Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  The fact that in actual history, the Ilkhanate rapidly disintegrated after 1335 and Mongol rule in China collapsed between the 1350s and 1380s makes it seem very likely that similar developments would have occurred in an occupied Europe, had it indeed been chosen over China and the Levant as the Mongols’ main target. The dislocations of the Black Death from 1347 onward would have heightened existing tensions. Overall, even if we twist history enough to allow successful conquest, a long-term Mongol-Turkic empire in Europe was hardly a realistic outcome.

  A different question may be more relevant: Would Mongol pressure or domination have been capable of steering European state formation toward a trajectory of centralization and the formation of large imperial structures in response to this pressure or domination? Russian—Muscovite—history offers a model of such a process. However, given how deeply entrenched polycentrism was in the political, social, and ideological structures of high medieval Europe, it is debatable whether Mongol influence on a halfway plausible time scale—say, for a century—would have been sufficient to remake the political landscape in later Russia’s image, or that of ancient Rome.

  The most likely outcome might have been a strengthening of regional rulers—whether in cooperation with or in opposition to Mongol power—through institutional adaptations and a dismantling of the castle network. This could have accelerated the emergence of the competitive state system of the early modern period to a considerable degree. Paradoxically, a stronger Mongol presence might in the end have reinforced polycentrism, if perhaps with fewer players: Germany and Italy in particular might well have emerged from this process in a more consolidated format. Whether the political, economic, and mental infrastructure that underpinned the eventual advent of modernity would still have been in place is, however, a question that, crucial as it may be, is too encumbered by complex second-order counterfactuals to be even worth considering here.

  This question is also present in the second scenario, that of massive devastation. In this case, Europe’s development is dealt a more direct blow—not by altering trajectories of state formation but by destroying the underpinnings of later advances. Cecilia Holland’s counterfactual account presents a stark version of this outcome. In her telling, instead of retreating in 1242, the Mongols first strike the Low Countries, a center of prosperity, destroying Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. Then they swing south into France and move against Paris, using the meadows of Middle France as their temporary base. Another force, sustained by the grasslands of the Po Valley, devastates northern Italy.

  Wiping out the Flemish cities would “erase the nascent financial center of Europe,” and depopulation from slaughter would allow sea and swamps to return: “There would be no rise of capitalism or the middle class. No printing press, no humanism. No Dutch Revolt, the seedbed of the great democratic revolutions from England to America to France. No Industrial Revolution.” The loss of Paris, on the other hand, would remove the university that provided foundations for Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. And if the pope had been killed just as the caliph had been when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, central religious authority might have collapsed altogether, and the Reformation would have been avoided: Christianity might have devolved into discrete sects.29

  The historical experience of the Middle East might seem to provide a measure of support for this apocalyptic vision, considering that stalled development there is sometimes blamed on Mongol depredations. However, the Holland scenario does not even begin to consider the role of European fortifications, a serious shortcoming that disqualifies it at least as far as the early 1240s are concerned. This degree of devastation would have required not only more Mongols but above all the mobilization of the sedentary population of Eastern and Central Europe in support of sieges: in other words, a more sustained presence and gradual advance that takes us back to the first option of Mongol-induced empire-building. Europe’s wreckage could not have been achieved without it.30

  I must stress that both the empire-building and the devastation counterfactuals—which are so closely related as to be effectively indistinguishable—are logically predicated on a massive rewrite of history that suppresses not only highly contingent events (such as the life span or motivations of a Great Khan) but also more robust features such as geographical distance (both from Mongolia and the steppe), the Mongolian polity’s built-in propensity to fracture, and the intrinsic appeal of alternative targets, foremost southern China. It also needs to posit that the extent of fortified resistance in Europe would not have derailed Mongol operations. Some of these notions run counter to real-life experiences elsewhere. Thus, the Mongols never staged a full-scale invasion of India, which was likewise remote and well defended. Setbacks in Japan and Indonesia were accepted rather than followed by renewed efforts. Unsuccessful invasions of Vietnam resulted in no more than nominal submission.

  Although the counterfactual of significantly different developmental outcomes in Europe as a result of sustained Mongol pressure cannot be ruled out, it certainly requires aggressive rewrites of historical conditions and therefore does not seem plausible overall. The most one could argue is that at this juncture, the potential for a meaningful divergence from Europe’s real-life trajectory of state formation was somewhat higher than it had been before (taking account of the Arab, Carolingian, and German empires) and after (taking account of Habsburg, Ottoman, and French policies).

  This alone justifies devoting as much space to this counterfactual as I have done here. Nevertheless, “somewhat higher” was nowhere near enough. East Asia and the Middle East had long been exposed to pressures from the steppe, whereas the western half of Europe was not. Ecological constraints were so powerful that even the Mongols, for all their historically unique reach, were ill equipped to overcome them. In chapter 8, I explore this issue in greater detail and from a comparative perspective.31

  THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: THE HABSBURG STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY

  After the Mongol threat had abated and German emperors had given up trying to tighten their grip on their heterogeneous domain, about a quarter of a millennium passed without producing any potential junctures that would merit counterfactual assessment. During this period, state power was slowly but surely rebuilt: rulers bargained more successfully for tax revenue, and armies grew in size. State consolidation strengthened the polycentric state system of Latin Europe: the remaining parties were fewer in number but more capable and resilient than before.32

  By 1500, the Christians of Spain had subdued the last Muslim redoubts, and the English and their Burgundian allies had been expelled from France. Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Muscovy had developed into often spatially extensive states along the periphery, and the Ottoman empire had taken over most of the Balkans. Only in Germany and to a lesser degree in the northern half of Italy did intense fragmentation prevail. Overall, the European political environment was even less conducive to the emergence of a single very large empire than it had ever been since the fall of Rome.

  There were only two ways to disturb this increasingly stable equilibrium of balancing states: a massive exogenous shock or a sudden and dramatic increase in one party’s power. The explosive growth of the Ottoman empire to the east falls into the former category: reaching westward from the Aegean into the Balkans and Carpathian region and advancing along the North African coast, it recalled the initial successes of the first caliphate 900 years earlier. I consider this option in the next section.

  In the early sixteenth century, a sudden shift in the balance of power within Latin Europe created another possible juncture: in short order, the Habsburg prince Charles V acquired (by way of inheritance) Burgundy and the Low Countries (1506), Spain (Aragon and Castile) and the southern half of Italy (the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia and the Duchy of Milan) (1516), and Austria (1519), and was elected emperor.

  On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus, in Castile’s employ, had reached the Caribbean in 1492, opening the doors to expansion on the Am
erican mainland. In 1521, after the conquest of the Aztec empire, the colony of New Spain was established in Mexico (and upgraded to a viceroyalty in 1535), and the viceroyalty of Peru followed in 1542 a few years after the fall of the Inca empire in the Andes. Three years later, the mining town of Potosí was set up in what is now Bolivia to exploit the richest silver mines thus far discovered: together with other Andean and Mexican mines, they proceeded to generate vast amounts of bullion for the Spanish crown (figure 6.2).

  FIGURE 6.2   The Holy Roman empire and the European possessions of Charles V, c. 1550 CE.

  This fortuitous congruence of events not only elevated Charles V to a dominant position in the western Mediterranean that also encircled France and reached up toward England, it put at his disposal a growing revenue windfall that could be spent on war. Within a single generation, power had come to be concentrated on a scale unheard of since the days of the Roman empire, the last time Spain, much of Italy, the eastern Alpine region, and much of the Rhineland had reported to the same ruler, and the last time rich precious metal deposits had subsidized military activity—the Middle Ages had been a period of bullion shortage. At least nominally, Charles V could claim about 40 percent of the population of Western and central Europe.33

  Yet notwithstanding the pronouncements of eulogists who cast the Habsburgs as descendants of Aeneas via Augustus, Constantine, and Charlemagne, Charles’s position was dramatically different from that of a Roman emperor. His domain was characterized, and effectively riven, by intense particularism, resembling, in Anthony Pagden’s apt turn of phrase, “a multinational corporation more than a state.”34

  Even in the ideational sphere, notions of universal empire, while promoted by some contemporaries, elicited resistance not only outside his realm—most notably by France—but also in his two Spanish kingdoms. The “empire” was conceived of as being territorially confined to the traditional German empire, where Charles’s influence was generally much weaker than in his direct possessions. Only the New World, where he lacked serious challengers, was susceptible to the idea of truly imperial rule. In 1535, Charles felt compelled to publicly announce before the pope that he had no interest in universal empire at all. An alternative aspiration, leadership of a unified Christendom (leaving aside the Orthodox community, which was well beyond his reach), likewise proved elusive even as it absorbed growing resources that might have been committed to more promising strategies of state-building.35

  Germany occupied an awkward position within the Habsburg system. As politically segmented and opposed to centralized authority as ever, the German principalities acted as a brake on Charles’s ambitions and drained his treasury in internecine conflicts. Charles V and his son Philip II did not formally expand the German empire. Instead, their power increasingly rested on territories outside the empire’s traditional boundaries: only Austria, Milan, Burgundy, and the Low Countries lay within them.

  This structural dualism created tensions between the empire’s consensus-driven constitution and the location of the resources its ruler drew on: incorporation of the other Habsburg domains—favored by the princes—would have given them a say in how these funds were spent. Instead, their emperor could now fall back on monies that were completely outside their control, and could even be used against them. Conversely, the emperor was not entitled to ask for German funds against Christian opponents, and even when an exception was made to move against France because of its alliance with the Muslim Turks, only a minute fraction of the costs of that war were borne by the empire’s principalities.36

  The imposition of direct rule by force held little promise: experiments with placing fortified garrisons in cities (such as Florence and Ghent) were not feasible in Germany. As a result, the emperor’s suppression of princely resistance did not much outlast his army’s presence, and opportunistic extortion of funds was often the best Charles could hope for.37

  The unwieldy sprawl of his composite realm precipitated warfare on multiple fronts. The principal challengers were France, which sought to balance his rising power; the German princes, who sought to preserve their autonomy and politicized the Protestant Reformation; and, to a lesser degree, the Ottoman empire, freshly allied with France to offset Habsburg prominence. Broadly speaking, Charles’s military ventures were not particularly successful, and generally failed to add to the domains he had acquired through inheritance. While he managed to retrieve the Duchy of Milan after several changes in ownership, his demand for the Duchy of Burgundy and Provence in return for the release of the captured French king failed in 1535, as did an invasion of Provence the following year. Further wars in Italy in the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s accomplished little of substance.

  The Ottomans’ ascent added to the pressure: Austria’s claim to Hungary was short-lived and Vienna itself was attacked in 1529, forcing Charles to assemble a large army to counter another attempt in 1532. His conquest of Tunis in 1535 was quickly followed by a major naval defeat in 1538 and a disastrous assault on Algiers in 1541 that cost him more than 150 ships. An invasion of France conducted jointly with England became bogged down in prolonged sieges and had to be aborted to deal with German Protestants: it did not alter the status quo. Finally, a massive and hugely expensive operation against the French city of Metz failed in the winter of 1552–1553.38

  Only the Spanish advance in the Americas was a success story: indigenous societies that lacked steel, guns, cash, an advanced form of literacy, and sometimes even wheeled transport, and that were laid low by catastrophic epidemics that had been introduced by the invaders, were no match for Charles’s conquistadores. It seemed as if his forces could only overpower opponents at a much lower level of social development but failed to make much headway against their Old World peers. But problems arose even in the New World, as quasi-autonomous colonial leaders, operating on the premise that their victories entitled them to hefty rewards, claimed enormous estates and masses of forced laborers for themselves. In the 1540s, reform attempts in Peru prompted them to rise against the crown.39

  Lack of military success in Europe was compounded by domestic resistance rooted in German particularism and doctrinal schism. Religious unity, with or without Habsburg leadership, remained an illusion. In 1526–1527, in a distant echo of the papacy quarrel with Frederick II three centuries earlier, Pope Clement VII formed a league against Charles, whose mercenaries in turn sacked the city of Rome. More importantly, Charles’s ascent to power in Spain and Germany coincided with Luther’s dissident teachings in the Electorate of Saxony in the empire’s northeast. Although the emperor had Luther banned at the Diet of Worms in 1521, this reformative movement, soon reinforced by the work of others such as Zwingli (from the 1520s) and Calvin (from the 1530s) and accompanied by Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church (likewise in the 1530s), rapidly spread across northern and central Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and Switzerland, forever dividing Latin Christendom.

  With respect to imperial state formation, this process could not have occurred at a worse time, as it served to offset the concatenation of territorial amalgamation and resource windfalls on the Habsburg side. Among German princes wary of an overlord who could draw on growing external funds but denied them a voice in how they were spent, religious reform immediately became entangled with political priorities, coalescing into resistance to Catholic dogma and its imperial champion alike. As early as 1531, the Lutheran princes of Saxony and Hesse formed a defensive alliance against the eventuality of aggression by their own emperor. Its membership tied to Lutheran confession, this coalition, known as the Schmalkaldic League, soon attracted other principalities from different parts of Germany: by the 1540s, it covered most of the northern half of the empire’s German-speaking lands and also extended into its west and southwest. In a less formalized way, princely solidarity extended across confessional boundaries: even arch-Catholic Bavaria was wary of Habsburg ambition.40

  Having bought a break from war with France and its Ottoman allies, Charles turned agai
nst his dissident princes by employing both divisive diplomacy and military force. However, military victory in 1547 proved ephemeral. His efforts to compel a return to Catholic practices provoked renewed resistance not only in Protestant principalities but also in others that feared a more centralized imperial monarchy. In a telling reflection of just how deep divisions ran, even the pope himself initially disapproved of Charles’s pro-Catholic ordinances because they encroached on the pope’s own jurisdiction.

  In 1552, another round of armed conflict with German opponents who had allied themselves with France caught Charles flatfooted: in a scene that captures the profound weakness behind the imperial splendor, Charles and his entourage had to flee Innsbruck, deep in the Catholic Alps, to avoid capture by Saxony’s forces. After a failed campaign against France, Charles was forced to accept religious freedoms in Germany, and he abdicated soon thereafter.41

  Both his military ambitions and his designs for religious unity had thus come to nothing. Upon Charles’s death in 1558, the Habsburg domains were more fragmented than they had been before. Protestantism had swiftly become firmly entrenched and politicized in ways that reinforced existing divisions within the German empire and beyond. As the emperorship devolved upon the Habsburg line that ruled Austria, there was no longer a single figurehead for their entire domain. Only in the autobiographical account that Charles had dictated in the early 1550s did he eclipse that paragon of Roman imperialism, Julius Caesar: after all, Charles noted, Caesar had invaded Gaul only once, whereas he had done so no fewer than five times—a tally that neglects the inconvenient detail of how these invasions turned out.42