by Ian Morris
This never caught on, perhaps because substitutes cost money. Much more common was the noble Enguerrand de Coucy’s response when his master (the king of England) summoned him to war against his other master (the king of France) in 1369. Coucy declared a personal peace treaty with both kings and, rather than choose one master over the other, found himself a third master, going off to fight in the pope’s army in Italy. When the papal campaigns fizzled out in 1374, Coucy took ten thousand men and waged a private war in Switzerland instead.
In the 1770s, while he was writing The Wealth of Nations in the safety of enlightened Edinburgh, Adam Smith contrasted his own well-ordered world with the tumultuous times of Coucy, Count Robert, and Kings Henry and Philip. That era, Smith sadly concluded, had been an age of “feudal anarchy” (so called after feoda or feuda, the Latin name for the land grants that so entangled everyone’s loyalties), when “great lords continued to make war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and the open country still continued to be a scene of violence, rapine, and disorder” (Figure 3.8).
Figure 3.8. Feudal anarchy: the flower of Christian and Muslim chivalry hack each other to pieces at Damietta in Egypt, in 1218 (from a book dating from around 1255).
Since Smith’s day, scholars have had a hard time deciding what significance to attach to the age of feudal anarchy. It was reading about medieval mayhem that made Norbert Elias decide in the 1930s that Europe must have subsequently gone through a civilizing process, driving down rates of violent death. But that was only half-correct. Because Elias did not take a long-term perspective, he assumed that feudal anarchy was simply the natural state of humanity, not the end point of a millennium of counterproductive wars that followed the breakdown of the ancient empires.
By the 1960s, though, as the spirit of Coming of Age in Samoa convinced more and more academics that humans were naturally peaceful, many historians began to ask whether “feudal anarchy” really was the right way to describe Coucy’s world. After all, for every William the Conqueror hacking off heads, there was a Francis of Assisi ministering to the meek, and most of the time Europeans did settle their disputes without resort to force. But so, of course, did most twentieth-century Yanomami—and yet something like one-quarter of their men still died violently. What makes “feudal anarchy” such an appropriate label for fourteenth-century Europe is that many of its residents (much like Yanomami men) turned to violence with shocking casualness.
My own favorite story, out of thousands that survive, is about a knight who dropped in at a neighbor’s castle for dinner. “My lord,” he said by way of small talk. “This rich wine, how much did you pay for it?”
“Ah,” his gracious host replied. “No living man ever asked a penny for it.”
It seems to me, in fact, that “feudal anarchy” is an excellent description not just of western Europe between about 900 and 1400 but also of most of Eurasia’s lucky latitudes in the same period. From England to Japan, societies staggered toward feudal anarchy as their Leviathans dismembered themselves. In third- and fourth-century northern China, documents speak of the rise of buqu, clients who followed warrior-landlords into battle, providing soldiers in return for shares of the plunder. In sixth-century India, rulers of the declining Gupta Empire began recognizing the virtual independence of samantas, local lords who provided soldiers when the imperial bureaucracy collapsed. In the ninth-century Middle East, the iqta’—lands granted by the caliph to local sultans who might, or might not, raise troops in return—provided what little glue still held the Arab world together. By 1000, the Byzantine Empire had moved in the same direction, with emperors making land grants called pronoiai in return for military service. Everywhere, the ancient empires went to their graves.
Zombie Empires
But they did not stay there; like Hollywood zombies, empires rose from the dead again and again.
Take China. When the Buddhist priest Yang Xuanzhi visited the former capital Luoyang in 547, the desolation stunned him. “The city walls had collapsed, palaces and houses were in ruins,” he wrote. Just thirteen years before, a great rebellion had sacked the city, carried off its population, and split the Northern Wei kingdom that had briefly reunited this part of China into two warring states. Since then, said Yang, “beasts of the field had made their holes in the overgrown palace steps and mountain birds had nested in the courtyard trees. Wandering herdsmen loitered in the highways, and farmers planted millet between the ceremonial towers.”
But just thirty years after Yang’s visit, northern China had been reunited, and another twelve years later, in 589, most of China was under the rule of the Sui dynasty. China had clawed its way back up the slope in Figure 3.6.
Counterproductive wars, like productive ones, had their culminating points, and when they overshot them, men who excelled at violence found themselves (like the rulers of antiquity) spending less time killing and more time in meetings. “Understand this truth,” a Persian prince told his son around 1080: “The kingdom can be held by the army, and the army by gold; and gold is acquired through agricultural development; and agricultural development through justice and equity. Therefore be just and equitable.”
Conquerors who refused to learn this truth did not last long. After reuniting China in 589, the Sui dynasty kept raising bigger and bigger armies and launching them into disastrous wars in Korea. In the 610s, their subjects refused to take any more, and for a while it looked as if China were sliding back into feudal anarchy. Banditry increased, the number of households paying taxes fell by 75 percent, and much of the countryside was overrun by warlords (including thousands of militant Buddhist monks, apparently unconvinced by their own nonviolent teachings). But the winners of the civil wars, who set themselves up as the Tang dynasty, had learned the lessons of productive war well. “The ruler depends on the state,” the emperor Taizong wrote, “and the state depends on its people. Oppressing the people to make them serve the ruler is like someone cutting off his own flesh to feed his stomach. The stomach is filled but the body is injured: the ruler is wealthy but the state is destroyed.”
As good as their word, Tang monarchs granted amnesties, promoted talented officials regardless of their previous loyalties, and rebuilt a professional civil service. Setting the standard himself, Taizong reputedly had his bureaucrats hang memos on his bedroom walls so he could study them each night as he dozed off. He even brought the rebellious Buddhists on board, hiring those who surrendered to pray for the war dead (of both sides) in new monasteries built at the sites of his biggest battles.
Nor did the Tang rulers stop there. As descendants of invading nomads, they understood steppe politics well enough to know how to sow dissent within the Turkic tribes facing them across the Great Wall. In 630 they sent ten thousand cavalry charging out of a heavy morning mist to sweep away the Eastern Turk encampment at the battle at the Iron Mountain, and for the next half century China’s frontier was secure.
But the achievement that really raised Tang rulers above feudal kings was reestablishing civilian control of the military. Being practical men, they cut deals with mighty nobles when they had to but refused to exchange land for armed service. Instead, they kept everyone on the Tang payroll and even revoked land grants made by previous dynasties. They rotated generals around the empire to prevent them from forming strong local ties. An officer who moved even ten troops without permission risked a year in jail; one who moved a regiment might be strangled.
The Tang basically did everything right, and the seventh century turned into an East Asian golden age. Peace was restored, the economy boomed, and Chinese poetry reached its peak of perfection. Tang armies overran Korea and the oases of central Asia; Chinese thought indelibly marked Japan and Southeast Asia. Yet despite these triumphs, not even the Tang could break the cycle of productive and counterproductive wars.
By the middle of the eighth century, China had grown so rich that the Turkic nomads on the steppes were formin
g new confederations to plunder it. To defend themselves, the Tang had to put ever-bigger armies on their frontiers, and in 755 one of their generals—a Turk who had joined the Chinese side—rebelled. The government crushed the revolt, but its methods, which involved granting enormous powers to other generals and inviting more groups of Turks into the empire to fight on its behalf against the groups of Turks that had already invaded, led to even worse disasters. There were brief intervals when hope flared anew, but overall the empire spent the next century and a half in free fall. Security broke down almost completely. Criminal gangs grew strong enough to beat the imperial army in pitched battles, and in 883 the mightiest of the outlaws (known to his friends as the Heaven-Storming Generalissimo, to his enemies as the Mad Bandit) even sacked Chang’an. Before the Mad Bandit showed up, Chang’an had been the world’s biggest city, home to perhaps a million people. After, said the poet Wei Zhuang (who was there),
Chang’an lies in silence; what’s there now?
In ruined markets and desolate streets, ears of wheat sprout…
The Hanyuan Hall is the haunt of foxes and hares…
Along the Avenue of Heaven you walk on the bones of high officials.
So many people were starving, one story says, that a thousand peasants were being killed and eaten every day in 883, with the Mad Bandit’s men salting and pickling some bodies to save for later. By 907, when the last Tang emperor was deposed and China formally split into ten kingdoms, it seemed that no one would ever break the cycle of productive and counterproductive wars.
No Way Out
The revolution in military affairs that had brought mounted warfare to the lucky latitudes between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500 was different from most of the previous revolutions. These earlier revolutions—the rise of fortifications and siege warfare after 4300 B.C., bronze arms and armor after 3300, discipline sometime between then and 2450, mass iron-armed infantry forces around 900 B.C.—had generally played to the lucky latitudes’ strengths, giving Leviathans tools to suppress internal strife and to conquer their neighbors, making bigger societies. Even chariots, invented on the steppes around 2000 B.C., had ultimately worked better in the hands of the empires than in those of raiders, because only empires could afford to build vehicles and train horses by the thousands.
With cavalry, though, it proved impossible to convert the lucky latitudes’ wealth, organization, and numbers into victory over the nomads. The insuperable problem was that the nomads ruled lands that were perfect for horse-breeding. Most tribes had more horses than people, and they practically lived in the saddle. Even the richest and cleverest of the agrarian empires (above all, Tang China) could only win temporary advantages, which would eventually be wiped out by bad luck, bad judgment, or the rise of a particularly big nomadic federation. What the lucky latitudes needed was another revolution in military affairs to tip the balance back in their favor, but none came. For every technical improvement that worked to the lucky latitudes’ advantage (such as improved ships, castles, and infrastructure), another (such as stirrups or the breeding of even stronger horses) benefited the nomads even more.
What eventually changed the equation was gunpowder, but you would have needed a very good crystal ball to have seen that coming before A.D. 1400. The earliest reference to gunpowder goes back to the ninth century, when Chinese Daoist monks searching for elixirs of immortality set fire to a mixture of sulfur and saltpeter and discovered that it burned and fizzed in marvelously entertaining ways. They quickly found two uses for the powder. The first, fireworks, did nothing to extend life, while the second, firearms, promised only to shorten it.
The oldest surviving recipe for gunpowder, dating to 1044, did not use enough saltpeter to explode. Instead of making guns, in which gunpowder blasts a ball or bullet out of a barrel, Chinese craftsmen designed weapons that sprayed burning powder out of bamboo tubes or used catapults to launch paper bags full of the “fire chemical.” On the whole, gunpowder was probably more dangerous to its users than to its targets.
If anything, as late as the fourteenth century the balance of military power still seemed to be tilting toward the barbarians, largely because they proved so good at learning from their adversaries. When the Goths flooded into the Roman Empire in 378, they had found that they could win battles but not storm cities. “Keep peace with walls,” their chief advised them. But just two generations later, when Attila the Hun invaded the exact same area, very different scenes unfolded. Finding his way blocked by the massive fortifications of Naissus (modern Nis in Serbia) in 442, Attila had the Huns chop down trees and build dozens of battering rams. “From the walls the defenders tumbled down wagon-sized boulders,” the Roman diplomat Priscus wrote. “Some of the rams were crushed, along with the men working them, but the Romans could not hold out against the great number of machines. Then the enemy brought up scaling ladders … and the city was taken.”
Attila used the plunder from his victories to hire the best Roman engineers, who repaid his generosity by exploiting the weaknesses of the defenses they had themselves built. As a result, says a fifth-century writer, the Huns “captured more than a hundred cities and almost brought Constantinople into danger, and most men fled from it. Even the monks wanted to run away from Jerusalem.” One of the sacked cities, Nicopolis in what is now Bulgaria, has been excavated extensively, and the thoroughness of the Hunnic destruction is astonishing. No one ever rebuilt its mansions.
For centuries, the nomads got better and better at fighting the lucky latitudes, and by 1219, when Genghis Khan invaded the mighty but now largely forgotten Khwarizmian Empire in eastern Iran, his Mongol army employed a permanent corps of Chinese engineers. This corps directed prisoners of war to dig tunnels; divert rivers; build catapults, rams, and towers; and rain burning gunpowder onto defenders. According to Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the first European to live in a Mongol khan’s court, the engineers constantly refined their nasty methods. “They even take the fat of the people they kill,” Carpine claimed, “and, melting it, throw it onto the houses, and wherever the fire falls on this fat it is almost inextinguishable.”
Baghdad, Islam’s richest city, surrendered in 1258 after Mongol catapults concentrated their fire on a single tower and brought it crashing down in just three days. After mocking the city’s ruler for hoarding his wealth instead of spending it on defense, the Mongols rolled him in a carpet and crushed him to death, officially ending the caliphate.
In 1267 the Mongols capped this by besieging Xiangyang, possibly the greatest fortress on earth and certainly the strategic key to China. For six years it defied them. Nothing—not rams, not fire weapons, not scaling ladders—worked, but then the ever-adaptable nomads adapted even more, swapping their horses for ships. After sweeping the Chinese fleet off the Han River, they used new styles of catapults to blast holes in the walls of Fancheng, which guarded the bank of the Han across from Xiangyang. Once Fancheng fell, Xiangyang’s position became hopeless, and once Xiangyang fell, China’s position became hopeless too. In 1279, Khubilai Khan chased the last emperor of the Song dynasty into the sea and seized the celestial throne for himself.
Nomad armies proved equally adaptable in open battle. In 1191, for instance, the steppe cavalry of the Ghurid Empire fled in disorder when they first encountered elephants in India, and their commander was lucky to escape with his life. Returning the following year, however, the same commander fought the same alliance of Ganges Valley kings on the same battlefield at Tarain but used different tactics. Four wings of horse archers, each ten thousand strong, took turns harassing the Indian forces, avoiding direct contact with the terrifying elephants; and then, as night drew in, the Ghurid reserve of twelve thousand armored lancers charged home, shattering the demoralized Indian ranks.
The Ghurids’ enormous army—more than fifty thousand cavalry—bears witness to the last, and most important, reason that the nomads’ power grew. As well as learning how to get the better of walls, ships, and elephants, nomads learned logistics.
By the thirteenth century, nomads were regularly raising and supplying armies like the Ghurids’, with each rider typically bringing along three or four spare mounts. When armies from the steppes fought each other to control the lucky latitudes—as happened when Genghis Khan annihilated the Khwarizmians on the banks of the Indus in 1221, or the Turkic Mamluks repulsed a Mongol invasion of Syria at Homs sixty years later—half a million horses might be crammed into a square mile of dust and arrows, drawing in every scrap of forage from hundreds of miles around. All this had to be organized, and the great nomad conquerors assembled huge general staffs (usually men captured from the cities they sacked) to do it for them.
The human and animal carnage of the great battles was staggering, but it paled in comparison to the massacres of civilians that followed. Some of the numbers written down by survivors—1,747,000 people plus all the cats and dogs killed by Mongols at Nishapur, says one Persian historian; 2,400,000 at Herat, says another—simply cannot be true, not least because they are so much bigger than the total populations of the cities in question. But even if we discount the wilder claims, it does seem that each time horsemen from the steppes burst into the lucky latitudes, hundreds of thousands died, and sometimes millions. Genghis Khan’s head count probably reached the tens of millions, and when Tamerlane led a second wave of Mongol invasions around 1400, sacking Delhi, Damascus, and dozens of other cities, he might have come close to matching that tally. (Had he not died of fever as he was marching against China in 1405, he might even have surpassed it.)
Stunning as it is to read about these bloodbaths, we should bear in mind that the rape, pillage, slaughter, and starvation that armies spread across Eurasia was only one part of the era’s violence. All the while, the background noise of casual, small-scale killing—homicides, vendettas, private wars, civil strife—rumbled on, rising in crescendos as kingdoms collapsed into feudal anarchy, dying down again as productive war temporarily worked its magic.