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Islamic Globalization

(570–1450 AD)

How a series of visions appeared to a merchant from Mecca, connecting East with West

MOHAMMED WAS A PROPHET and the founder of Islam, a religion and way of life that has profoundly affected the course of human and natural history. About 1,400 years ago, this merchant from the city of Mecca was seized by a series of visions in which he saw the Archangel Gabriel reveal the true and final word of Allah, the one almighty God. His family and followers then wrote down these revelations in a series of verses called the Koran. Today, with more than 1.3 billion practising Muslims, Islam is the second most popular religion in the world, after Christianity (there are an estimated 2.1 billion Christians in the world today).

Before the emergence of Islam, the Arab religion was pantheistic. The Kaaba was a shrine in Mecca, in the middle of the Arabian desert, that contained 360 different gods. Every year nomadic tribes would converge on the Kaaba in the Hajj, a pilgrimage. No violence was allowed. It was believed that the Kaaba represented the intersection between heaven and earth. Its cornerstone, a piece of sacred black rock, symbolized that link, having fallen from the gate of heaven as a meteorite. It is still located in the Kaaba, a large cubic building in the al-Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.

Mohammed was born in Mecca in about 570 AD. His family business was the transportation of goods such as salt, gold, ivory and slaves using horses and camels. As a youth he gained a reputation for honesty and wisdom. It is said he successfully resolved a heated dispute during the reconstruction of the Kaaba after it had been damaged by flash floods. The four chief clans of Mecca couldn’t decide which of them should have the honour of lifting the sacred cornerstone into place. It was resolved to let the next person who walked into the shrine make the decision – that person was Mohammed. Mirroring the wisdom of King Solomon, he took off his cloak, placed the stone in the middle and instructed the leaders of the clans to lift it into place jointly by taking one corner of the cloak each.

Mohammed was a profoundly unsettled man. Perhaps it was because he never knew his father, Abdullah, who died on a trading trip six months before he was born. Perhaps it was because he lost his mother, Amina, who died of an illness when he was only six. Maybe life as a merchant disillusioned him. Despite what was by all reports a happy marriage, at the age of about forty he withdrew from everyday life to a small cave on Mount Hira, near where he lived. There he had the first in a long series of dramatic and vivid visions in which the Archangel Gabriel – the same angel who is said to have visited Abraham and Mary, Jesus’s mother – revealed to him the final and absolute word of God.

The angel told Mohammed that there was only one God, not many, and that he was in heaven, not on earth. He said that God had revealed his word many times before through prophets such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, Elijah, Jesus and more than fifty others, but that over time, partly by accident but sometimes through deception, humans had corrupted his word and leaped to false assumptions. In so doing they had constructed religions such as Judaism and Christianity, which, although based on the truth of there being only one God, had become misguided and false.

It was a mistake, said the angel, for the Jews to think they were God’s only chosen people. The Arabs were also descended from Abraham – not, like the Jews, through his second son Isaac (see page 145), but through his elder son Ishmael. Christians were mistaken when they claimed that Jesus was the son of God, because God is divine and cannot be made flesh. Rather, God spoke through prophets, finishing with Mohammed, who was the last prophet. Nor will there be a second coming, when Jesus or any other Messiah (meaning a saviour or liberator of the world) comes to earth in judgement. No, there is only one God, Allah, the God in heaven, and he is the only judge.

Mohammed’s visions also provided the foundations for a code that defines the Islamic way of life. The Five Pillars of Islam are a simple but powerful creed: profess faith in Allah as the one and only true God (and to Mohammed as his messenger); pray to Allah five times a day; give generously to the poor; observe all religious festivals; and, finally, make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your lifetime.

Engaging simplicity

Islam spread like wildfire. Within a hundred years of Mohammed’s death in AD 632 its simple, powerful message had penetrated Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the rest of the Middle East. It spread to Persia, toppling the Sassanid Empire in 651, extending its reach as far as the Black Sea coast to the north and modern-day Pakistan to the south. By 711 Muslim warriors had crossed North Africa and moved up into southern Spain, and within five years had captured the entire Iberian Peninsula as far north as the Pyrenees (see plate 9). By 732 they were near Poitiers, in the heart of France, only to be stopped by a miraculous victory, against all odds, by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. Some historians, including Edward Gibbon in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, believe that had Martel not won this battle, Europe might well have become Islamic.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Islamic world, in Central Asia, a new Islamic dynasty called the Abbasids defeated the Chinese at the Battle of Talas in 751, securing control of the area as far north as the Aral Sea. This Arab victory introduced Islam into inner and Central Asia, where it has remained ever since. Within 150 years of Mohammed’s death, Islam was the largest and fastest-growing religion in the world.

After Mohammed died, disputes had immediately broken out as to who should lead the Muslim community. Since he had no agreed heir, a split emerged that still exists to this day. Sunni Muslims believe that Mohammed passed on his estate, and therefore his authority, to the Muslim community around him. It was with their approval that Mohammed’s close friend and ally Abu Bakr legitimized his claim to become the first Islamic Caliph, Mohammed’s rightful successor. However, Shia Muslims believe Abu Bakr orchestrated a coup d’état, and that Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, who later became the fourth Caliph, was the Prophet’s true heir, owing to his blood relationship. Ever since, Sunni Muslim rulers have claimed their authority from the election or approval of senior Islamic representatives, while Shias believe political and religious legitimacy comes through direct descent from Mohammed and his family.

Rivalries burst into bitter struggles that exploded in a series of Muslim civil wars called fitna, shot through with coups and assassinations. Such rivalries helped spread the new word of God faster and farther. Out of Arabia came men highly charged with political ambition who scattered in all directions on horses and camels, spreading the word of Allah using whichever version of Mohammed’s rightful inheritance suited their own particular claims.

The voluntary and mostly permanent conversion of millions of people to the new faith of Islam had dramatic consequences for the relationship between nature and mankind. At the heart of the religious philosophy of Mohammed was the complete removal of any concept of God on earth. The only earthly link with divinity was through the immutable, inspired written word of the Koran. Forests, animals, plants, mountains – dreamtime – none was a focus of Islamic veneration. Even the weather, thunder, lightning and other forces of nature were not considered sacred in themselves. Putting a single God in heaven, not on earth, was a trend started by the Jews. Then, barring the temporary exception of Jesus, Christianity reinforced the idea. Now the process was perfected by Islam. God was not to be found in the druidic woods of Europe or in Poseidon’s stormy seas, not even in the pyramids of Egypt or on top of the ziggurats of Babylon. God was to be known on earth only through a single set of perfect and immutable rules uttered by Mohammed and later written down by his followers in their holy book.

Initially the verses of the Koran were either memorized or etched on anything that came to hand, from stones to pieces of bark. One close follower of the early Caliphs, who was ordered to compile the Koran into a single complete manuscript, protested that ‘shifting mountains’ would have been easier. In the end he resorted to gathering material from ‘parchments, scapula, leaf-stalks of date palms and from the memories of men who knew it by heart’.

Spreading the word

The advent of paper supercharged the Islamic world’s religious lust for the written word. Until the middle of the eighth century the only people who knew the secrets of paper manufacture were from the Far East. But following the capture of a few Chinese prisoners by a gang of Arabian knights at the Battle of Talas in 751, this secret’s genie was uncorked (see plate 9). The prisoners’ knowledge of paper making helped establish the process outside the Far East for the first time, in the city of Samarkand, now the capital of Uzbekistan. By 794 a paper mill had been set up in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. From there the art spread to Damascus, Egypt and Morocco, and paper replaced papyrus, silk, wood and parchment.

The first paper book known in Christian Europe was produced using paper made from a mill built by Islamic rulers in Valencia, Spain in 1151. This book, a religious document called The Missal of Silos, is kept in the library of the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, near Burgos, Spain.

The mass production of blank books made it easier for calligraphic experts to copy out the poetic verses of the Koran and for these to be distributed all across the Muslim world. From about 900 AD Islamic mystics from Baghdad, called Sufis, began to teach that the Koran could help individuals gain direct experience of divine love. The advent of paper making encouraged the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad to commission translations of ancient Greek, Persian and Indian scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic, in the hope of making their language and culture more acceptable to the newly conquered Persian nobility, whose rich past stretched back to the Hellenic age of Alexander the Great. Music, poetry, literature and the concept of courtly love now mingled in the Abbasid world with the ideas of ancient Greek and Roman writers on science, medicine, astronomy and mathematics.

Rulers such as Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786–809 AD) sent diplomats to Constantinople to acquire Greek texts. His son al-Ma’mun (ruled 813–33 AD) is even said to have made it a condition of peace that the Byzantines hand over a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Written in about 150 AD, this book of mathematical astronomy explained in precise detail how to predict the position of the sun, moon and planets on any given date, past, present or future. It became an astronomical gospel for Islamic rulers, who used it to determine the dates of future religious festivals, such as Ramadan, that were based on the cycles of the moon.

Thousands of other ancient texts were translated into Arabic or Persian in the Abbasids’ House of Wisdom, an enormous royal library in Baghdad. Caliphs lured translators, scholars and philosophers from all over the known world to their courts and even encouraged debates on how to reconcile the works of rational philosophers like Aristotle with the divine revelations of Mohammed.

The world of the Caliphs

The Umayyad Caliphs in al-Andalus (Spain) were determined not to be outdone by their Abbasid enemies in Baghdad. Ruling from their rival capital of Cordoba they also patronized philosophers, doctors, mathematicians and scientists, but in addition they transplanted an entire Middle Eastern culture, root and branch, to southern and central Spain. Technical experts arrived to help reshape and revitalize the country’s earth and soil, bringing with them Arabic knowledge of irrigation. Thousands of miles of qanats – underground aqueducts – were constructed, which from c.900 AD transported water from mountain sources to the fields. Oranges, lemons, apricots, mulberries, bananas, sugar cane and watermelons – crops which had never been grown in Europe before – were brought over from the Middle East and successfully cultivated in Spain. They even brought rice from India, without which today there would be no such thing as Spanish paella.

Agricultural riches meant that by 1000 AD the population of Cordoba had grown to more than 100,000. In the words of one Muslim chronicler, al-Maqqari, who is widely suspected of exaggeration, the city had 1,600 mosques, 900 public baths, 213,077 private homes and 80,455 shops!

Islamic merchants brought gold and ivory from across the Sahara, and Cordoba’s artisans turned them into coins, jewellery and luxury goods for the Caliph and his court. Thanks to the growing population and prosperity of this city, engineers were commissioned to build and later extend a monumental mosque, called the Mezquita. With more than a thousand columns made of jasper, onyx, marble and granite, it could accommodate as many as 40,000 faithful for their five-a-day prayers.

Islamic courts like those in Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba acted like throbbing hearts, pumping ideas and inventions around a huge body united by a single faith and the common language of Arabic. They were responsible for fetching and carrying knowledge from as far as China in the East to France in the West, a process that eventually led to the transformation of the fortunes of Europe, helping future explorers assemble toolkits for global conquest. Sometimes ideas were exchanged through war, like the transmission of how to make paper, and sometimes through trade.

The birth of modern arithmetic

In about 1200 an Italian merchant called Leonardo Fibonacci travelled to Algiers in North Africa to help out in his father’s funduq – trading post. There for the first time he saw the incredible power of arithmetic written on paper rather than using the old-fashioned abacus. The idea had come from India via Baghdad, where at the House of Wisdom two scholars, al-Kindi and his colleague al-Khwarizmi (780–850 AD), had written books on the newly arrived paper that illustrated how to replace the convention of using written words to describe numbers (such as alpha, beta and gamma) with symbols ranging from 1 to 9. They showed how these could be arranged to allow fast calculation, and added the symbol 0, to represent no value, so that between these ten digits any number could be written.

After Fibonacci had seen Algerian merchants using the system, he was determined that his Italian counterparts should not miss out on its potential. Liber Abaci, his book published in 1202, introduced these new numbers to the Christian West. It showed how Arabic numerals could transform everything from bookkeeping to the calculation of interest and money changing. So successful was this innovation that within 200 years most Italian merchants and bankers had abandoned their old-fashioned ways and converted entirely to arithmetic using ink, pen and paper.

It wasn’t just arithmetic that spread to the Christian West via Islamic scholars. Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise on al-jabr (transposition) showed how a process of linear and quadratic equations could determine an unknown value. When al-Khwarizmi’s work was translated in Spain, the Arabic word for ‘thing’ (shay) was transcribed as ‘xay’ because the letter ‘x’ was pronounced ‘sh’ in Spain. Over time this word was shortened to just ‘x’, which has become the symbol universally used to denote an unknown value. Thanks to the translation of this text into Latin by Christian scholars such as Gerard of Cremona (1114–87) in Toledo, the foundations of modern Western physical sciences were laid. Today algebra is an essential cornerstone of modern science and engineering projects for everything from building particle accelerators to skyscrapers.

Science, medicine and music

Islamic scholars were just as passionate as the ancient Greeks about fathoming out how the laws of nature worked, be they biological, mathematical or astronomical. Modern medicine owes much of its inspiration to Arabic philosophers, who were influenced by ancient Greek writers like Claudius Galen (129–200 AD), a court physician in Rome. A bright young Arabic doctor called Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna (980–1037 AD), wrote no fewer than 450 books after reading the works of Galen in the royal library at Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan. His Book of Healing and Canon of Medicine, detailing the symptoms and causes of diseases, treatments using different types of medicines and the functions of various organs and parts of the body, were standard textbooks in European universities for more than 500 years. The fourteen-volume Canon of Medicine included the first ever detailed description of how the human eye works and even described how to remove cataracts.

Just as important to the evolution of Western science was a man called ibn al-Haytham (965–1040 AD), who worked out the laws of optics some 600 years before Isaac Newton. Al-Haytham was educated in Baghdad, but later travelled to Spain, from where his discoveries made their way via Christian translators to the Latin West. He demonstrated how rays of light are affected by the processes of reflection and refraction. Such insights were the key for the future understanding of how lenses work. It was a Latin translation of the work on optics by al-Haytham that early Western scientists used to work out how to build a telescope.

Islamic rulers had a deeply religious reason for wanting to find ways to understand the science of navigation. Mohammed had stipulated that at prayer times all Muslims should face towards Mecca (initially the direction was Jerusalem, but that was changed after the reluctance of the Jews in Medina to embrace Islam), and that mosques should therefore be built with their prayer shrines (qibla) pointing in the right direction. Once Islam spread across the world, knowing in which direction the holy city lay became one of the most significant scientific challenges of all.

The astrolabe was a tool used throughout the Islamic world for precisely this purpose. Ultimately, its value to European explorers was just as great as that of the Chinese-inspired compass. The idea of designing a hand-held instrument that could track the process and elevation of the stars at night to determine one’s position on the earth’s surface went back to the ancient Greeks – to Eratosthenes (276–194 BC) and Hipparchus (190–120 BC). Using trigonometric tables, Persian scientist Mohammed al-Fazari (died c. 777 AD) built the first Islamic astrolabe, although it worked along only a single line of latitude.

Later, Andalusian scientist al-Zarqali (1028–87 AD) modified the instrument so it could be used anywhere in the world. After his textbooks and astronomical tables were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century, they provided vital navigational resources for early-fifteenth-century Christian explorers. The first known European astrolabe was built in 1492 in Lisbon by Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto (c.1450–c.1510), whose astronomical tables were used by Christopher Columbus as navigational aids for his overseas expeditions (see page 233).

Warfare between the Islamic world and the Christian West conveyed other important innovations from East to West. Well-bred cavalry horses from Persia and stirrups from China were two examples picked up by Charles Martel after his remarkable victory at Tours, suggesting that the culture of the European medieval knight may have originated in Persia and then diffused via Islamic Spain into eleventh-century France.

When William VIII of Aquitaine captured a group of attractive Saracen slave girls at the Siege of Barbastro in 1064, he so loved their songs that he was moved to write his own love poetry. William later became the founder of the French troubadour movement, a group of itinerant singers and poets who enthralled crusaders with their songs about war, romance and courtly love. If troubadour songs lie at the start of Western Europe’s musical tradition, their likeliest origins come from the Muslim world.

The presence of Islamic rulers in Europe, especially in Spain and Sicily, eventually provoked a furious contest between Christian and Muslim civilizations. One dispute centred on control of Jerusalem, holy to both Christianity and Islam (see page 217), another concerned the return of the Iberian Peninsula to Christian rule, known as the Reconquista (see page 233).

The spread of holy war

The idea of jihad was deployed with dramatic effect by Mohammed’s early followers in their seventh-century firestorm raids out of the Middle East, their soldiers inspired by the words of the Koran: ‘Consider not those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they will be provided for.’

By 1095 the Muslim idea of justifying war in the name of religion had matured in the Christian West and included the forgiveness of soldiers’ sins and the promise of eternal bliss for the brave, granted by Christ’s representative on earth, the Pope in Rome. Once the Islamic concept of holy war had been adopted by Christian crusaders in Europe, mankind was truly launched on a new path towards global conflict.

Mohammed’s fiery revolution thoroughly connected Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and China through war and trade. Like a whirling dervish dance, which originated with the Sufi mystics of Persia, the capitals and Caliphs of early Islam sent bold ideas and inventions flinging around the enormous Muslim universe and whatever else it touched in peace or war.

When European explorers eventually set out on their great adventures across the seas in the fifteenth century, their fortunes relied on a wide range of Islamic imports, most of which came from China including gunpowder, mathematics, maps, navigational aids and, most precious of all, paper.

China and the birth of bureaucracy

It was ancient China’s expertise in paper making that helped its people build the most technologically advanced civilization in the medieval world. Perhaps the Chinese reverence for paper was a reaction against the Great Burning of Books ordered by the paranoid and obsessive absolutist Qin Shi Huang in 213 BC – the Emperor who built himself the terracotta army to defend him in the afterlife (see page 131). Shortly after his death, a new dynasty called the Hàn came to power. During more than 400 years of almost uninterrupted rule (206 BC–220 AD) its Emperors unified China around a new cultural system. At its core was the beginning of what came to be the world’s biggest imperial bureaucracy, begun by Emperor Wu (141–87 BC), in which studying books became central to how people rose through the ranks of the imperial government.

Wu’s reforms made it compulsory for court officials to study the classic books of Confucius (see page 129), teaching them that what mattered most was loyalty to the state. In 140 BC Wu ordered the first ever imperial examinations, whereby a hundred official appointments were to be based on performance in an academic test. Most of the candidates were commoners with no connections to nobility. For the first time poor people from the rural heartlands of China could, if they were clever enough, secure positions in government, positions that brought with them wealth, privilege and influence. Gaining a place bestowed huge honour on the successful candidates’ homes, families and villages. As if to prove the point, Wu appointed several scholars from this intake as some of his most trusted advisers.

This simple idea had massive consequences for the effective government of China. By the time of Emperor He (ruled 88–106 AD), materials for writing had become essential tools of government administration. So when a bright court official called Cai Lun came up with a radically new method for making a cheap, versatile writing material, Emperor He took a great deal of notice. So impressed was he by Cai Lun’s system of pulping, draining and drying plant fibres into thin matted sheets, usually made from the bark of mulberry trees, that Lun was rewarded with vast wealth and an aristocratic title.

In time the Chinese began to use this soft, cheap marvel of nature for almost everything, from wrapping up precious objects to making umbrellas and parasols. Wallpaper, kites, tea bags, playing cards and lanterns all made their first appearance in China. Even the modern habit of using toilet paper has its origins here. The first evidence of its use comes from a report in 851 of an early Arab traveller to China, who says that the Chinese were ‘not careful about cleanliness, and they do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities, but they only wipe themselves with paper’.

Paper rescued Chinese civilization from perpetual war and civil unrest. It allowed the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) to expand the examination system and provide poor people with the hope of wealth, privilege and prestige – if only their families could produce sons with good brains. Emperor Wu’s initial idea of cultivating a bureaucracy stuffed with scholars was revived by Tang rulers, and competition amongst poor people to succeed in imperial examinations accelerated rapidly.

Now all male citizens were allowed to apply, not just those recommended by existing government officers. Buddhist monks were paid by local communities to pray for and teach the rural poor. The curriculum was extended to include everything from military strategy to civil law, agriculture and geography. Of course, the Confucian ethic of loyalty and obedience to the state ran through everything, providing all candidates, successful or otherwise, with an effective form of cultural alignment.

The first printed book

The spread of Buddhism from India to China went hand in hand with what some people regard as the second most powerful invention after paper – printing. Books mass-produced by a technique called block printing are known to have originated in China thanks to a remarkable discovery made by Aurel Stein, a Hungarian archaeologist who in the first half of the twentieth century travelled more than 25,000 miles by mule and foot through inhospitable deserts, plains and mountains because he wanted to find out more about the early culture of Central Asia. It was worth the effort. His finest discovery was at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, located at an oasis on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in north-west China (see plate 6).

When Stein arrived at the caves, in 1907, he heard rumours of an enormous cache of ancient documents that had recently been found hidden behind a temple wall. A shy Taoist priest called Wang Tao-shih had taken it upon himself to become their guardian, and had locked up the treasures in a storeroom. When Stein persuaded the priest to show him inside the tiny room, measuring no more than nine feet square, he saw that it was packed floor to ceiling with precious manuscripts. Here, perfectly preserved by the dry atmosphere of the Central Asian desert, were thousands of untouched ancient texts, some dating from as early as the fifth century AD. After weeks of careful diplomacy Stein managed to purchase as many as 40,000 of these documents, in return for a generous contribution towards the further restoration of the caves.

The jewel in the crown of Stein’s hoard, now kept in the British Museum, is the world’s oldest known complete, dated, printed book. It is a Buddhist text called the Diamond Sutra printed with the date 868 AD – towards the end of the Tang Dynasty. It is made of seven sheets of white paper, pasted together to form a scroll of just over seventeen feet. The manufacturing technique used is called woodblock printing, in which sheets of paper were pressed on to wooden blocks intricately carved with words and illustrations. Although making books this way required advanced craftwork skills to carve the wooden blocks, once these were made the number of copies that could be printed was almost limitless.

The wealth of scholarship

China’s golden age of innovation in science and technology took off with the founding of the Song Dynasty by Emperor Taizu, who seized the imperial throne in 960. According to the Song Shi, a history of the dynasty written in 1345, he spoke to his military commanders at a victory banquet in words that sound remarkably like a modern manifesto for sustainable government: ‘The life of man is short. Happiness is to have the wealth and means to enjoy life, and then to be able to leave the same prosperity to one’s descendants.’

One of Taizu’s first acts was further to expand the concept of a scholastic imperial bureaucracy. By the end of his reign, in 976 AD, roughly 30,000 candidates per year – all of whom had already passed a pre-qualifying test (jinshi) – were taking the imperial administration’s exams. By the end of the eleventh century this had risen to 80,000, and by the end of the Song Dynasty (1279) it reached 400,000, creating an enormous intellectual population.

Printers worked overtime, with more than 500 classic Confucian texts, dictionaries, encyclopedias and history books carved on to thousands of wood blocks to provide mass-produced study materials for candidates. At least a thousand schools were established throughout China to help prepare students for their civil service exams.

It wasn’t just printing books that invigorated cultural and academic life in Song times. Thanks to an expansion of rice cultivation, by 1102 the Chinese population had more than doubled, to over a hundred million people. Traditional currency, in the form of either silk bolts or copper coins, had become difficult to carry, short in supply and expensive to manufacture. So in the 1120s the Chinese government turned to its favourite invention. It used woodblock printing to make the world’s first known banknotes, called jiaozi. Within a decade several state-run paper-money factories had been established, employing many thousands of workers.

But in 1127 disaster struck. The ingenious Song government was rudely interrupted by a horde of horse breeders from Manchuria, the Jurchens, who double-crossed them after defeating a mutual enemy called the Liao in 1125. Their victory over the Song, using innovative siege engines to break through the imperial capital’s walls, resulted in China being split between a northern region ruled by the Jurchens (who became the Jin Dynasty), and a southern region under the Song, who fled south of the Yangtze River to a new capital at Lin’an.

These events triggered an arms race of epic proportions. Song rulers challenged their best scholarly brains to come up with every conceivable way of creating technological superiority in warfare to guarantee success in the event of further attacks. Their quest led directly to the development of the world’s first firearms.

The original gunpowder plot

Charcoal, sulphur and mineral ores were first mixed into a primitive form of gunpowder by Taoist monks in the Tang Dynasty, in c.850. These holy men had been charged by their imperial masters with finding an elixir for everlasting life, but in the course of their experiments they stumbled across a combination of chemicals which, they warned, could result in disastrous consequences: ‘Some have heated together sulphur, realgar and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.’

Such words must have fired the hearts of those whose preference was for power over others on earth. The first known image of a firearm in actual use dates to c.950. For years the significance of a silk banner found at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas lay unnoticed in a Paris museum until it was rediscovered in 1978. It shows an army of demons trying to distract the Buddha from attaining enlightenment. Among the weapons they use is a fire-lance – a long pole held by a demon wearing a headdress of three serpents. There is a cylinder at one end from which flames spout forth. Beneath him, to the right, is another figure with a serpent entangled in his eyes and his mouth. He is about to throw a small bomb or grenade, from which flames are already pouring out.

Brilliant minds at the court of the southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) were able to construct an array of powerful new weapons, ranging from catapult bombs and cannon to flame-throwers.

A new maritime perspective

The Song’s shift south had other important consequences. Court officials set about commissioning China’s first permanent standing navy in 1132, after realizing that the Yangtze River was now effectively their new Great Wall. Previously, in 1130, slingshots throwing gunpowder bombs had been ordered as standard on all ships. A new generation of paddle-wheel ships, powered by human treadmills, some with as many as eleven paddles on each side, dramatically increased manoeuvrability in the tight conditions of river-based warfare. By 1203 many of these warships had been reinforced with the addition of iron armour.

Naval power gave the southern Song complete control of the East China Sea, previously dominated by Hindu rulers called the Cholas, a Tamil dynasty that ruled southern India and Sri Lanka between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Foreign trade was essential for the survival of the Song, since the mountainous terrain of southern China was less suitable for widespread agriculture than the north. With overland trading via the Silk Road firmly in Jin hands, trade by sea was essential for the survival of their civilization (see plate 6).

Such conditions led to the first known portfolio investment schemes, now so common in the modern capitalist world. Instead of putting all their money into one trading venture, Chinese merchants would collaborate in guilds and spread their money across several expeditions, so that if one were lost, it came as a complete disaster to no one (other than the crew, of course). According to one source, such arrangements proved highly lucrative: ‘they invest from ten to a hundred strings of cash, and regularly make profits of several hundred per cent’.

Goods were carried on junks that sailed across the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf. These vessels were waterproofed with tung oil, fitted with watertight bulkheads (which meant that if the ship was holed it would not sink) and equipped with stern-mounted rudders for improved steering. Some of them were powered by a combination of sails and oars, and were able to carry huge cargoes and several hundred men.

Their sailors took with them that most precious of all instruments for seafarers – a compass. The idea of magnetizing a needle by rubbing it against silk and then placing it inside a straw and floating this in water to make a primitive compass had been known in China since at least the first century AD. In 1044 a Song Dynasty manual on military techniques called Wujing Zongyao described how this knowledge was used to create a south-pointing chariot to help guide troops in gloomy weather and on dark nights (the same book also included a recipe for how to make gunpowder). The biggest breakthrough came a few years later, when court official Shen Kuo, who passed his imperial state examinations in 1061, described how to magnetize the needle of a compass and use it for navigation by stringing it up on a thread of silk. His compass is known to have been used on Chinese ships from as early as 1111.

Astonishing technological breakthroughs were made possible by an exchange of knowledge in an imperial court that promoted a sophisticated knowledge base of paper, printing and books. By now Chinese civilization had substantially enhanced man’s power over nature by harnessing gunpowder weapons and twenty-four-hour navigation (in all weathers) by magnetic needles. But no dynasty lasts for ever, however ingenious its technology, especially in times of environmental stress.

The rise of Genghis Khan, a ruthless Mongol chief

Beginning in about 1200 AD, the climate began to cool. North Atlantic pack ice started advancing south towards Iceland, and Greenland’s glaciers expanded. This climate change signalled the start of what is called the Little Ice Age. Cold winters and unpredictable summers continued across Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century. According to oxygen isotopes captured in Greenland ice cores, the first signs of cooling appear to have been in high latitudes.

Mongol horsemen who burst southwards between 1205 and 1225 would have been early casualties, as bitter Arctic air invaded the heart of Asia with devastating effects. Steppe lands, now populated with more animals and people than ever before thanks to years of increased rainfall, simply couldn’t cope. In a cooler climate their pastoral yield was insufficient. People living in the steppes probably had only one choice if they wished to maintain their numbers and lifestyle. They had to unite and conquer new, more fertile lands. Fortunately for them, they found just the man to lead them. His name was Genghis Khan.

By 1206 Genghis had united rival Mongolian tribes (Merkits, Uyghurs, Keraits and Tatars) through a mixture of diplomacy, charisma and leadership skills. Taking climate changes into account, however, his rise to power can also be explained by his being in the right place at the right time. The survival of the Mongol population of some 200,000 people depended on a coordinated nomadic expansion.

Genghis was a brilliant military planner and a strict disciplinarian who demanded toughness, dedication and loyalty from all his men. He organized his forces into decimal units of ten, one hundred, one thousand and ten thousand. Soldiers who performed well in battle rose through the ranks. Cowardice was not tolerated. Each unit of ten had a leader who reported up to the next level. If one soldier deserted, his unit of ten was executed. If a unit of ten deserted, the whole hundred was slaughtered.

Careful planning in military councils (called kurultai) and excellent reconnaissance conducted on fast steeds meant success was swift. Whenever Genghis faced an enemy city he gave them a simple choice: surrender or die. He was a man of his word. To proud rulers who offered resistance, he showed no mercy. If a ruler agreed to submit, his people were spared, but total loyalty was expected in return.

By 1213 the Mongols had advanced as far as the Great Wall and within two years they had charged into the heart of northern China. In 1215 they besieged and sacked the Jin capital at Yanjing (now Beijing). Having subdued the Jin, Genghis’s anger was roused by an apparently unprovoked insult from the Islamic ruler of Khwarazm, an empire that stretched from the western edge of China to the Caspian Sea. In 1219 Mongol armies massed on the eastern edge of the Islamic world. Each city was given the usual choice.

Genghis then headed north, where his forces split into two and conquered Georgia and the Crimea. On their way back to Mongolia they defeated a Russian army led by six princes, including the ruler of Kiev. As was customary in Mongolian tradition the princes were given a bloodless execution: they were crushed to death under the weight of a banqueting platform while the Mongolian generals ate their victory feast.

The world’s largest end-to-end empire

In 1225 Genghis returned to China, where he again fought and subdued the Jin. Shortly after, he died – no one quite knows how. Some say he fell off a horse. Another legend has it that he was murdered by a beautiful Tangut princess who, as they were about to make love, castrated him with a knife hidden inside her body, in revenge for the murder of so many of her people. At the time of Genghis’s death the Mongol Empire stretched from the east coast of China to the Caspian Sea. But his children were to take it further still, establishing empires in Russia, Siberia and Central Asia. By 1241 their armies were ready to flood into Western Europe following victory over Polish, German and Hungarian forces at the Battle of Mohi, south-west of the Sajó River, in Hungary.

By this time the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous civilization that the world had, and still has, ever seen (see plate 10). Its inexorable expansion was only halted by the death of Genghis’s successor Ögedei Khan in 1242, because tradition said that Mongol leaders must convene a grand council to confirm the appointment of the next Great Khan. So they retreated, at least for a while, to approve their new leader, and Europe was spared, although military success in southern China eventually resulted in the annihilation of the Song dynasty in 1279.

As Genghis Khan and his successors swept westwards they converted to Islam, bringing with them more technologies from the ingenious Far East. Innovations such as paper making, printing and gunpowder brought west by Islamic traders, warriors and Mongol hordes lit the touchpaper for the globalization of humanity. As a result of their progression west, a suite of diverse cultures, each having its own distinctive relationship with nature, gradually began to turn towards a single world view with common access to a powerful bank of scientific knowledge and a raft of new expertise ranging from portfolio investment schemes, numerals and algebra to paper making, the compass and gunpowder. Firearms were first witnessed by Europeans in Muslim Spain, where they were used against Christians in 1342 at the siege of Algeciras (see page 222). Within 100 years they were being actively deployed by Europeans in their own holy wars.

The inventiveness, scholarship, power, wealth and glory of ancient China and the transmission of its genius west by the forces of Islam was matched only by the contrast provided by the climate of desperation across medieval Europe, much of which, by 1450, was languishing in a wilting wilderness of disease, famine and war.