At the beginning of the first millennium CE, China and Rome remained the world’s largest and most powerful empires. Each held sway over approximately 60 million people. Rome’s might was centred on the control of trade and agriculture around the Mediterranean. Expansion was its defence, in the south as far as the Sahara, in the east as far as Mesopotamia, and in the north along the shores of the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Rhine and the fringes of the Scottish Highlands. The empire was kept together by the superior organization and mobility of its armed forces, on land and at sea, as well as by the immense lure of trade. Italy, the heart of the empire, enjoyed an unprecedented period of stability known as the Pax Romana.

During the two centuries following the start of Augustus’ reign as emperor (27 BCE–14 CE), the city of Rome experienced major incidents of violence in only eight years. It was an era in which foreigners from all corners of the empire came to pay tribute as Rome ruthlessly tapped its provinces for food, gold, and luxury. The Roman world was tripartite: there was the capital city, the empire, and barbaricum – the uncivilized region beyond the frontier. The only possible way for Rome seemed to be up, much like the victorious scenes that spiral ever higher around Trajan’s Column in the heart of Rome. This very success, according to ancient Roman writers, caused the empire’s decadence and moral decline. By the third century, as the defence of the empire’s borders was increasingly outsourced to barbarian foederati and unrest plagued the society inside the borders, Rome’s peace and prosperity were drawing to an end.

The situation in China was similar. After a period of civil war, the Han emperor Guangwu (25–57) ushered in a century of peace across the North China Plain. He and his immediate successors demilitarized the empire, abolished slavery, and implemented a series of other popular reforms. This era coincided with a weakening of the nomadic threat: when these barbarians regained strength, the golden age was over. The Han emperors opted for retrenchment, withdrawing from forward bases along the Silk Road and using proxies, similar to the Roman foederati, to defend the border. Meanwhile, members of the court had gained so much power that they came to control much of China’s farmland. It caused major rebellions. By 220, the last emperor of the Han Dynasty was deposed, fracturing the empire.

In the shadow of Rome and Han China, lesser powers sought to organize themselves in various different ways. Sometimes they attempted to accommodate themselves with their imperial neighbours, at other times they were stubbornly defiant. In the great swathes of Eurasia that lay between Rome and China, a contest unfolded for control of the trade corridor between East and West: the Silk Road. It was a struggle in which polities like the Kushan Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Xiongnu competed for fertile valleys and trade emporiums, and occasionally solicited China and Rome to support their endeavours.

The Donkey’s Master

In 13 BCE, the Emperor Augustus returned to Rome from a military campaign in Spain and Gaul. The senate decided to celebrate his arrival by erecting the Altar of Augustan Peace, the Ara Pacis Augustae. The relief panel on one wall of the shrine depicts the goddess Peace, or Pax, reposing with two infants on her lap and surrounded by flowers, grain, and livestock. This was the earthly paradise that Augustus promised to his people. The relief on the opposite wall depicts a female warrior – possibly the personification of Rome – seated on a pile of captured weapons to remind citizens of one of Augustus’ most famous maxims: peace is only born out of military victory. Rome was thus entering a period of prosperity thanks to its military success. A new imperial tradition was born.

Augustus made sure that the Romans continued to regard themselves as a chosen people. Under the emperor’s patronage, Livy embarked on his celebrated history. From the poet Virgil, Augustus commissioned the Aeneid, a jubilant work of patriotism celebrating the mythic origins of Rome. Virgil had Rome’s future supreme deity proclaim:

young Romulus

Will take the leadership, build walls of Mars,

And call it by his own name his people Romans.

For these I set no limits, world or time,

But make the gift of an empire without end.1

Under the rule of Augustus, Rome gradually became a metropolis of travertine and marble. He built a new forum, a temple in memory of Julius Caesar, and a temple dedicated to Mars, the god of war, filled with the spoils of battle. As the capital was embellished, the emperor sought to rid it of many of its poor. The free distribution of wheat – the grain dole – was reduced. Veterans and destitute young men were encouraged to try their luck elsewhere in the empire. Augustus established a record number of colonies. They were an opportunity for Rome to externalize the problems of overpopulation and poverty.

Even though Virgil wrote of an empire without end, Augustus’ foreign strategy was one of moderation. He reduced the army from 500,000 to 300,000 men, and fixed the empire’s frontiers behind protective natural features: the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Sahara. The empire, Augustus insisted, had to stay within its existing borders.2 He described his foreign policy as combining hardness and softness, conciliation and repression. ‘I brought peace to the Alps from the region which is near the Adriatic Sea to the Tuscan, with no unjust war waged against any nation,’ he boasted:

I sailed my ships on the ocean from the mouth of the Rhine to the east region up to the borders of the Cimbri, where no Roman had gone before that time by land or sea, and the Cimbri and the Charydes and the Semnones and the other Germans of the same territory sought by envoys the friendship of me and of the Roman people.³

Yet at the same time, he described fierce punitive campaigns against those who opposed the establishment of the Pax Romana: ‘By my order and auspices two armies were led … into Ethiopia and into that part of Arabia which is called Happy and the troops of each nation of enemies were slaughtered.’4

Augustus was portrayed by contemporaries as a demigod, combining wisdom with military valour. The appointment of senators, consuls, praetors, and other officials who had previously been freely elected now required his approval. The senate continued to select governors for the so-called ‘senatorial’ provinces. For ‘imperial’ provinces, the largest part of the empire, Augustus picked his own legates. There were only a few client states. The objective of Augustus was to exert his power as directly as possible in all corners of the empire. The majority of the army was deployed in garrisons on the periphery of Roman territory, where they were protected by fortresses and connected by an ever-expanding network of roads. Leaders of defeated tribes were forced to prostrate themselves in submission. In return for clemency, they paid an indemnity and regular tax, accepted Roman law, and often surrendered their children as hostages.

Beyond the empire, Augustus sought to stabilize relations with foreign powers. He negotiated a peace with the Parthians and made a spectacle of the reception of foreign ambassadors: ‘Emissaries from the Indian kings were often sent to me,’ he reported. ‘The Bastarnae, the Scythians, and the Sarmatians … and the kings of the Albanians, of the Iberians, and of the Medes, sought our friendship through emissaries … King Phrates of the Parthians, son of Orodes, sent all his sons and grandsons into Italy to me, though defeated in no war, but seeking our friendship through the pledges of his children.’⁵ To keep himself informed, Augustus overhauled the courier system; although there were state archives, there was no particular ministry or bureaucracy in charge of foreign affairs. The emperor took the important decisions himself; the senate handled what was left.

Nevertheless, the Roman peace was shaky. The historian Tacitus (54–120) famously described how the prospect of Roman rule was perceived by many when he recorded the purported words of Calgacus – the leader of the Caledonian tribes in what is now northern Scotland – on the eve of battle against an invading Roman army:

Nature has willed that every man’s children and kindred should be his dearest objects. Yet these are torn from us by conscriptions to be slaves elsewhere. Our wives and our sisters, even though they may escape violation from the enemy, are dishonoured under the names of friendship and hospitality. Our goods and fortunes they collect for their tribute, our harvests for their granaries. Our very hands and bodies, under the lash and in the midst of insult, are worn down by the toil of clearing forests and morasses.6

There were many more such resistance leaders, so that the Roman legions seldom had any rest. ‘Heaven knows,’ complained one soldier, ‘lashes and wounds are always with us! So are hard winters and hardworking summers, grim war and unprofitable peace.’⁷ When Augustus died, the legions along the German border promptly mutinied.

Augustus’ legacy fell heavily on the shoulders of his successors. The Emperor Tiberius (14–37) grappled with a flash flood that destroyed parts of Rome, insurrections along the Rhine, a power grab by the Praetorian Guard – who protected the emperor in Rome and formed the only significant body of troops in Italy – rising food prices, and tax revolts in Macedonia and Syria. Gradually, stability in Rome gave way to violence. ‘Frenzied with bloodshed, the emperor now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus,’ wrote Tacitus following the uncovering of an alleged plot centred on the commander of the Praetorian Guard in 31. ‘It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about – or in heaps … Terror had paralysed human sympathy.’8 Generosity and justice were recurring themes in the pages of Tacitus, as well as those of that other celebrated writer of the age, Suetonius; but most emperors, they bitterly reported, abused their power.

Senators complained about the growing number of immigrants acquiring citizenship and gaining political influence. ‘Do we have to import foreigners in hordes, like gangs of prisoners, and leave no careers for our own surviving aristocracy?’⁹ The situation continued to deteriorate. In an episode that established a damaging precedent for the imperial succession, the Emperor Caligula (37–41) was murdered by the Praetorians, who then supported the succession of his uncle, Claudius (41–53), and received a handsome reward from him for their ‘loyalty’. Under Nero (54–68), Rome burst into flames: both literally, when a great fire devastated much of the city, and figuratively, as the emperor’s increasingly outlandish and authoritarian behaviour provoked open rebellion. ‘Traditional morals,’ complained critics of the regime, ‘have been utterly ruined by this imported laxity! It makes everything potentially corrupting and corruptible flow into the capital – foreign influences demoralize our young men into shirkers, gymnasts, and perverts.’10

Between the death of Nero in 68 and the death of Philip the Arab in 249, emperors ruled on average for only six years. There were strong rulers, to be sure, like Trajan (98–117) and Hadrian (117–38). Yet Trajan, in particular, overstretched the empire’s resources. He embarked on campaigns in Dacia (part of modern Romania), Parthia, and Arabia, the cost of which forced him to debase the currency. His successor, Hadrian, had to withdraw from Mesopotamia, lower taxes, and rely more on local soldiers. Hadrian prided himself on his efforts to restore Rome’s prosperity. A marble statue in the Musée du Louvre, for example, portrays him as Mars, the god of war, embraced by Venus, the goddess of love.¹¹ But even Hadrian’s endeavours were not enough. Subsequent emperors, like Marcus Aurelius (161–80), tried to manage Rome’s overstretched capabilities and to quell growing unrest along the borders. Others were more irresponsible and reckless: the megalomaniacal Caracalla (198–217) aimed at world domination.

A prime witness to the turmoil and violent repression experienced by most Romans in the late second and early third centuries was the Greek-born historian and senator Cassius Dio. His writings comprise a forceful condemnation of the abuse of power, the corruption, and the endless wars that were waged to try to keep gold flowing into the imperial coffers. Gone were any illusions about the nature of Roman rule. In response to a rebellion in Britain, the Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) ordered: ‘Let no one escape sheer destruction, no one our hands, not even the babe in the womb of the mother.’¹² But Severus realized that never-ending campaigns could make emperors unpopular. ‘On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his coming to power,’ Dio recorded, ‘Severus presented to the entire populace that received the grain dole and to the soldiers of the pretorian guard gold pieces equal in number to the years of his reign.’13

Other emperors were less astute: Caracalla spent so heavily on the army and on gladiatorial games to entertain the masses that he was forced to debase the currency and to declare all male non-slaves in the empire Roman citizens in a desperate attempt to expand the tax base. ‘He would appoint some freedman or other wealthy person to be director of the games in order that the man might spend money in this way also; and he would salute the spectators with his whip from the arena below and beg for gold pieces like a performer of the lowest class.’¹⁴ Dio decried the disintegration of the social order: the ruling through terror, the armed gangs roaming the Italian countryside, the orgies in the imperial palace. ‘He carried his lewdness to such a point,’ he wrote about one emperor, ‘that he asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body.’¹⁵ The omens for Rome were not good and the gods issued stern warnings: ‘Thy house shall perish utterly in blood.’¹⁶

But the empire survived this descent into anarchy. Part of the reason is that, externally, nobody could challenge its military power. Rome had a single peer: Parthia. Parthia could at worst threaten Roman possessions in Armenia and the Levant. Most of the imperial frontier was inhabited by tribes. Guerrilla tactics in the forests of Germany or the Highlands of Scotland tormented the Roman legions, but were curbed as soon as reinforcements arrived. ‘The Germans wear no breastplates or helmets,’ Tacitus has a general reassure his troops. ‘Even their shields are not reinforced … Spears, of a sort, are limited to their front rank. The rest only have clubs burnt at the end, or with short metal points. Physically, they look formidable and are good for a short rush. But they cannot stand being hurt.’17 Crucially, the Romans had an unmatched capacity for long-range power projection, thanks to their roads, the navy that dominated the Mediterranean Sea, and small galleys that could patrol rivers like the Rhine and Danube. At its peak, Rome had more than 80,000 kilometres of paved roads, built a fleet of over a thousand ships, and constructed dozens of ports in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas and, to a much lesser extent, the North Sea. The Romans were also adept at playing tribes off against each other: allowing one to trade freely while excluding another, proclaiming one community a friend of the Roman people while declaring another their enemy.

The other part of the reason for the empire’s survival is that, internally, the elite mollified the masses. Inequality among the 1 million inhabitants of Rome was staggering. While the rich erected extravagant villas on the hills of the capital, the poor lived in an impenetrable maze of apartment blocks and dark alleyways occupied by beggars, criminals, and prostitutes. As much as one third of the population in the capital might have been slaves.¹⁸ A worker earned about four sestertii per day, but more than 400,000 sestertii were required for a citizen to qualify for the leading social class, the equestrians. Landowners could be tremendously rich. One of them, Marcus Antonius Pallas, was even reputed to have been worth over 300 million sestertii.¹⁹ The masses were conditioned to accept their poverty. Virgil, Seneca, and many other writers praised hard work.

Popular poems and plays took poverty as a given, sometimes humorously so. ‘I was in agony from the cold,’ says the donkey in the second-century Greek writer Lucius Apuleius’ novel the Golden Ass; ‘but my master was no better off. Indeed, because of his extreme poverty, he is unable to buy straw or even the smallest blankets for his bed.’20 To ameliorate the living conditions of poor citizens, spectacular gladiatorial games and chariot races were regularly staged: this was the time of grandiose projects like the building of the Colosseum, the renovation of the Circus Maximus, and the construction of giant public bath houses. Emperors did everything in their might to guarantee a steady supply of grain from the provinces. In extreme cases, there was the army to restore order. ‘Many uprisings were begun by many persons, some of which caused great alarm,’ wrote Cassius Dio, ‘but they were all put down.’²¹ Imperial Roman society was inequality permanently pushed to the limits of acceptability.

Controlling Barbaricum

Outside the borders of the Roman Empire lay barbaricum. The attitudes of those people that lived on the fringes of the empire were ambivalent. Even the fiercest opponents of military domination sought to benefit economically. The Caledonian tribes, for instance, obstinately resisted the legions from their redoubts in the Scottish Highlands, but the graves of their leaders were full of Roman artefacts. Germanic tribes fought countless wars with the Romans. The Frisii, who lived north of the lower Rhine, hanged Roman tax collectors and rebelled against an oppressive Roman governor. Yet some Frisian clans were among the many Germanic peoples who supplied auxiliary troops to fight in the Roman army.

One of the larger societies on Rome’s northern frontier were the Dacians. Initially, the Romans bribed them not to cross the Danube. But as turmoil within the empire grew, enterprising Dacian kings began to raid across the border. The Roman counterstroke, when it came, was ferocious: the Dacians were defeated, their king hunted down and killed, and the kingdom incorporated into the empire in 105. Still the Dacians continued to resist the influx of Romans keen to exploit the region’s many gold mines. That resistance ultimately forced the Emperor Commodus (180–92) to grant the tribes greater autonomy.

Many factors influenced the behaviour of these tribal peoples. Their political organization shifted between fragmentation into clans and cohesion under strong kings. Most of them were small-scale farmers with a clear interest in stability. But they were also known for their warrior ethos and the ability to mobilize young and old, women as well as men, to fight. The security of their domains remained permanently in flux. Migrating peoples from the east, attracted by the more temperate climate and the region’s growing wealth, exerted growing pressure on the tribes already settled next to the Roman border.

The empire was not always able to defend its frontiers with the same degree of vigour. The defensive system – the so-called limes – frequently suffered from undermanning. Instead, more diplomatic policies were often adopted. The desire to become part of the empire was fostered by promoting trade or granting elites certain privileges. Tribes just beyond the border were invited to become tributarii: a trade-off between access to Roman markets and a degree of Roman protection on the one hand, and the payment of taxes and the performance of military service on the other. Some tribes became leati, granted land inside the empire in exchange for providing men for the army. The most favoured tribes became foederati, able to settle inside the empire, retain their leaders, and even receive subsidies in return for serving as auxiliary troops.

The tribes in Britain and along the Rhine and Danube have not left us any written sources concerning their relations with the Romans. The main texts available are those of historians like Tacitus and Cassius Dio. Matters are different when it comes to Greece, the Levant, and Egypt, where native written sources do exist. In Greece, intellectuals during this period were divided. Some tried to reconcile their countrymen to Roman rule: the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the geographer Strabo both argued that Rome provided protection from rival states in Asia Minor, the scourge of piracy, and the restless hordes around the coast of the Black Sea; while the philosopher Aristides praised the freedom of movement in the empire. Others were less reconciled: the geographer Pausanias, for example, argued that the Roman conquest had ushered in ‘the period when Greece sank to the lowest depth of weakness’.22 He deplored the way that the Greek cities had lost their freedom and their leaders rushed to become part of the imperial elite. ‘The foulest of all crimes,’ he insisted, was ‘the betrayal of native land and fellow-countrymen for personal gain.’23 He testified to Roman looting, the forced depopulation of great cities like Corinth, and the arbitrary behaviour of governors.

The last of these was also one of the chief complaints of Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish-Greek philosopher who lived in Egypt in the first century, and who described – in his tract Against Flaccus – how a Roman governor incited popular unrest against Jews in the country. But perhaps the most vivid account of life in the Middle East under the Roman regime is provided by the story of Jesus Christ – his peaceful resistance, his passion, and his crucifixion – as it is recorded in the New Testament. For many in the centuries since, this narrative has come to symbolize imperial oppression. The apostle John deplored how the Romans came and took away both the land and soul of the Jews. Yet he was even more critical of the many locals who collaborated with their conquerors, not least those who let themselves be manipulated and bribed when Jesus was put on trial alongside the criminal Barabbas by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. The gospel account is contextualized by Philo of Alexandria and the late first-century Jewish-Greek historian Flavius Josephus, both of whom record how the arbitrary rule of Pilate, and his disdain for Jewish customs, caused unrest in Palestine. Both writers, however, had become Romanized in their outlook, suggesting that Roman rule over the Jews was the will of God.

At its height, during the reign of Trajan in the early second century, the Roman Empire was one of the largest the world had seen. But if the land area controlled by the Han and the Achaemenids was probably more extensive, Rome also controlled a vast maritime zone stretching from the North Sea, via the Mediterranean, all the way to the Black Sea and the northern part of the Red Sea. The degree of Roman imperialism was arguably greater too. Rome had the power not only to conquer, but also to integrate its conquests – through stringent administrative practices, harmonized standards, common languages for the elite, shipping, and unrivalled engineering prowess, which is visible in the harbours, roads, bridges, and aqueducts that still survive from antiquity. Sea and land combined, the Roman Empire was one of the largest ever.

Along the Silk Road

Parthia, the cosmopolitan empire that stretched between the Euphrates and the Hindu Kush, remained Rome’s most significant rival according to the ancient historians. Tacitus, for example, referred to Rome and Parthia as the two greatest empires (maxima imperia), while Pompeius Trogus visualized the world as divided between Romans and Parthians. Nevertheless, the Parthian Empire was under pressure. From a Roman viewpoint, the desired relationship with the Parthians was clear: Parthia had to be treated like a major power, yet still inferior to Rome. The famous white marble Prima Porta statue of Augustus, now in the Vatican Museums, shows on its breastplate a Parthian soldier diffidently returning one of the military standards captured from the Roman legions in earlier wars. The Parthian king even gave his sons as hostages to Augustus to ensure that the next ruler would be of Roman blood.

The peace did not last. The two powers became locked into a geopolitical zero-sum game, where the gains of one side were regarded as a loss by the other, over the kingdom of Armenia, which acted as a buffer state between the empires. There were also persistent tensions over the Euphrates border. Initially, Rome’s ambitions stopped on the western banks of the river. But in 115, the Emperor Trajan crossed it. According to Tacitus, Roman campaigns in the east historically were regarded as a way of consolidating the domestic prestige of emperors. And Trajan did indeed allude to the Persian conquests of Alexander the Great in relation to his own war. However, Parthia had initially provoked Rome by replacing the king of Armenia. Another contributory factor was Roman ‘mission creep’. After his Dacian campaign, Trajan had led his troops to the Black Sea. Beyond the gold of Dacia, the trade of the Caucasus and the Middle East beckoned. The Parthians, however, opposed the Roman invasion fiercely. Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, withdrew from Mesopotamia. In 198, the Emperor Septimius Severus returned. He sacked the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, and annexed northern Mesopotamia. In 217, Parthia and Rome readied for another major confrontation: the Emperor Caracalla was poised to descend with his troops from the Anatolian mountains into Mesopotamia. The expedition was aborted when Caracalla was assassinated during a toilet break, and the Romans were forced to sue for peace.

But the Parthian Empire was now so exhausted that it fell prey to a tiny vassal kingdom situated a mere two kilometres from the ruins of Persepolis, in the historic heartland of the Achaemenids. Its ruler, Ardashir I, crowned himself ‘king of kings’ – in the tradition of the Assyrians and the Persians – in Ctesiphon in 224. A new empire was founded. This Sasanian Empire would rule over large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia until the birth of Islam in the seventh century.

Even as the Parthian Empire was clearly weakening, it remained an important trading hub connecting the Mediterranean and Asia. The Greek-born Roman official and historian Herodian described the flourishing trade at the beginning of the third century and argued that specialization could smooth political relations: ‘Since the Parthians produced spices and excellent textiles and the Romans metals and manufactured articles, these products would no longer be scarce and smuggled by merchants; rather, when there was one world under one supreme authority, both peoples would enjoy these goods and share them in common.’24 But the reality was not so straightforward. Chinese and Roman sources hint that the Parthians tried to preserve their position as the gatekeeper of Asian commerce. In 97, a Chinese envoy requested permission from the Parthian court to travel on to Rome via the Persian Gulf. The Parthians seemingly convinced him that the journey would be too arduous. ‘The ocean is huge,’ they said. ‘[It] urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.’²⁵ The Chinese were probably well aware that they were being tricked. The Roman emperor ‘always wanted to send envoys to the Han’, we read in the Chinese records, ‘but Anxi [Parthia], wishing to control the trade in multi-colored Chinese silks, blocked the route’.²⁶

Parthia’s designs on monopolizing the trade of the Silk Road were not the only economic concern in Rome, where writers also worried about the trade deficit with the East. Pliny the Elder believed that Roman women’s thirst for Eastern luxuries cost the empire a fortune: ‘In no year does India drain our empire of less than five hundred and fifty millions of sesterces.’27 Tacitus warned that too much wealth was being transferred to foreign hostile countries for the sake of female extravagance. Instead of trying to regulate the consumption of rich Romans, the objective became to control the trade. First, Rome sought to dominate entrepôts in the Levant, such as Palmyra and Petra, in order to avoid additional tariffs. At the same time, it promoted maritime trade via the Red Sea with the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, with India, and even with China. Most trade with China was indirect, even though Rome probably sent an embassy as early as 166. Yet the Chinese, for the time being, remained unimpressed. ‘The tribute they brought,’ we read in the records, ‘was neither precious nor rare.’²⁸

The Kushan Empire

While direct overland trade between Rome and China was blocked by Parthia, maritime trade with India grew. Under Augustus, ships sailed to India each year, mooring in the many ports on the subcontinent’s western coast. A traveller from the first century recounted this long, tiring journey from the port of Alexandria, via the Red Sea, where Roman warships patrolled against pirates, along the dangerous coasts of the Indian Ocean.²⁹ His periplus (literally ‘voyage around’) described how the ports on the coast of South Asia were primarily independent city states or part of small kingdoms, which took a keen interest in controlling trade through designated harbours, official pilots, customs officers, patrols against pirates, and ancient claims to authority of the region. In the case of a valuable spice such as frankincense, ‘neither openly nor by stealth can it be loaded on board ship without the King’s permission; if a single grain were loaded without this, the ship could not clear from the harbour’.30 These ports were connected with their hinterland by rivers along which gold, gems, textiles, and spices were transported. They also held regular markets with more primitive tribes. ‘They come with their wives and children, carrying great packs and plaited baskets of what looks like green grape-leaves … There they hold a feast for several days, spreading out the baskets under themselves as mats, and then return to their own places in the interior.’³¹ The traveller also testified to what he thought were ‘signs of the expedition of Alexander the Great, such as ancient shrines, walls of forts and great wells’.³²

The hinterlands of India and Central Asia remained a perilous arena of war. The south of the subcontinent was divided between kingdoms such as those of the Satavahanas, the Kshaharatas, the Pandyans, and the Cholas. In the north, the Kushan Empire of the Yuezhi took advantage of the Parthian decline to continue to expand. As the Book of the Later Han put it: ‘It was when the Yuezhi triumphed over the Parthians that they took Kabul.’³³ The Yuezhi were able to field hundreds of thousands of horsemen, a capability that no other power in the region could match.

The Yuezhi conquered the kingdoms of the Indo-Gangetic Plain one after another. The impact of the Yuezhi is reflected in biographies of the early second-century Buddhist monk Ashvaghosha. The ideal state was a world ‘made peaceable, with a long-lived king, plentiful harvests, and joy throughout the land, with none of the myriad calamaties’.34 But then came the Yuezhi, demanding tribute: one kingdom was expected to pay a sum three times greater than its entire wealth. Its compassionate Buddhist king gave in: ‘We will provide for you whatever you require. Why must the people suffer and be distressed by your extended presence?’³⁵ The kingdom was overrun nonetheless.

The Romans may have believed that there were only two great emperors – their own and Parthia’s – but the Kushan ruler regarded himself as their equal. On their coins, Kushan monarchs described themselves as ‘august’, in imitation of Roman emperors, but also ‘king of kings’, in the Mesopotamian tradition, and ‘son of heaven’, like Chinese rulers. According to legend, the powerful emperor Kanishka (127–63) had supernatural powers and defeated an evil serpent king. The Rabatak Inscription honoured Kanishka as ‘the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat, the god worthy of worship, who has obtained the kingship from Nana and from all the gods’.³⁶ The Mathura Inscription described him as ‘steadfast in the true law’.³⁷ The Kushan emperors prided themselves on their irrigation schemes. Projects like the Dargom dam, which controlled much of the water supply for the city of Samarkand in the Ferghana Valley, were unmatched.

Although the Kushan Empire was divided into satrapies, they were probably not as tightly controlled as those of the Achaemenid Empire. Nevertheless, Chinese travellers admired the strength and brilliance of the Kushan realm. It is striking that, even though there were no significant gold mines in the area, the Kushans minted an immense volume of gold coinage. The only possible explanation is a large economic surplus with Parthia, Rome, and other trading partners. The combination of the South Asian plains and the Central Asian oases had immense agricultural potential. At their peak, the Kushans controlled the main caravan routes connecting South Asia, Mesopotamia, the Tarim Basin in present-day China, and even Siberia, as well as major ports in the Gulf of Aden. Like Ashoka Maurya four centuries earlier, Kanishka adopted Buddhism as the official religion of his realm and as justification for his righteous rule over hundreds of different tribes and languages.

The Kushan Empire emerged as a pivotal player in an ancient version of the ‘Great Game’, and contested with Rome, Parthia, the Xiongnu, and China for control over the fertile plateaus and trade corridors of Central Asia. Around 50, the Kushan Empire was at war with the Parthians over the control of the green valleys of the eastern Zagros Mountains. Cassius Dio reported a Kushan alliance with Rome: ‘The people of India, who had already made overtures, now made a treaty of friendship, sending among other gifts tigers, which were then for the first time seen by the Romans.’38 At the same time, the Kushans agreed a pact with China. It was short-lived. Insulted by the Chinese refusal of a royal marriage and alarmed by the scale of their advances into Central Asia, the Kushan Empire declared war. When it lost, China demanded humiliating terms. The Kushan Empire took revenge by forming a coalition with the Xiongnu. But when the Sasanians overthrew the sclerotic Parthian Empire, the Kushan emperor Vasudeva I sought a new alliance with China. To flatter the Chinese, he even issued coins with his name stamped in Chinese. It was a sign of weakness. After Vasudeva’s death in around 235, the Kushan realm first divided in two and later splintered into smaller kingdoms.

Even without the Kushan Empire, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and China remained more connected than before. After having absorbed Greek influences, South Asia now also took an interest in Roman culture. In the other direction, Roman citizens became very keen on Asian luxuries. Trade, culture, and travel helped cement ties across Eurasia. So did power politics. Diplomatic relations were established between China, Rome, Parthia, Kushan, and India. But more wars were fought between them too. Because the more that trade travelled the Silk Road and penetrated the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the Tian Shan, the fiercer the competition to control it.

Closing the Jade Gate

Along with Parthia and Kushan, the other major contender for mastery of Central Asia was thus Han China. The Han adhered to the traditional notion that China was ‘the Middle Kingdom’. As we have seen, they conceived the world order as concentric rings surrounding the imperial domain; the emperor’s task was to preserve this peaceful Chinese realm and keep out the world of the barbarians. At the end of the first century BCE, however, that peace was threatened from within.

After the death of Emperor Ai of Han in 1 BCE, the empire collapsed into turmoil over the succession that fed into the bitter resentments of poor farmers. A military commander called Wang Mang made a particular bid to win over the masses. ‘The rich had dogs and horses fed on more grain and vegetables than they could eat,’ he observed. ‘The poor could not get their fill of dregs, and were driven by poverty to crime.’39 The reforms he proposed were sweeping. As soon as he prised the regency from his aunt, the dowager empress, he outlawed slavery, nationalized farmland, and embarked on infrastructure works. He also tried to curb food prices, appointing a superintendent of the market to buy goods when they were cheap and sell them when they were expensive.⁴⁰ His radical undertakings were halted, however, by massive floods, famine, and opposition to his apparent usurpation of the imperial throne. Rebels and robbers organized themselves into armed bands such as the Red Eyebrows Army.

Meanwhile, another scion of the imperial family, Liu Xiu, turned the chaos to his advantage. Seizing the decisive moment in the struggle against Wang Mang, Liu displayed remarkable military leadership to achieve the victory that won him most of the North China Plain. In 25 CE, he proclaimed himself emperor of a restored Han Dynasty, the so-called ‘Eastern Han’, and adopted the name Guangwu. As the new imperial colour, he chose red, the colour of fire and vigour. Emperor Guangwu did everything to boost his legitimacy as rightful inheritor of the heavenly mandate. Like Augustus, he cultivated important writers. One of them was the court historian Ban Gu, who narrated how the new Han Dynasty ‘magnified imperial discipline’.⁴¹ He made a forceful case for the centralization of authority and revived the Confucian imperial theory of Dong Zhongshu. Guangwu understood, though, that he also had to placate the masses to stay in power and therefore upheld some of Wang Mang’s populist policies. He confirmed the abolition of slavery, reduced the number of noblemen at court, redistributed land to the poor, and relieved farmers from the burden of compulsory military service.

One objective of this last, remarkable reform was to disarm Chinese society and so make civil war more difficult. But it had severe consequences for the empire’s foreign policy. With only a palace guard of 2,400 soldiers, and a further five commanders each with 3,500 troops, the Chinese army was now far smaller than that of many neighbours. The solution was to conscript criminals and recruit non-Han warriors.42 More than ever, security depended on a strategy of setting barbarian against barbarian. In such circumstances, Ban Gu advised against campaigning beyond the border. The barbarians ‘are separated from us by mountains and valleys and cut off by the desert. By these means did Heaven and Earth divide inner from outer,’ he asserted. ‘To conclude agreements with them is to waste gifts and suffer deception. To attack them is to exhaust our armies and provoke raids.’⁴³

The ensuing strategy of restraint conveniently coincided with a period of weakness among the barbarians. In 24, the Xiongnu had baulked at the demand for tribute, arguing that Liu Xiu should pay them in return for the support he had received against Wang Mang. But in 50, after the Xiongnu federation had been riven by succession conflicts, the Southern Xiongnu accepted their obligation to pay tribute, sent a prince as hostage to the Han court, and aligned themselves as a buffer state. The Northern Xiongnu lacked the power to threaten the Chinese Empire and were also harassed by Han-sponsored rivals like the Wuhuan and the Xianbei. In such circumstances, Chinese commanders grew contemptuous. ‘Why does it take five Xiongnu to match one Han soldier? It is because their sword blades are dull and their crossbows worthless.’44 The counsellor Chao Cuo, meanwhile, likened the Xiongnu to ‘flying birds or running beasts in the vast, open fields’.⁴⁵ This dismissiveness did not last long.

Guangwu’s successor, Emperor Ming (57–75), was greeted on his accession by growing assertiveness from the Northern Xiongnu. They raided trading posts on the border and attacked their poorly equipped garrisons. Their conflicts with the Southern Xiongnu generated large inflows of immigrants, who were promptly bribed to return home. The military challenge was met with punitive expeditions. Emperor Zhang (75–88) ordered his troops to push deeply into Central Asia and end the Xiongnu problem once and for all. The general Ban Chao succeeded in pacifying most of these ‘Western Regions’, assisted by the Kushan and lesser local rulers. When famine also struck the Xiongnu, several of their leaders came to the border to submit. ‘Overawed by our military strength and attracted by our wealth, all the rulers presented exotic local products as tribute and their beloved sons as hostages. They bared their heads and kneeled down towards the east to pay homage to the Son of Heaven,’ the records boasted.⁴⁶ China reinstated the office of protector-general of the Western Regions to oversee the payment of tribute.⁴⁷ If a ruler was unable to meet his dues, he was stripped of his authority and the official imperial ribbon was bestowed on a new puppet.

Under Emperors Ming and Zhang, China lived through a golden age. Internal stability returned, taxes remained low, and the majority of farmers were spared conscription. Zhang successfully managed a disastrous cattle epidemic and experimented with social security policies, including tax relief for young fathers, grants of grain to any wife that gave birth, and subsidies to parents that could not feed their children. In 79, in an apparent effort to shore up his credentials as a just ruler, Zhang summoned renowned scholars from across the realm to participate in the so-called ‘Virtuous Discussions of White Tiger Hall’. The result was a new manifesto for governance based on Confucian principles. It dealt with court rituals, social justice, law, and public administration within the empire. Beyond the borders, meanwhile, the Confucian principle of harmony was propagated through increasingly ritualized relationships and ceremonies designed to overawe envoys with their magnificence, as well as ever more extravagant gifts.

This age of prosperity, however, was short-lived. The policy of demilitarization proved untenable. Distrustful of barbarian intentions, officials recommended that more troops were needed to guard the border. The cost of subsidies to foreign leaders grew alarmingly high. The weakening of the Northern Xiongnu also diminished the need for the Southern Xiongnu, the Xianbei, and the Wuhuan to collaborate. As their subsidies were cut, they started to pillage Chinese farmers. In 94, the Southern Xiongnu formally joined forces with the Northern Xiongnu against the Han Empire.

Meanwhile, another neighbour tried to profit from the mayhem: the nomadic Qiang people, who lived west of the North China Plain. In 104, tensions escalated into a full-blown war. The Han regime panicked and withdrew several frontier garrisons in order to preserve security ‘east of the passes’. A leading intellectual warned of the geopolitical domino effect: ‘If you lose Liang province, then the Three Adjuncts will be the border. If the people of the Three Adjuncts move inward, then Hongnong will be the border. If the people of Hongnong move inward, then Luoyang will be the border. If you carry on like this, you will reach the edge of the Eastern Sea.’48

This was the beginning of the Han Dynasty’s collapse. Beset by growing unrest not only beyond but within the border, Emperor An (106–25) opted for isolationism. He closed the Jade Gate – the main Silk Road pass connecting China with Central Asia – and terminated tributary relations with the peoples to its west, which were no longer sustainable. An was a notoriously miserly and incompetent ruler: records speak of a ‘gradual diminishment of benevolence’ in his reign. One of his first decrees abolished the redistribution of land and grain to the poor, while landowning families grew more powerful again. In the Monthly Instructions for the Four Classes of People, Ts’ui Shih deplored how land was systematically transferred to courtiers and how the emperor’s desire to increase taxes incited local officials to sequestrate peasants’ farms. The landless peasantry were then left at the mercy of rich landowners, who exploited them as labourers. According to Ts’ui, the countryside grew increasingly restless, causing landowners to fortify their homes and hire private guards.⁴⁹ Under An’s successors, major revolts erupted, like the Five Pecks of Grain Uprising in 142 and the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 182. Popular poems from the time depict a world of impermanence and sorrow.

Seasons of growth and decay march on and on,

The years allotted to man are like morning dew.

Man’s life is as transient as a sojourn,

His frame is not as firm as metal or stone …

Some take drugs and hope to become immortals,

Many of them only end their life with poison.

Far better to drink fine wine

And wear clothes of choice white silk.50

War with the Qiang made the situation worse. ‘The Qiang invade our frontiers so frequently,’ it was reported, ‘that hardly a year goes by in peace and it is only when the trading season arrives that they come forward in submission.’⁵¹ The records speak of hundreds of thousands of casualties, the loss of large stretches of farmland, and an immense drain on the empire’s coffers. Officials now proposed relinquishing all claims on the areas inhabited by the Qiang, tacitly admitting that the Han had become unable to stop the loss of influence on the periphery. The elite had become largely uninterested in the restless western part of the empire and aligned its interests more than ever with the rich agricultural areas in the east. Here the economic centre of gravity had shifted from the North China Plain to the banks of the River Yangtze, and thus even further from the western frontier.⁵²

The Han court was dominated by scholar-officials from rich agricultural families. ‘Since the times of the Qin and Han, Shandong produces civil ministers and Shanxi produces military generals,’ it was said.⁵³ Those officials were loath to surrender their influence to military men at the head of powerful armies and so they continued to prefer the old policies involving soft power or the fighting of wars by proxy. ‘The men of Bing and Liang, as well as the Xiongnu, the Tuge, the voluntary followers from the Huangzhong area, and the eight stocks of the Western Qiang are the most vigorous fighters [of] all under Heaven and are feared by the people,’ asserted one courtier in a conversation with the emperor. ‘They are all under the command of Your Excellency and serve as teeth and claws.’54 Another official ordered books on filial piety to be distributed in the Qiang’s territories.

The mellow eastern heartland of the empire failed to come to grips with the rough power politics of the west. But if the imperial court was reluctant to defend the border, growing internal unrest and more frequent coup attempts made it invest in large militias. When the court fractured into its constituent clans, the militias followed suit. China had become ungovernable. By 190, the whole empire was beset with fighting, very much like the Spring and Autumn or the Warring States periods centuries earlier. Battles often involved hundreds of thousands of warriors. Powerful warlords first sidelined the scholar-officials, and then the emperor. In 220, the last Han emperor was relieved from more than a decade’s existence as a puppet ruler and deposed. He was lucky and allowed to retire peacefully. The empire was less fortunate. It split into three kingdoms: the Shu, the Wu, and the Wei. The subsequent century of infighting cost millions of lives.

The foundering of the Han Empire affected the whole of East Asia. In the Korean Peninsula, the kingdom of Goguryeo, which had replaced the Gojoseon kingdom, seized the opportunity to escape from Chinese tutelage. Goguryeo had been established in the late first century BCE as a federation of hunting tribes and had only recently been consolidated into a centrally governed realm under King Gogukcheon (179–97 CE). The Samguk Sagi, a compilation from ancient Korean records, credited Gogukcheon with being a capable commander and a just ruler. Encountering an impoverished town, the legend went, he shared his clothes with its inhabitants and later instituted a grain-subsidy system. The Goguryeo kingdom had probably been a client state of the Han Empire, although skirmishes between them were frequent. This was primarily because Goguryeo straddled the Yalu River, so that there was no natural border with the Han Empire, and persistent competition for the grasslands of Manchuria. When the Han Dynasty collapsed, Goguryeo briefly expanded, but was pushed back by the newly established Wei kingdom.

In Japan, meanwhile, state building also advanced slowly. Chinese sources inform us that the archipelago of Wa, the ancient name for Japan, was still atomized in hundreds of statelets throughout the first century, but that by 230 it had been united under the Yamatai kingdom. With the Han emperor gone, the Japanese monarch decided to make overtures to the Wei, which instantly adopted traditional tributary practice, bestowing the title ‘Kingdom of Wa Friendly to Wei’ along with a special purple ribbon. These ribbons had also been used by the Han to legitimize rulers in Southeast Asia. In present-day Vietnam, for example, China subsidized and protected kings. When the Trung Sisters rebelled against Chinese hegemony in around 41, the Han dispatched a ‘wave-calming general’ to Vietnam, together with 20,000 soldiers. ‘Wherever he passed, the general promptly established prefectures and districts to govern walled towns.’55 But guerrilla attacks from the dense forests continued to be mounted on Chinese-supported fortresses, and the Han returned to their previous policy of indirect control through trade and diplomatic flattery.⁵⁶ After the Han’s demise, the same practices were continued by the Wu kingdom.

Even though the Han Empire crumbled, China’s cultural and economic influence remained vast. Looking at the Han’s downfall, some parallels with the contemporary Roman Empire are striking. In both cases, imperialism initially brought security to the heartland, but subsequently caused destabilizing inequality and decadence in the elite. This weakened the core of the empire at the same time as its borders continued to be pushed outwards. The result was overstretch. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Han closed the Jade Gate at almost exactly the same time as Hadrian ordered the legions to pull back from Mesopotamia.

World of Extremes

The world of the Emperors Augustus and Guangwu was thus one of extremes. It was an era of unprecedented transcontinental trade and exploration. Merchants and envoys travelled vast distances. We have already encountered the Chinese delegate stuck in Parthia on his way to Rome in 97; but in 166, a Roman emissary made the journey east, arriving in what is now Vietnam in the hope of presenting gifts to the Chinese emperor.

The empires of Rome, Parthia, Kushan, and the Han all promised peace and harmony of some sort. Indeed, Rome and the Han achieved it for several decades. But, even there, peace was always relative. Violence never ceased along the borders. In any case, such peace as there was mostly benefited a small elite in the centre, who controlled the food supply, the luxury trade, and the state monopolies. In the Roman Empire, around 15 per cent of the population might have consisted of slaves.57 In Han China, only 1–2 per cent of the population consisted of slaves, although the proportion was higher in the cities, and peasants often did not fare much better. Tribal peoples also kept slaves and were feared among the inhabitants of sedentary societies for their slave-taking raids.

Unless they lived in the imperial capitals at times of political stability, therefore, most men, women, and children were never entirely safe, and rarely free from hardship. People often survived on only a fistful of cereals and beans per day, occasionally enriched with some oil, fruit, or vegetables.⁵⁸ Undernourishment was rampant and so was disease, particularly in the crowded cities. Infant mortality in the first two years of life was 50 per cent.⁵⁹ At its heart, empire was about advancing the privileges of a small capital area over those of a large surrounding hinterland, and about promoting the interests of a small rich elite over those of the large numbers of poor and needy.