7 Silk Roads and Steppe Peoples
fn1 Loess soils cover no more than 10 per cent of the Earth’s surface, but offer some of the most agriculturally productive land in the world. Alongside the thick loess plateau in China, a wide band of loess runs through the steppe region of Central Asia, and there are also patches of these fertile soils across Northern Europe.7
fn2 This extent of the Roman Empire has had a long-lingering influence through history, and its imprint is still evident in the geographical spread of the three forms of the Christian faith in modern Europe – Catholicism, Protestantism and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The East–West Schism of 1054 saw Christianity divide into two main branches: Roman Catholics led by the Pope and Eastern Orthodox Christians headed by the Patriarch in Constantinople. The second major schism was the split of Protestantism from Catholicism in the sixteenth century, the result of the Reformation that began in Germany (territory that had remained outside the Roman Empire). This tripartite division of Europe largely separated along two main fault lines. The first, between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, tracked the Danube river as it ran south through the plains of Hungary: the old demarcation of the zones of influence of the East and West Roman Empires, roughly equidistant between their capitals in Rome and Constantinople. The second line follows the long-standing frontier of the Roman Empire along the Rhine, and the boundary between the Latin civilisation and the Germanic tribes, with the territories that embraced Protestantism lying beyond the old Roman border. In broad brushstrokes, the three Christianities follow the frontiers of the old empire, themselves defined by natural boundaries of the underlying landscape.9
fn3 The fact that silk arrived by these contrasting routes caused the Romans to believe that it came from two different places: transported by land from the country of the Seres, and reaching the west across the water from that of the Sinae.15 The Romans were also unclear about how silk thread was produced, believing it was combed from leaves in the forest – a misunderstanding perhaps deriving from the fact that the caterpillars of the silk moth are fed on mulberry leaves.16 The Han Chinese had a similar misapprehension about the natural source of the cotton they received from India, believing it to be the ‘hair combed from certain water sheep’17 and not, in fact, the fluffy fibres encasing the seeds of a plant that is related to okra and cocoa.
fn4 Silk became less important along these east–west trade routes after around AD 550, when eggs of the silk moth were smuggled to Constantinople, launching a new silk industry that undermined the previous Chinese monopoly.29
fn5 This was something of which the more isolated civilisations of the Americas were deprived. When contact was re-established between the peoples of Eurasia and the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century – for the first time since the Bering land bridge was severed at the end of the last ice age – Eurasian civilisation was much more advanced in terms of scientific understanding and technological capability. A shared heritage across the millennia, facilitated by land and maritime trade routes, was one of the major reasons for this faster development.
fn6 Over this period, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a widespread cooling known as the Little Ice Age, and warming furs were therefore highly sought after. We retain vestiges of this chilly period today in the fur-trimmed formal wear of judges and lord mayors, as well as academic gowns, all of which were designed at that time.36
fn7 Today, the sparsely populated Kazakh Steppe offers the perfect location for Russia to launch its rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the capsules containing the returning crew descending by parachute onto the empty flat plains of this sea of grass. By comparison, NASA launches its missions eastwards across the Atlantic Ocean, and before the Space Shuttle, its capsules would splash down into the North Atlantic or Pacific oceans for their crew to be recovered by ship.
fn8 An important combination of horse rearing and wheeled transport was the construction of the light-spoked and fast-moving war chariot by around 2000 BC.41 Pulled by a team of well-trained horses and carrying a javelin-thrower or archer, it was the blitzkrieg tank of the Bronze Age. Chariots revolutionised warfare and were as transformational in the conflicts between city states and empires as the later development of gunpowder. But by the time Homer composed the Iliad around 800 BC, some five centuries after the Trojan War, this Bronze Age military technology was long obsolete – it had been superseded by tight formations of spear-wielding infantry or fast-moving cavalry armed with the compound bow.42 The chariot survived merely as a symbol of prestige and power: in Persian, Indian, Graeco-Roman and Norse mythology the gods all ride chariots. Even today many cities have monuments that bear a quadriga, such as the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Brandenburg Gate.
fn9 The Urals are one of the world’s oldest surviving mountain ranges, formed around 250–300 million years ago when the Siberian Plate docked onto the eastern side of Pangea, marking the last stage in the making of the supercontinent. Like the pristinely preserved ophiolite scooped out on top of Cyprus that we discussed in Chapter 6, the Ural mountain range also contains flecks of crust from a long-since vanished ocean and so holds a legacy of rich copper mines.45
fn10 On numerous occasions throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongols also invaded the north-western region of India, but it wasn’t until 1526 that one of Genghis’ descendants established the Mogul Empire across the subcontinent.81
fn11 In contrast, the landowners in Eastern Europe held more power and were able to force the remaining peasantry into tighter serfdom.
fn12 We’ve focused in this chapter on the steppes running across the spine of Eurasia, but the same ecological region also appears in North America. The prairies reach in a broad stripe right down the centre of the United States, occupying the dry region of the continental interior and rain shadow of the Rockies. As we’ve already explored, compared to Eurasia, North America was impoverished in its biological heritage. The horse had fallen extinct in its birthplace and there were no cows or sheep that supported the steppe nomads. The dominant mammal of the prairies, the bison, was hunted by indigenous American tribes, but resisted domestication. Plants like the squash, as well as several seed-bearing species such as the sunflower, had been domesticated by about 4,000 years ago in eastern North America,103 but the prairie belt represented a huge area of the Earth that was never utilised for agriculture.104 This all changed after the European conquest, with the arrival of colonists who brought with them the livestock and crops domesticated in the Old World. The drier prairies in the west proved perfect for open ranching of cattle, and over the last two centuries, with the help of steel-edged ploughs, advanced irrigation techniques and artificial fertilisers and pesticides, the eastern prairies have become some of the most productive croplands on the planet.
fn13 In 2016, Russia became the world’s biggest wheat exporter, much of the harvest coming from the steppe region north of the Black Sea, and supplied to the Middle East and North Africa.105
8 The Global Wind Machine and the Age of Discovery
fn1 The modern name for Gibraltar is derived from the Arabic Jabal Tariq, Mountain of Tariq, after the Islamic general who led this invasion. In the ancient world, Gibraltar formed one of the two Pillars of Hercules – the other being Mount Abila on the North African coast – that marked the beginning of the end of the known world. With European expansion into the Atlantic the Strait of Gibraltar became a vital naval chokepoint, controlling the passage into the Mediterranean Sea.
fn2 The reason why Spain joined the Age of Exploration significantly later than Portugal also comes down to plate tectonics. As we’ve seen, the Mediterranean is a tectonically complex region, formed by the disappearance of the Tethys Sea as Africa rammed north into Eurasia, and with a jumbled mess of small fragments of continental crust becoming caught in the collision zone. One of these is the Alborán microcontinent, which over the last 20 million years has moved west to crunch into the south-eastern margin of Spain and thrust up the Sierra
Nevada mountain range.3 It was here, in this easily defensible rugged terrain, that the last bastion of Islamic rule, the Emirate of Granada, held out for another 250 years after the rest of the Iberian Peninsula had been reclaimed by the Christian Reconquista. While the Kingdom of Portugal, occupying the flatter terrain across the western side of the peninsula, had secured its territory by the middle of the thirteenth century, and was able to invest its energy in maritime exploration, Spain remained preoccupied with its own, more challenging reconquests until the very end of the fifteenth century.
fn3 Their name derives from the Latin ‘Islands of the Dogs’, although this description may have actually referred to the large seals that once packed the archipelago’s beaches. Canary birds in turn were named for these islands to which they are indigenous.
fn4 Isolated volcanic islands have played an important role in history, offering strategic value as specks of land within the great expanse of the ocean. Saint Helena in the South Atlantic is another volcanic island born of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and one of the most remote islands in the world. It became a vital stop-off point for ships of the East India Company returning from India and China, and it was here that the British imprisoned Napoleon after his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. In modern history, the volcanic chain of the Hawaiian archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was of great strategic importance to the United States, which established airfields and naval bases there. When the Japanese attacked the ships stationed at Pearl Harbor in the lagoon of the island of Oahu in December 1941, the incident drew the US into the Second World War. The bombing raids flown from Midway, one of the most north-western islands of the long Hawaiian chain, crippled the Japanese fleet six months later and proved to be decisive in turning the war in the Pacific.
fn5 Most air currents are invisible, but in this case the winds can be clearly seen from space, thick with dust picked up from the Sahara Desert. The dust-laden air takes about a week to cross the Atlantic, and then the particles settle to fertilise the rich soils of the Amazon rainforest.
fn6 The equivalent English word, derived from the French, for losing your bearings is to become ‘disoriented’ – to have lost the eastward direction, from where the sun rises.
fn7 King João II was given by his great rival, Queen Isabella of Castile (who later unified Spain) perhaps the greatest accolade of history. She referred to him only as ‘The Man’20 – a moniker far better than even Bruce Springsteen’s …
fn8 In this way, it took Columbus just over a month to sail across the ocean that had taken more than 100 million years to open by plate tectonics.
fn9 He also learned from the natives of the West Indies about their hammocks, which would change how European sailors slept on board ship for hundreds of years.
fn10 Surprisingly, though, the name for these winds does not derive from the meaning of ‘trade’ in the sense of commerce. The term in fact originates from a different sixteenth-century usage: a wind ‘blowing trade’ means it is in a constant direction. Thus the trade winds are constant, proving to be very useful for exploration and trade in our understanding of the word.
fn11 The action of the fluid dynamics in these vast rotating gyres of ocean is to pull surface material into the centre of the gyre. The Sargasso Sea lies in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre – and is the only region of open ocean to be classified as a sea – forming a 1,000-by 3,000-kilometre patch of distinctively clear, blue water that is thick with seaweed. The same corralling process has in recent times also concentrated large amounts of plastic flotsam, dubbed the North Atlantic Garbage Patch; a similar concentration of pollution is found in the Pacific Trash Vortex.
fn12 It was during these first long-distance voyages by the Portuguese that scurvy began to routinely afflict sailors. Scurvy was not unknown at the time: it occurred during times of famine or among armies on nutritionally unbalanced diets. But it was sailors voyaging the seas for months on end that the disease now affected with great regularity, indeed inevitability. Today we know that scurvy is caused by vitamin deficiency. Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, is a vital ingredient in the way the body makes collagen for the connective tissue. Within a month or so of a diet containing insufficient vitamin C, the symptoms progressively worsen, ranging from bleeding gums and aching bones to poor wound healing, loss of teeth and eventually convulsions and death. Curiously, humans are one of the few animal species (guinea pigs are another) that suffer from scurvy. It turns out that at some point during our evolutionary divergence from other primate species we picked up a mutation in a single letter of our genetic code that knocked out the key enzyme for making ascorbic acid in our own liver cells. Scurvy was the major killer of sailors on long voyages until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was identified that citrus fruit could prevent the disease.33
fn13 The first fleet that followed da Gama’s route to India took such a wide volta do mar loop through the south Atlantic on the way out that they discovered Brazil.37
fn14 When Sri Lankans first encountered the Portuguese and their alien European food and drink they reported that ‘They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood.’ It was the first time they had seen bread and wine.38
fn15 The two great marine powers of the time had signed a treaty in 1494 to split the world between a Portuguese East and a Spanish West. The division, known as the Tordesillas line, ran north–south through the Atlantic 370 leagues (just over 2,000 kilometres) west of the Cape Verde Islands. It was no more than a line on a map passing through featureless, open ocean – a pure cartographical abstraction. When Portuguese sailors on their way to India discovered the coast of South America they realised it lay on their side of the demarcation and so claimed it: which is the reason why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of Latin America Spanish. The problem that arose in the 1520s was what happened around the other side of the planet. If the Tordesillas line is extended in a circle all the way across the poles and through the Pacific – 180° opposite the Atlantic partition – do the Moluccas lie in the Spanish or Portuguese realm? In the event the dispute was resolved when Spain, in urgent need of quick cash to finance its ongoing war with France, sold its Moluccas claim to Portugal.44
fn16 Potosí, also known as Cerro Rico (Spanish for ‘rich mountain’), is the core of an eroded volcano formed about 13 million years ago.49 The volcanic activity drove an underground hydrothermal system that leached out silver, as well as tin and zinc, from deeper rocks and then redeposited it in extremely rich, thick veins riddled throughout the heart of the mountain.50 It is the largest silver mine in history and for more than 100 years accounted for over half of global production.51
fn17 One major problem throughout most of the Age of Sail was that ships’ captains had a hard time determining their precise position in the open seas. Astronomy can easily tell you your latitude – you only need to measure the angle between the horizon and select stars – but before the invention of accurate clocks it was nigh-impossible to work out your correct longitude. Ships dashing east along the Roaring Forties had to know the right moment when to turn north-east to continue up to Indonesia. And if you waited too long you would plough into Australia – the continent’s coral-studded western coastline is littered with the wrecks of ships that missed their turning.57
fn18 The Portuguese had begun importing African slaves to the sugar plantations on Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands in the late 1400s, and from the 1530s transported them across the Atlantic to their colonies in Brazil.59 Soon enough, other European seafaring nations got involved in the human trafficking of the so-called Middle Passage.60
fn19 And we’re no more responsible consumers today, excitedly buying the latest electronic touch-screen device or cheap T-shirt whilst knowing in the back of our minds the appalling conditions many factory workers in the developing world are forced to endure.
9 Energy
fn1 Many of the tree species of Northern Europe – including alder, ash, beech, oak, sycamore and willow – are able to
resprout from a snapped stem, and it is this natural capability that makes them suitable for coppicing. But this in itself may have developed as an evolutionary response to damage wrought by foraging elephants and other megafauna – the sort of huge animals that roamed across even northern latitudes in the warmer interglacial periods, as we saw here.1
fn2 While this was hugely impressive for its time, it is still utterly dwarfed by the prodigious amounts of energy we have learned to marshal today: this entire waterwheel complex is outstripped by the power output of a single family car engine.
fn3 Orogeny is a geological term for the building of a mountain range from subduction or collision of tectonic plates, although disappointingly the adjectival form is ‘orogenic’ not ‘orogenous’.
fn4 The orogeny also created the intrusions of granite in Cornwall, which as we saw came to supply tin for bronze production and kaolinite clay for making porcelain.
fn5 On 21 April 2017, Britain went a full day without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since the 1880s.26
fn6 The correlation between Labour and coalfields is less clear in Scotland with the rise of another major left-wing party, the Scottish Nationalist Party.
fn7 Similar anoxic sea-floor conditions are found in certain areas today, such as the bottom of the Black Sea or the region of upwelling off the coast of Peru,38 but during the Cretaceous these were widespread around the world.
fn8 We saw in Chapter 6 how the Great Oxidation Event created the iron ores that we have mined through history, but also scrubbed the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas methane to trigger a snowball Earth.
fn9 The atmospheric carbon dioxide levels won’t naturally return to their pre-industrial setting for tens of thousands of years. The overlapping rhythms of the Milankovitch cycles are due to push the Earth’s climate back to glaciation around 50,000 years from now, but the sharp shove we’ve already delivered to the atmosphere means that this next scheduled ice age will almost certainly be skipped. So from a human perspective, one silver lining to the current global warming might be that our civilisation will be better able to adapt in the long run to the extremes of a hotter world than the return of kilometre-thick ice sheets grinding across the Northern Hemisphere and a punishingly cold and dry climate making widespread agriculture impossible.47
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