The fall of the Western Roman Empire, the eclipse of the Han and Jin Dynasties, the failure of the Guptas to preserve power, and the struggles for survival of the Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires – their cumulative effect was to produce an age of continued imperial crisis and political fracturing, as most of the Eastern Hemisphere was beset by fighting between lesser powers. At the same time, however, the Völkerwanderung and the mobility of the nomadic peoples across the steppes demonstrated that the fates of Europe and Asia had become more interconnected. The continuation of this trend over the following centuries was mostly the consequence of the rise of a new major power: the Islamic Caliphate.
Once again, a minor player on the periphery of great powers suddenly exploded to pre-eminence. The first Islamic armies contained a few hundred warriors, or mujahedin. But within barely a century the caliphate had conquered an immense realm. Not only had they done so faster than any major imperial power before them, but their realm was also larger than any previous empire, extending from the Pyrenees in the west all the way to the Gobi Desert in the east. Islamic warriors were soon followed by envoys and traders. The diplomatic network of the caliphate spanned almost the entire Eastern Hemisphere. So did its network of commerce, which encompassed most of the Silk Road, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean.
The spectacular rise of the caliphate formed a backdrop to other great events: the struggles for survival of the Sasanian and the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empires; and the rise of two new powers, the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Dynasty in China. One of the most striking features is the lack of cooperation displayed by the established major powers – the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires – in trying to halt the threat posed by the Arabs. Another is the way that the era’s three new powers – the Arabs, the Franks, and the Tang – quickly renounced their barbarian heritage and adopted the traditions and trappings of earlier cultures. The Tang claimed the heavenly mandate, the Franks claimed to inherit the legacy of Rome, and the caliphs abandoned the harsh Arabian desert for the luxurious ancient cities of the Levant. Old imperial practices persisted, but with new patrons.
The Birth of the Caliphate
In 497, in the Arabian city of Mecca, a man of great fame died. His name was Hashim ibn Abd Manaf. He had been an accomplished trader, selling his wares as far afield as Constantinople, Syria, and Ethiopia. But he was also a local benefactor, feeding travellers and arbitrating between the city’s feuding clans. It was this combination of commercial cunning and selfless compassion that allowed his tribe, the Quraysh, to dominate Mecca, and Mecca – favourably located as it was not far from the Red Sea, water wells, and caravan routes – to dominate much of the trade across the Arabian Peninsula.
After Hashim’s death, the Quraysh preserved their position by promoting harmony between the many tribes, who were torn apart by commercial rivalry and religious conflict. They proposed an annual truce and the establishment of a community of common rituals (hums). They sponsored a system of agreements (ilafs) guaranteeing access to wells in return for a fee. The Kaaba, a shrine where the Quraysh revered their gods, was declared a sanctuary (haram) where travellers could stay in peace, and its holy men arbitrated in conflicts. This all remained power politics on a small scale: Mecca, like other cities on the Arabian Peninsula, was home to only a few thousand people.
Nevertheless, the emergence of Mecca as a minor regional hegemon did attract some suspicion. In 570, the Christian king of Yemen, backed by Constantinople, attacked the city. He failed, but pestilence, internal rivalries, and conflict with other tribes in the so-called Fijar War (580–90) put the leadership of the Quraysh to the test. In an attempt to uphold justice and cooperation, they established a ‘league of the virtuous’. It was in the context of such turmoil that the great-grandson of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, a merchant named Muhammad (570–632), started to preach in favour of one god, Allah, and one community, the umma.
Muhammad’s religious teachings sought to unite a deeply divided society. Yet the Meccan elite saw Muhammad as a threat, and attempted to counter him with violence. His followers first fled to Ethiopia, where they were offered sanctuary by a Christian king. In 622, after a murder attempt, Muhammad himself sought refuge in Medina, accompanied by his supporters. It was from this desert town that Muhammad’s new religion spread. The teachings of Islam were adopted by the quarrelling clans of Medina and translated into a constitution which prescribed peace between all Muslims and kindness towards non-believers. By 631, the numbers of Muslim adherents had swollen to such an extent that Muhammad was able to march on Mecca with an army of 10,000 men. The capture of Mecca was the Prophet’s last victory. He died in 632.
Muhammad’s successor (khalifah, or ‘caliph’) was his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who had been the earliest convert to Islam not related by blood to the Prophet. The first caliph subjugated most of the Arab tribes during the Ridda Wars (632–3) and initiated campaigns against the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia to seize the lucrative trade routes already familiar to Muslim merchants. The second caliph, Umar (634–44), completed the task, conquering the great cities of Ctesiphon, Basra, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, and shattering the Sasanian Empire.
The imperial ideology of the early caliphs – much like that of many other nascent empires – was founded on the principles of compassion for believers, protection for subservient non-believers, and retribution for those who resisted. The Caliph Umar advised his successors to live soberly, respect the law, and support the poor. He employed heralds to read out proclamations informing citizens of their rights, and established administrative courts to investigate complaints against corrupt officials. He imposed a pact on non-Muslims, granting them security in exchange for submission. ‘The dwellings of the non-Muslims must be low,’ read one of its articles, ‘so that exiting their houses would make them bend and would remind them of their low status.’1 Even so, Muslims complained that Christians and Jews benefited from government spending while not being obliged to pay zakat, the main Islamic tax.
Around that time, clerics wrote down the texts of Muhammad’s revelations and teachings – which had been preserved orally by his followers – to form the Quran. The holy book made clear the universal aspirations of Islam: ‘Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to God; it is to Him that all things return.’2 The good life was one of devotion: ‘The love of desirable things is made alluring for men – women, children, gold and silver treasures piled up high, horses with fine markings, livestock, and farmland – these may be the joys of this life, but God has the best place to return to.’3 Inside the umma, justice should prevail: ‘Do not wrongfully consume each other’s wealth … Do not kill each other … If any of you does these things, out of hostility and injustice, We shall make him suffer Fire.’4 Outside the umma, hostile unbelievers should be subjugated: ‘So if they neither withdraw, nor offer you peace, nor restrain themselves from fighting you, seize and kill them wherever you encounter them.’5
Although it is unlikely that Muhammad ever envisaged it, within a decade of his death Muslim armies had penetrated as far as the Hindu Kush, the Caucasus, and the Atlas Mountains. But the strains – and spoils – of such conquests ripped the umma apart, igniting a civil war. Fault lines existed between the Muslims east of the River Euphrates, who called themselves Shia, and the Muslims of the western communities, who were known as Sunni. The Sunni Umayyad clan prevailed, and proclaimed a new caliphate in 661. The centre of Islamic power shifted from Mecca to the Levant, where they ruled from Damascus. To aid them in their task, they appointed amirs (governors), established divans (ministries), introduced a single currency, and promoted Arabic as common language. Slavery was outlawed and land redistributed. As testament to the splendour – and devoutness – of their regime, they constructed the architectural masterpieces of the Great Mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, two of the holiest sites in Islam.
The Umayyad Dynasty continued relentlessly to expand its empire, partly to bolster its prestige, partly to channel the energy of the Arab tribes away from fighting each other, and partly to take over the Byzantine trade in the Mediterranean. This was one of the reasons why the first Umayyad caliph, Muawiya, decided to build a navy, even though it had to be manned mainly by Christians. He encountered widespread resentment: those who sail in a ship ‘are like worms in a log,’ one critic sneered, ‘and if it rolls over they are drowned’.6 But the policy paid off. At its height, in the mid-eighth century, the Umayyad Caliphate ruled a third of the world’s population, and reached from the Atlantic to the River Indus and from the Caucasus Mountains to the Bab-el-Mandeb.
The Impossible Peace
The chronicle of the eighth-century Syrian monk Theophilus of Edessa, who also served as court astrologer to the caliph, provides a unique perspective on the sufferings endured by the peoples of the Mediterranean during the Muslim conquests. Describing the campaigns of the Caliph Muawiya, for example, Theophilus recounted how ‘The barbarian force had scattered throughout the land … to collect gold, slaves and expensive clothing … when they felt they had stayed long enough, they embarked their human loot on the ships. What misery and lamentation were seen then! Fathers were separated from their children, daughters from their mothers, brother from brother, some destined for Alexandria, others for Syria.’7
But what makes Theophilus’ account especially valuable is that he was equally critical of Umayyad aggression and Byzantine ineptitude.8 He discerned that the successes of the caliphate were to a great extent due to the failings of its enemies, in particular the inability of the Byzantines to cooperate with the other regional power – the Sasanian Empire – to see off the Islamic threat in the seventh century. To understand fully the triumph of the caliphate, therefore, it is vital to appreciate how fundamentally the centuries-old antagonism between the Byzantines and the Sasanians shaped the political situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.
One of the chief reasons the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires became so consumed with mutual hostility and distrust was the way their spheres of influence overlapped in Armenia and the Caucasus. Both vied to control a region that acted as a buffer not only between them but also against the peoples of the Central Asian steppe. The wary stand-off was periodically inflamed by one side upgrading its border fortifications. Despite protestations that this was merely a precautionary measure against the nomadic barbarian threat, each suspected the other of a ploy to tweak the status quo in their own favour. In the first year of his reign, for example, the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great (527–65) ordered one of his generals to construct a fortress on the border in northern Mesopotamia. ‘He accordingly with great haste began to carry out the decision of the emperor, and the fort was already rising to a considerable height by reason of the great number of artisans,’ it was reported. ‘But the Persians [Sasanians] forbade them to build any further, threatening that, not with words alone but also with deeds, they would at no distant time obstruct the work.’9 Letters were sent, envoys dispatched, but the bickering sparked a full-scale war.
Friction was not confined to the Armenian–Mesopotamian border in the north. At the mouth of the Red Sea, in 522, the Jewish kingdom of Himyar called on the Sasanians for support against an invasion by the Christian kingdom of Aksum which was backed by Constantinople. In the north of the Arabian Peninsula, the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms fought proxy wars on behalf of the Byzantines and Sasanians respectively. The two empires also locked horns over the silk trade. In 531, the Emperor Justinian sought to bypass Sasanian control of the overland Silk Road by approaching the Arab kingdoms about trading directly with the East via the Red Sea. He also attempted to establish a Byzantine silk industry with silkworm eggs and knowledge smuggled back from China by Christian monks.
In 532, an eternal peace treaty was signed between Justinian and the Sasanian emperor Khosrow I (531–79). Under pressure from barbarians in the north, Constantinople paid 440,000 gold pieces for the privilege. The peace did not last even a decade. In 562, a fifty-year peace placed a moratorium on fortress building in Armenia; instituted a demilitarized zone between the empires; agreed that future disputes would be settled on the basis that the empires shared equal status; established immunities for diplomats; and designated frontier posts where cross-border trade would be allowed. A decade later, the two empires were at war again. Another eternal accord was signed in 591 – and another war erupted eleven years after. This time, the Sasanian armies reached the walls of Constantinople before the Emperor Heraclius was able to push them back. His counter-offensive took the Byzantine army to the banks of the River Tigris before the Sasanians sued for peace in 628.
Their endless wars left the two empires enfeebled and dependent on frontier kingdoms for their defence. This was the caliphate’s chance. Even after Muhammad and his successors had embarked on their conquests, Ctesiphon and Constantinople continued to fight each other. In 637, a Muslim army marched on Ctesiphon. Fourteen years later, the caliphate brought the Sasanian Empire crashing down. In 674, the banners of Islam fluttered before the gates of Constantinople itself.
The Two Lights of the World
Before the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires were overwhelmed by the caliphate, each considered itself the centre of the world and the defender of the true faith. From a geopolitical viewpoint, the Byzantine Empire was both continental and maritime in its orientation, like the Roman Empire before it. It not only ruled an immense area of land, but also controlled much of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Its population must have been around 40 million people. Constantinople alone had about 500,000 inhabitants. Its most famous landmark, Hagia Sophia – the Church of Holy Wisdom – was completed in 537, one of the prestige projects of Justinian the Great. But shortly before Hagia Sophia was opened, the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens was closed in an effort to stamp out the last vestiges of pagan thought.
Justinian the Great – renowned as the emperor who never slept – was tireless in his efforts to impose Orthodox Christianity as the empire’s sole faith. The Musée du Louvre possesses an extraordinary ivory plaque of the triumphant emperor astride a rearing stallion and forcing back a defeated barbarian.10 Beneath the charger’s hooves cringe Asian tribute bearers, who offer him elephant tusks and a tiger. Before the emperor crouches a woman, one breast naked, who personifies the earth. With one hand, she clasps the emperor’s foot in supplication; with the other she holds fruit. All this takes place beneath the gaze of Jesus Christ and two winged angels. The message is clear: subjugating the world for Christ was the emperor’s mission.
To help further this end, Justinian issued the Corpus Juris Civilis, a compilation of Civil law, in 534. The emperor, it stated, was given God’s blessing to conquer enemies of the faith. Once the code came into force, for example, any new Jewish synagogues were banned. Byzantine intellectuals debated the qualities of the ideal emperor, drawing on the examples of classical statesmen, generals, king, and emperors, as well as the monarchs of the Old Testament. The Peri Politikes Epistemes (On Political Science) represented him as a wise philosopher-king: ‘The wealth and dearth of the times, which are bound to the rotations of the universe, are not in our power … Within our power, however, are justice and injustice, good government and bad government.’11
The Byzantines believed not only that they were the heirs of Rome, but that, as Christians, their glory would surpass the pagan Roman emperors. The late sixth-century emperor Maurice made the Byzantine worldview clear in his Strategikon. It reveals the Byzantine preoccupation with protecting its chief cities and emporiums: not just Constantinople, but also its commercial centres in the Levant and Egypt. This led them to create buffer zones and to seek to dominate the gateways to the Eastern Mediterranean. The Strategikon called for a vigilant policy of defensiveness, restraint, and concealment, ‘unless a truly exceptional opportunity or advantage presents itself’.12 A critical element in its strategic thinking was the navy, which guarded the capital and important trade routes.
The Strategikon also mocked the light-haired, faithless barbarians; although it sounded a note of caution about the military prowess of the ‘wicked’ Sasanians. Like Rome and China, the empire had a department to deal with such foreigners: the ‘bureau of barbarians’. From the sixth century, envoys to Constantinople were received in the Chrysotriklinos Hall, a golden octagonal reception room at the heart of the Great Palace on the banks of the Sea of Marmara. ‘When the curtain was drawn aside and the inner part was revealed, and when the hall of the gilded building glittered and Tergazis the Avar looked up at the head of the emperor shining with the holy diadem, he lay down three times in adoration and remained fixed to the ground,’ we read in the Strategikon. ‘The other Avars followed him in similar fear and fell on their faces.’13
The Sasanians regarded themselves as the equals of the Byzantines. King Khosrow I superscribed the peace treaty of 532 as follows: ‘The divine, good, father of peace, ancient Khosro, king of kings, fortunate, pious and beneficent, to whom the gods have given great fortune and a great kingdom, giant of giants, formed in the image of the gods.’14 He called Justinian his brother and described the empires as two lights, the moon of the west and the sun of the east.
Khosrow is indeed remembered as one of the Sasanian Empire’s strongest rulers. While Zoroastrianism remained the empire’s official religion, Khosrow pursued a policy of toleration and welcomed pagan Byzantines who fled Justinian’s religious zeal. He organized a conference of scholars to discuss the respective merits of different religions and political systems. The brightest immigrants joined the Academy of Gondishapur, where learning flourished under the patronage of the Sasanian king so that it became the world’s most important intellectual centre. The king improved irrigation infrastructure in Mesopotamia, built fortresses along the border, and embellished the capital, Ctesiphon, erecting a new palace, the Taq Kasra, where he received foreign guests in a vast vaulted hall. More significant in the long-term were his efforts to recruit cavalry from the lower nobility in exchange for land. While Khosrow had expected this reform to undermine the position of the upper nobility, it also created a new powerful interest group that would defy his weaker successors.
In the decades after Khosrow, the Sasanians continued to expand their borders, but the larger the empire became, the more it suffered from dynastic conflict, over-taxation, religious violence – one king even converted to Christianity – and plague. But the downfall of the Sasanians was also expedited by the alliance formed between the Byzantines and the emerging Göktürk Khaganate. The Göktürks were a nomadic confederacy, originating in Northern China, that had swept aside several other steppe peoples to seize control of much of Central Asia and the Silk Road. In 569, the Byzantines sent a delegation to establish direct trade with the Göktürks and so bypass the Sasanian intermediaries. The Byzantine envoy, Zemarchus, was deeply impressed by his audience with the khan, who was enrobed in silk embroidery, enthroned on gold, and surrounded by golden peacocks and silver animals. Out of these first diplomatic exchanges grew a coalition against the Sasanians. But as much as the Göktürks were valuable to Constantinople for the way their raids chipped away at the borders of the Sasanian Empire, their presence also forced nomadic societies such as the Avars further west, thereby destabilizing the borders of the Byzantine Empire too.
However, nobody at the beginning of the seventh century would have anticipated that these two mighty empires could be defeated by tribes from the Arabian desert. Even exhausted from fighting each other, their armies were immense, their cultural influence was huge, and their wealth unequalled. The armies of the caliphs may have been fresh and motivated, yet they were also divided. The caliphs may have possessed formidable cavalry, but so did the Sasanians and Byzantines. It was the failure of the great powers to make serious efforts to contain the caliphate when it was still small that proved critical. Another demonstration of the domino effect followed: once the Arab tribes had annexed towns on the peripheries of the empires, the caliphs could then draw on their resources to help take the major cities of the interiors. But even as the Muslim armies advanced ever closer, the Byzantines and Sasanians failed to work together. At the same time, the two empires were weakened by internal divisions. In Byzantine Egypt, for instance, Coptic Christians actively supported Muslim troops as a result of Constantinople’s rigid Orthodoxy. For the Sasanian Empire, the cumulative effect of all these factors proved fatal. The Byzantine Empire was much reduced, but survived thanks to its powerful navy and the support of allies from elsewhere in Europe.
Western and Eastern Europe
Beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire, Europe remained divided into small kingdoms. Many of the peoples from the Völkerwanderung, which had contributed to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, had settled in its former provinces, but new fortune seekers and invaders continued to cause instability. For the time being, no one power in this region was able to emulate the conquests of the Islamic Caliphate. By the beginning of the eighth century – after Umayyad warlords had seized most of North Africa from the Byzantines and swept onwards as far as the Strait of Gibraltar – it stood poised on the threshold of Europe.
In 711, an Islamic army of probably no more than a couple of thousand soldiers crossed into Spain. They found the Visigothic kingdom in disarray. The Mozarabic Chronicle – compiled in the mid-eighth century by a Christian under Islamic rule – described how the region was afflicted by religious fighting, plague, Basque uprisings, and dynastic conflicts. In 717, the first Islamic troops traversed the Pyrenees and descended on the Western European Coastal Plain. They found it sparsely inhabited, with a scattering of small wood-built settlements, and with forest re-encroaching on the farmlands that had been needed to support the far greater population under the Roman Empire.
Most of the former Roman province of Gaul was controlled by the Franks, who had been united into a single state under the auspices of their king, Clovis (481–511). After his death, the kingdom was divided among his three quarrelsome sons and fell apart. Gregory of Tours wrote of a time of evil, bloodshed, and pillaging. ‘What can we do when the entire population is steeped in vice and all delight in doing evil? No man fears the King, no man has any respect for his duke or his count.’15
By the early eighth century, this so-called Merovingian Dynasty was exhausted; the resultant anarchy provided the ideal pretext for a palace official called Charles Martel to seize power. The arrival of the Umayyads furnished another important opportunity to legitimize the new Frankish leadership, this time as figureheads in the Christian world’s struggle against Islam. Charles Martel won immense prestige when he defeated the Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732. His son, Pepin the Short, continued to repel the Umayyads and expanded the Frankish realm as far as the Danube. In exchange for his continued protection of the Church, he received the blessing of the pope for his plan to take the place of the Merovingian king. ‘It would be better for one who had power to be called a king than for one who remained without royal power,’ the pope pronounced.16 In 751, a new dynasty was born: the Carolingians.
Even if the Franks were seldom truly united, their kings tried hard to build a nation. They sought to establish some sort of common Frankish identity by the promotion of shared customs and the introduction of more standardized systems of government. More important, however, was the attempt to reconnect with the imperial legacy of the Romans. From the sixth century, kings took the old imperial title Imperator Augustus and emblazoned coins with the imperial laurels. Diplomatic exchanges with Constantinople were critical for upholding the king’s standing as a faithful son of the emperor. When Clovis codified the Frankish civil law, he employed Gallo-Roman jurists who drew heavily on imperial Roman decrees.
Christianity provided one of the most important means of fostering Frankish unity and reinforcing the legitimacy of kings. Prelates like Gregory of Tours were expected to promote a common Frankish identity in their preaching. Kings explicitly portrayed themselves as the helpmeets of God. ‘Let your servants, our kings, adorn the triumph of your virtue skilfully,’ we read in a Merovingian Mass, ‘so that they who are principes [rulers] by your command, may always be powerful in their duty and may rise above all the kingdoms.’17 Clovis – the first Frankish king to convert – treated the subjection of Aquitaine and Burgundy as a holy war. His son Childebert backed bishops in their forced conversion of Jews. By the eighth century, Frankish kings called themselves Rex Dei Gratia: ‘king by the grace of God’. They employed missionaries to expand Frankish influence beyond the northern and eastern borders. Churches were built in Frisia and prelates dispatched to the pagan Saxons. Whatever their personal aspirations, apostles like St Willibrord and St Boniface were pawns in what increasingly came to look like conquest under the banner of the cross. Christianity was increasingly used as a motive for war. Regions that refused to adopt Christianity were punished ruthlessly.
This was markedly different from earlier Christianity, which had averred that injustice should be countered peacefully and that suffering the scourge of suppression was the will of God.18 In the third century, the theologian Clement of Alexandria had likened Christians to an army without weapons, a peaceful race; and Cyprian of Carthage had propounded that enemies are to be loved.19 These were the views of Christians who lacked worldly power. As soon as the faith was adopted by political leaders, its attitudes to force changed. When Constantine marched against a rival emperor near Rome in 312, he inspired his troops by promising that their victory would be the will of God. In the early fifth century, the widely read Church father St Augustine of Hippo asserted that God had given the sword to kings and that it was just to defend the Christian peace.20 In the Byzantine Empire, religion was commonly used to justify military campaigns. The Strategikon, for example, posited that Byzantine emperors commanded their armies under the aegis of God. Such religious zeal would only become more pronounced. By the late ninth century, the Emperor Leo VI even judged that in order to defend the Christian realm it was warranted to make use of ‘contrivances of the devil’.21
The ardour of the Christian states was further tested by the Avars, who threatened their eastern borders as the caliphate encroached from the south. Like the Huns, the Avars originated from the steppes east of the Caspian Sea and settled in the plains north of the Black Sea. From there, they penetrated Anatolia, the Balkans, and Western Europe. Also like the Huns, they were feared for their sudden hit-and-run strikes. They perfected this form of warfare by introducing the stirrup, which kept riders more stable in the saddle, and a powerful, short, composite bow. These technological innovations, however, were offset by the fact that the Avar hordes were far smaller than those of the Huns and the peoples they encountered more organized.
At first, in the late sixth century, the Byzantines financed the Avars to fight the Gepids, the Bulgars, and other federations of nomadic tribes on the Danube. But it did not stop them from raiding the empire’s northern frontiers. Moreover, the arrival of the Avars also upset the situation in the Italian Peninsula, where the Byzantines had been labouring to re-establish their rule. Having aided the Avars to defeat the Gepids, the Lombards increasingly feared their ally’s military might. In a bid to evade it, they migrated into Northern Italy, where they took possession of much of the Byzantine territory. In 583, the Avar khagan exacted 120,000 gold pieces from Constantinople – along with a golden bed and an elephant. But Avar ambitions remained unsated. In 626, the Avars joined the Sasanians in besieging Constantinople. The defeat of the siege by the Emperor Heraclius the following year heralded the end of the Avar expansion.
In the Avars’ stead, the Bulgars gained ground with the reluctant support of the Byzantines. The Avars initially responded by allying with the Slavs, but it was to no avail. By 680, the Bulgars had assimilated the Slav tribes in the former Avar territories of the northeast Balkans and proclaimed a new khanate. They forced the Byzantines to recognize their right to settle on the southern banks of the Danube, and exacted an annual payment of gold. In return for helping restore the Emperor Justinian II to his throne in 705, the Bulgar khan, Tervel, was granted the title of Caesar (tsar) and the emperor’s daughter in marriage. Relations with Constantinople, however, remained tense. But when Islamic troops besieged the metropolis in 717–18, it was crucial Bulgar support that saved the city from falling. A barbarian – Khan Tervel – was now hailed as the saviour of Christian Europe.
Over 150 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe remained a fragmented place. Spain was held by the Umayyads and would remain under the control of Islamic rulers for centuries. Protected by the Pyrenees, which acted as an important barrier between Islam and Christianity, the Western European Coastal Plain became dominated by the Franks. The Byzantines considered them barbarians; but their leaders increasingly came to see themselves as successors to the old Roman emperors. The Danube formed the other main fault line in Europe at this time. The region east of it was the domain of ambitious powers like the Avars and the Bulgars. Yet they remained small in population terms, hampered by environmental conditions that were less benign for agriculture; and they were far more affected than Western Europe by the incessant migrations and aggression that continued to sweep in from the steppes north of the Black Sea.
Armour in Chinese Fields
At the beginning of the sixth century, the fundamental political and social changes set in motion in China by the fall of the Western Jin state in 316 were still underway. The most important was the relocation of China’s economic centre to the region south of the River Yangtze, which slowly transformed into a second food basket. The former centre of Chinese civilization, the North China Plain, was entirely ceded to barbarians like the Xiongnu and the Xianbei.
Chinese culture was no less alien to such peoples than Roman culture was to the Franks with their Germanic origins. But in much the same way that the Franks sought to align themselves with the former greatness of the Roman Empire and converted to Christianity, the barbarian peoples in China consciously embraced its imperial tradition and culture. They competed with each other to construct the most sumptuous temples and to perform the most extravagant ceremonial rituals at their royal courts – to the point that they came to look down on the native Chinese on the far side of the Yangtze. ‘Your land is wet, cursed with malaria and crawling with insects,’ reported one traveller. ‘Frogs and toads share the same lairs, men and birds cohabit.’22 Chinese making the journey in the opposite direction, however, were reluctantly impressed by the state of the cities in the north. As one visitor put it:
Ever since Jin and Song times … Luoyang has been called a desolate region, and here we say that everyone north of the Yangtze is a barbarian; but on my recent visit to Luoyang, I found out that families of capped and gowned scholars live on the northern plains, where proper ceremonial and protocol flourish. I cannot find words to describe the magnificent personages I saw.23
Gradually, the ethnic composition of China changed entirely. The barbarians of the north blended with the native Chinese, and Chinese migrants in turn blended with the barbarians of the south. In the process, the old Confucian order was increasingly challenged by – and cross-fertilized with – the belief systems of Buddhism and Taoism, which first became widespread in this era.
Culturally, China flourished. Politically, however, it was a period of disunion and discord. ‘The people had to wear armor to till the fields,’ the records observed.24 By the end of the sixth century, political power had crystallized into three kingdoms: the Southern Chen, the Northern Qi, and the Northern Zhou. The most powerful and extensive of the three was the Northern Zhou kingdom, which had been established by the Xianbei, and stretched from the Mongolian Steppes to the upper reaches of the Mekong River. This bestowed immense strategic advantages. It allowed the Northern Zhou to control all the valleys that gave access to the east of China. It meant they were the first to profit from important military innovations brought by nomads from the west, like the stirrup.25 And it also let them benefit from the expertise of the highlanders of Sichuan in building and navigating ships that could be employed for warfare on often turbulent rivers.
Another major war for supremacy now loomed. In 577, the Northern Zhou overwhelmed the Northern Qi with a force said to number more than half a million men. In 588, they mounted an equally vast amphibious assault on the Southern Chen across the River Yangtze. The invasion had been preceded by the widespread distribution of pamphlets warning that the decadence and criminality of the Southern Chen rulers had caused them to lose the mandate of heaven. Their thesis was proved when their armies soon triumphed. For the first time in more than 350 years – since the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220 – the majority of the Chinese heartland was firmly under the control of a single ruler. The Northern Zhou now established a new imperial dynasty, the Sui. Although it was to be short-lived, it was pivotal in the reunification of China. The Sui may have been descended from barbarian nomads, but their ambition was to restore the greatness of the Han Empire. Now, heaven ordained them to inaugurate a lasting era of harmony.
The Tang Dynasty
Heaven, however, was made to wait for another thirty years, until a new dynasty – also of Xianbei origin – arose to assume the imperial mandate. Worn out by border wars and domestic rebellions, the Sui were toppled by the Tang, with the aid of the powerful Göktürks, in 618. For a brief moment, China again stared into the abyss of civil war. But fortunately for the newborn dynasty, the first emperor was succeeded by a highly capable and experienced warrior, who ruthlessly murdered his two brothers to gain the throne. The new emperor, Taizong (626–49), mustered an army of hundreds of thousands to confront the troubled situation. ‘The present disaster originated in the borderlands enjoying some small measure of peace, which allowed the ruler of men to roam at his ease and forget about warfare,’ he asserted. ‘We do not have you dig pools and construct parks, but instead allow you to focus on practicing the bow and arrow.’26 Within five years, he had put down rebellion within the realm and restored stability along the border.
Once the survival of the young dynasty was guaranteed, Taizong shifted his focus to peaceful statecraft. Shoring up his legitimacy was imperative. In accordance with the ancient Confucian tradition, he formally adopted the heavenly mandate. The imperial dynasty was symbolized as a tree: the wisdom of the emperor flowed from the roots to his descendants, the branches, which had to grow strong, but not become too heavy. The emperor was also expected to manifest such qualities as compassion, benevolence, courtesy, respect for tradition, and thoughtfulness. To that end, Taizong worked hard to foster good governance, writing two essays on the subject, The Model of an Emperor and The Emperor’s Government Strategy. Above all, he recommended avoiding military overstretch. ‘A warlike country,’ he warned, ‘however huge and safe it may be, will end up declining and endangering its populace.’27 To temper such martial ardour, he encouraged the growth of citizenship and civility through culture and education.
Between 618 and 683, the Tang Empire enjoyed stability, if not absolute harmony. Its population grew to between 50 and 60 million, reaching levels last seen during the Han Dynasty. Beliefs other than Confucianism were widely tolerated, including Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam; indeed, Taizong himself attended Buddhist services to commemorate the victims of war, and ordered the construction of Buddhist monasteries. Agricultural production was boosted by the use of prisoners to reclaim land on the empire’s periphery and by technological innovations such as new water-lifting systems and a more advanced form of plough. This consequently allowed for growth in the output of silk factories, iron foundries, and ceramic workshops. One historian-official even hinted at surpluses: ‘The prices of rice, corn and cloth kept on falling due to an abundance in supply.’28 People flocked to the cities, like the capital, Chang’an, which now had around 300,000 inhabitants. ‘Chang’an is a merchant’s paradise,’ a Silk Road trader testified. ‘The market place has 3,000 stalls representing 200 merchant guilds. The city is beautiful with fruit trees and a lake.’29 Like the Romans, the Tang laid out their cities according to grid systems and took great care in planning the water supply and other public amenities. These cities stimulated the spread of inventions, like woodblock printing, new medicines, and, above all, trade.
The early Tang emperors sought to encourage commerce along the Silk Road; although their attempts to develop a ‘harmonious market’ with the Göktürks, who controlled the route for much of its length through Central Asia, amounted to little more than demands to set trading terms unilaterally. They also encouraged trade with Southeast Asia and onwards by sea with the countries around the Indian Ocean. ‘A higher office will be rewarded to any official who can generate one million min annually in tariff revenue from maritime trade,’ the court declared.30 Tax rates for seaborne trade were lowered and official missions dispatched to establish relations with overseas countries. Several of China’s trading partners were invited to establish permanent missions in the capital and they even received subsidies. Such efforts seem to have paid off: ‘Rows of ships arrive from ten thousand countries,’ a poet hymned, ‘all trying to be the first to offer tributes and silk.’31 Nevertheless, Tang China remained first and foremost a continental power. When Emperor Taizong first saw the great sea, he was profoundly scared of its thunderous waves; then he dismissed it as little more than a moat for the capital. The famous cartographer Jia Dan described shipping routes all the way to the Persian Gulf, but most of what survives of his work is devoted to China’s continental neighbours, polities along the Silk Road, and the overland trade with the Middle East.
Although most East Asian powers were bound by common ties based on trade and Buddhism – which had become by far the most widespread belief system in the region – they still competed tirelessly over the control of that trade, and over the possession of strategic cities and natural resources. China’s foreign policy, therefore, was characterized by a combination of hard and soft power. When the support of the Göktürks was no longer needed, the Tang expelled them from China by force; yet their elite became so assimilated with the Tang that they formally invited Emperor Taizong to become the Göktürk khagan. ‘The sons of the nobles became the bondsmen of the Chinese people, their unsullied daughters became its slaves,’ the Göktürk Orkhon Inscriptions recorded. ‘While ensnaring them with their ingratiating talk and enervating riches, they have drawn the far-dwelling peoples nearer to themselves.’32 Another threat in the west was posed by the Tuyuhun kingdom. Yet another branch of the Xianbei, the Tuyuhun were initially offered a marriage alliance in return for ceasing their border raids. When they baulked, the Tang emperor turned to the Tibetan kingdom. In exchange for a Tang princess, Tibet became an energetic ally, providing tens of thousand of troops for the campaign that put an end to Tuyuhun pretensions.
In the east, the Tang found itself in competition with the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, which fought to maintain its primacy. After a large-scale invasion of the peninsula was routed, Taizong tried to wear down Goguryeo through border raids, disturbing its trade, and supporting its main Korean rival, the kingdom of Silla. In 668, Goguryeo was finally overwhelmed by a formidable Silla–Tang coalition. Much of the Korean Peninsula became a Tang protectorate – the so-called ‘protectorate-general to pacify the East’ – with the Silla king regarded merely as an adjunct to Chinese foreign policy.
Japan, meanwhile, remained torn between savage clan rivalries and efforts towards imperial reunification under its Yamato rulers. From China, they adopted Buddhism, urban planning, and the Confucian concept of imperial benevolence, which underpinned the famous Seventeen Article Constitution of Prince Shotoku in 604. Yet despite the beneficence of Shotoku’s rule, he also managed to damage diplomatic relations with China. His attempt, in an official letter, to celebrate the close relationship between the two countries – describing Japan as the land of the rising sun, and China the land of the setting sun –was regarded by the Chinese emperor as an unconscionable insult for presuming that in some way the two states were equals.
Tang China also maintained contacts with the kingdoms in India. Even though Buddhism originated in India, the Tang considered themselves its chief upholders. Their policy of employing distinguished Buddhist monks to help spread Chinese influence, however, did not always go well. In 648, for example, Hindu priests in northern India threw the Chinese ambassador Wang Xuance into prison, fearing that the Tang presence in the region would bolster Buddhism and so undermine their own privileged status. Wang escaped to Tibet, where he mustered Tibetan troops and led them in a punitive expedition to avenge this insult to Tang honour. The Tibetan king was subsequently rewarded with honours, rolls of richly dyed silk, silkworm eggs, and craftsmen to make paper. Despite such temporary setbacks, the Tang continued to send missions to India.
When Taizong died in 649, the star of the Tang started to wane. Dynastic struggles broke out, and the next emperors could not emulate the success of the dynasty’s founders. The storm clouds were further darkened by the appearance of the Islamic Caliphate on the western horizon. In 651, a first Arab envoy arrived in China, reportedly even trying to convert the emperor to Islam. A similar diplomatic mission seems to have been dispatched every four years subsequently. A worse humiliation was still to follow.
The expansion of the caliphate had caused many Central Asian kingdoms to seek aid from the Tang, but they were already too feeble to furnish military support. As resistance along the Silk Road crumbled before them, the troops of the caliphate marched relentlessly east. In 751, the forces of the Tang were crushed by the caliphate’s armies at the Battle of the Talas River, in the Ferghana Valley. The era of Tang cosmopolitanism had come to an end.
The presence of the Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia established a powerful geopolitical bond between the extremities of the Eastern Hemisphere. Stimulated by the relentless competition of the major powers, transcontinental mobility steadily developed, not least with the growing commercial and diplomatic exchanges taking place between Europe, Africa, and Asia. But as much as the Eastern Hemisphere was beset by endemic violence, the same was also true of lands still far beyond the reach, knowledge, or imagination of either Asian or European lords. Centuries after the disappearance of the Olmec Civilization, it is time to return to the Western Hemisphere.
Spear-Thrower Owl
In Ross County, Ohio, in the Midwestern United States, there is a park with dome-shaped graves that were long a mystery. In those graves, archaeologists discovered copper that originated from the present-day border with Canada, sharks’ teeth and mica from the east coast, obsidian and bears’ teeth from the Appalachian Mountains, and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, the burials were attributed to a people known to historians as the Woodland Culture. They lived in the fifth century, in towns protected by wooden palisades, and used bows and arrows to make war on each other. They were among the first in North America to develop a hierarchical society, large settlements, and a trade network that spanned most of the continent.
While North America remained thinly populated – its development hampered by climate change in the late fifth century – matters were very different south of the Gulf of Mexico. Here the land was studded with settlements, some of which contained tens of thousands of inhabitants. At their heart, forming their political and religious centre, towered vast stone pyramids. The greatest – soaring more than seventy metres above its plaza – was the ancient Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, near present-day Mexico City. As early as the fourth century, the population of Teotihuacán was probably more than 120,000. It contained numerous temples, a royal citadel, wide streets, workshops, apartment blocks, and large reservoirs. Its extraordinary architectural and artistic treasures testify to its prosperity and power, which it owed to a combination of agriculture, trade, and conquest.
Teotihuacán lay at the centre of a web of smaller cities and towns, which it expected to contribute both troops and goods. Its ambitions were not confined to settlements in its immediate neighbourhood, though. Traders from Teotihuacán had long found the way south and east to the rich cities of the Yucatán Peninsula, in the most important of which they set up a kind of chamber of commerce.33 These cities were all part of the Maya culture. They shared a common hieroglyphic script, calendar, architectural style, pantheon – and a passion for a highly competitive ritual ball game.
There were dozens of Maya city states in Yucatán. Their existence depended on the control of water resources: the peninsula is seasonally arid, so agriculture could only flourish when rulers built and maintained large reservoirs. The chief cities presided over a periphery of smaller satellite towns, which were required to participate in religious festivals and offer tribute (patan) of such highly valued commodities as cacao, obsidian, and brightly coloured feathers.34 They erected steles to demarcate their territory and hosted the shrines of smaller towns. The Maya were warriors. Their arts, culture, and religion celebrated masculine strength. Temples were adorned with images of terrifying gods and warrior-kings. One plaque from the city of Tikal, for example, represents the king trampling the body of a fallen foe.35
In the late fourth century, Teotihuacáni traders in the Maya region were replaced by soldiers. The storm god of Teotihuacán had ordered King Spear-Thrower Owl – as archaeologists refer to him – to extend the city’s power and prestige all the way to Yucatán. In city after city, Spear-Thrower Owl violently deposed the ruler in favour of one of his own relatives; in the major city of Tikal, Spear-Thrower Owl’s son himself took the place of the executed king. Teotihuacán’s conquests were aided by the state of discord that existed between Maya polities, as well as by superior weapons, such as spear-throwers (atlatls).36 For over 150 years, Teotihuacán’s hegemony cast a dark shadow over Yucatán. But then, in around 550, its star faded, probably as a result of famine and internal unrest.
The resulting power vacuum sparked a new contest for supremacy among the Maya cities. In the absence of metal weapons, the Maya fought with stone-tipped arrows, spears, and clubs, and wore primitive armour of padded cotton reinforced with flakes of rock salt. Defeated soldiers were massacred and leaders sacrificed to the gods. Around this time, cities began to invest in fortifications.37 But victors often poisoned the reservoirs of captive cities, so that they had to be abandoned. By the early seventh century, two cities had emerged to dominate Yucatán: Calakmul and Tikal. The two had a long history of trade, diplomacy, royal visits, and joint rituals; but competition over trade along the Pasión River, and rivalry over the smaller cities in their overlapping spheres of influence, led to war. At least three major wars were fought before Calakmul was finally defeated in the mid-eighth century.
Despite such wars, the Maya civilization persisted into the ninth century, when it mysteriously collapsed. Population pressure may well have led to over-intensive farming that exhausted the soil, while a period of climate change would have exacerbated the situation. Whatever the cause, over a relatively short stretch of time, the Maya abandoned their cities – and the complex societies they supported – and returned to living in small villages. By the tenth century, many of the great Maya pyramid complexes had already been reconquered by the forest.