could afford to leave, was looted by Roman citizens as well as by barbarians.
THE SACK OF ROME
“Plundering of Rome by the Vandals”, engraving based on an 1865 drawing by Heinrich Leutemann
WORD OF THE EXPECTED ARRIVAL OF THE Vandals’ fleet at the mouth of the Tiber River has caused panic in and around the palace of Emperor Petronius Maximus. From Empress Licinia Eudoxia’s point of view, her husband has displayed characteristic cowardice by attempting to escape. She is not sad to see him stoned to death by an angry mob of his own people outside the palace gates. Eudoxia watches numbly from a window as her husband’s head and other body parts are severed. Then, with the roar of angry Romans still audible from the streets, she returns quickly to her living quarters.
Realizing she has few choices, the empress grows more concerned about her own safety and that of her two daughters, Eudocia and Placidia. A few months before, Eudoxia had sent a letter to Vandal king Gaiseric, asking for his help in toppling Emperor Petronius—who had murdered the last emperor and forced Eudoxia to marry him. Now she regrets the offer to ally herself with him.
The empress gathers her daughters and, after donning disguises, the three leave the imperial fortress with two palace guards in an unadorned carriage. Eudoxia hopes to reach a waiting vessel and flee Rome for the north. The disguised royal party manages to get past the Roman mob and reach the port but cannot escape the Vandal king, whose fleet has by now encircled the city. Vandal troops are already making their way through the streets, taking anyone and anything they see fit.
When she, too, is taken into Gaiseric’s custody, Empress Eudoxia is forced to watch helplessly as the Vandal army plunders Rome, toppling its buildings and robbing the city of its coins and stripping the gold trim from its statuary and church altars and rooftops. When his ships can hold no more Roman treasure, Gaiseric sets sail again, taking the empress and her daughters back to Carthage, where he marries her and then gives her eldest daughter, Eudocia, to his son and heir, Huneric.
With his long-sought alliance to Roman royalty in place, Gaiseric declares himself ruler of Europe and Africa. Gaiseric’s successors will rule North Africa until 534, a long reign by the standards of these tumultuous times.
TO THE EAST, THE VIOLENT interruptions that nearly dismantled the foundations of the West had not slowed human progress toward modernity. Buoyed by wealth derived from the mining of gold and silver, the peoples of Arabia and Mesopotamia were building rather than destroying civilizations, creating science and mathematics to usher mankind into the future.
July 30, 762 CE. Al-Mansur, the second caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, stood on the banks of the Euphrates and watched as the architects laid out his new capital city, Baghdad.
The caliph was careful with both details and dinars. Used to the lavish spending of the recently overthrown Umayyad dynasty, al-Mansur’s subjects sometimes called him “the father of pennies” because he counted them all. That was all right with him. He’d grown up in poverty and knew that the man who counted the pennies had the dinars for the projects that matter. His new capital city was a project that mattered.
Al-Mansur was determined that his new capital would be like no other city the world had seen. He had searched for almost ten years before finding the perfect site for his new capital, at the point where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers were so close together that the city could fill the space between them.
Like Paris in the 1890s, Baghdad was a cultural magnet. Scientists, poets, scholars, and artists came from all over the civilized world to settle in the Round City of the Abbasids. Most important of all, Baghdad had libraries. Encouraged by an official policy of intellectual curiosity, Islamic scholars in Baghdad collected works of literature, philosophy, and science from all corners of the empire. (One of al-Mansur’s successors reportedly negotiated for a copy of Ptolemy’s Hè Megalè Syntaxis as part of a treaty with Byzantium.)
To the East, the violent interruptions that nearly dismantled the foundations of the West had not slowed human progress toward modernity.
Collecting and translating manuscripts from around the Islamic world required room to work, clerical support, and storage space. With financial backing from the caliphs, an army of scholars manned a translation bureau, a royal library, a book depository, and an observatory—collectively known as the House of Wisdom. Academic patronage became a path for political advancement. Ambitious nobles created their own libraries, many of them open to the public. By the ninth century, the Street of Stationers had more than a hundred book and paper shops.
An informal academy of scholars and their students grew up around the House of Wisdom. Working in a culture that encouraged learning, Abbasid scholars in the eighth through the tenth centuries not only transcribed and translated the classical scholarship of Greece, Persia, and India, they transformed it, pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward in mathematics, geography, astronomy, and medicine.
The disciplines at the heart of Arabic science were astronomy, geography, and mathematics, all of which were tied to the ritual requirements of Islam. To accurately calculate the timing of the five daily prayers and the month of fasting at Ramadan, Muslims scholars created increasingly sophisticated ways of making astronomical observations. They used tools from the new disciplines of astronomy and mathematics to determine the direction of Mecca from any point in the caliphate.
THE BIRTH OF BAGHDAD
The Arab caliph al-Mansur consulted with the three best astrologers of his court—an Arab, a Persian, and a Jew—to cast a horoscope to determine when work should start on the round city he determined would be the new capital that would be
come Baghdad. Now they were ready to begin.
Following al-Mansur’s instructions, the architects laid out the city walls in a perfect circle, drawn using the teachings of Euclid, the caliph’s favorite Greek geometer. They marked the circle first with ashes and then with cotton seeds soaked in naphtha. Once lit, the cotton seeds burst into flame, burning the outline of the Round City into the ground. “By God!” the watching caliph exclaimed. “I shall live in it my entire life, and it shall become the home of my descendants; and without doubt, it will become the most prosperous city in the world.”
Nicknamed the Round City, al-Mansur’s new capital took five years to build: an enormous palace complex within a circular brick wall one mile around, 95 feet high and 145 feet thick. Within twenty years of its completion, it was the biggest city in the world, with more than a million people: Muslim and Christian Arabs, non-Arab Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, Sabians, and an occasional Hindu scholar visiting from India. People and goods poured in from every corner of an empire that stretched from Spain to Samarqand. A growing disorderly ring of merchants and craftsmen surrounded the perfect circle of the inner city. Every type of business had its own street: cloth merchants, fruit sellers, leather workers, perfumers, bakers, even booksellers. An Arab geographer of the time claimed that the city had six thousand streets, thirty thousand mosques, and ten thousand bathhouses.
Muslim scholars’ achievements in the golden age of Islam went far beyond the practical requirements of Islamic worship. By the ninth century, scholars in Baghdad could measure the earth using astronomical readings with a degree of accuracy unsurpassed until the twentieth century. They had also begun work on the conundrum of how to represent the round surface of the earth on a two-dimensional map. Muslim alchemists developed and refined processes that were the foundation of modern chemistry, including distillation, crystallization, reduction, and filtration. Muslim doctors accurately described the mechanism of sight and the anatomy of the eye, discovered how blood circulates through the body, developed effective surgical techniques for removing cataracts, laid out rules for testing the effectiveness of new drugs that form the basis for clinical trials today, and wrote medical works that remained standard texts in Europe well into the seventeenth century.
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