8
Expanding the Afro-Eurasian Network (200-1000 CE)
By the beginning of the Common Era, humanity had achieved a potentially stable pattern of life under conditions of urbanization. Powerful leaders had developed the imperial, bureaucratic command system as the institution that tried to guarantee stability to its populations. The Roman Empire, the Han dynasty in China, and the imperial structures in Mesopotamia, Iran, and India all represent a climax of adaptations arising from the shift to agriculture that produced urban living.
Severe human inequalities arose from this shift, however, and raiding, plundering, and warfare became a feature of life—the apparent cost of the notable increase in numbers of people. Stability did not last. New developments in transportation and commerce arose to upset the imperial command system and to inaugurate the next great leap in humanity ’s development—the intensification of trade into powerful commercial networks.
1
The Central Core (200-600)
Europeans and Americans are accustomed to calling the period after the demise of the Roman Empire “the Dark Ages.” In this perspective the light went out when Latin cultures wedded to Christianity dimmed. But, on the other hand, the light went on for Angles, Saxons, Goths, Vandals, Franks, and other groups in Europe, and it went on brightly for the empires located in the center of Eurasia. Looking at the whole extent of the Afro-Eurasian network of communication, we can say that with the demise of Rome and the Han dynasty, at either side of the continent, the locus of imperial power shifted to Iran and India. Europe suffered more than China did and took longer to recover.
The withdrawal of power from Europe, when the Roman emperor Constantine moved his capital in 324 to Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople, left social disintegration in its wake. The population of Europe declined by half between 200 and 600, and Europe experienced its “Dark Age” of migrations, warfare, and breakdown of urbanization.
In Constantinople the remnant of Greco-Roman civilization developed into the Byzantine Empire. All pagan ceremonies were banned in 392, and the pagan temples of antiquity were destroyed; Christian rulers with complete political and religious authority refused to tolerate other religions. Eventually, in 1054, a formal schism developed between the Latin Church in Rome and the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire survived until 1453 but gradually lost power, so that by the end of the twelfth century, two-thirds of the Christians in the former Byzantine Empire had become Muslims.
Before it ended, the Byzantine Empire had a decisive influence on the emergence of Kievan Russia, Vikings, known as Varangians in Russia, dominated the two large rivers in Ukraine-Russia—the Dnieper and the Volga rivers. The Varangian elites lived in cities—Kiev on the Dnieper and Novgorod on the Volga—while the local Slavs farmed for them. In 989 Vladimir I, ruler of Kievan Russia, chose Orthodox Christianity rather than Islam for his people because, it is said, of the magnificence of the city of Constantinople and its cathedrals, and because he believed Russians could not do without their vodka.
2Farther east, in Iraq and Iran, the Parthians ruled (247 BCE-224 CE), followed by the Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE). The armies of these rulers fought with large horses, whose size could only be sustained by hay made from alfalfa, which required lots of water from irrigation. During this period the cities of Mesopotamia flourished with considerable prosperity and cultural creativity. Sassanid farmers adopted crops from India and China—cotton, sugarcane, rice, citrus fruits, and eggplant. The Sassanid rulers established the Zoroastrian faith, as Constantine had established Christianity; both sets of rulers used religion as an instrument of politics and both practiced religious intolerance.
In India the Gupta dynasty from about 350 to 535 CE provided the political stability for the classic age of Indian culture. Its prosperity rested on intensified agriculture, particularly on rice introduced from southeast Asia into the western areas of India, which required cutting down forests. Cinnamon, pepper, and cotton textiles were widely traded on the roads to China, around the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. The cotton plant may have been native to India; it matched the environment well, and Indians excelled in all aspects of its preparation for cloth.
Buddhist and Hindu holy men traveled the trade routes within India and across central Asia to China, bringing the hope of salvation to millions of people. Hinduism achieved some doctrinal definition in this period, while Buddhist monks and laypeople developed rituals appropriate for their distinctive roles. Buddhist monasteries, supported by admiring laypeople, became as important an institution as the portable congregations of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. All of these religions helped ease entry into the network of empire and trade for millions of ordinary people.
As discussed in the last chapter, the trade routes across Eurasia were called the Silk Road. Never a single road, these routes consisted of branches and segments, more or less significant in various times. The heaviest use of the Silk Road took place during the first millennium of the Common Era—until the eleventh century, when sea routes expanded and became more significant. During the first millennium, a caravan from Changan, China, took about four months to reach Samarkand and Bokhara (then Sogdiana, now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), a journey of 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) over unsettled deserts, mountains, and grassland (Fig. 7.1).
The silk that constituted China’s chief export remained a mystery fabric to Greeks and Romans for many years. They heard many possible explanations, such as that it was made from bark on trees. Not until the mid-sixth century did the Byzantine emperor learn from two monks that the cloth was a product of silk worms feeding on mulberry leaves.
3By the first century CE silk clothes were popular on the streets of Rome among its wealthy citizens. Much consumption of silk, at both ends of the Silk Road, was devoted to religious activities. Christian priests used purple silk embroidered with gold silk thread for their vestments. Kings, priests, and saints were shrouded in silks at their burials; even burials from long ago were dug up and shrouded in silk. In the Buddhist areas, yards of silk were used for banners, sometimes tens of thousands at one monastery. Buddhist laypeople made donations of silk to monasteries as a reward for the monks’ intercessions and as a way to gain merits for future life. The monks, in turn, traded silk for daily provisions and for the “seven treasures” used to decorate their
stupas, or shrines: gold, silver, lapis lazuli, red coral, crystal, pearls, and agate. During affluent times, Buddhist monasteries thus became significant economic entities.
4In addition to silk from China, other products moving along the Silk Road included: large horses, furs and woolen carpets from central Asia, cotton textiles, pearls and crystal from India, coral from the Mediterranean, glassware from India and the Roman world, and fragrances and spices from India, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa.
Two accounts of travel along the Silk Road exist to tell us what the journey was like. Both were written by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, traveling from China to India—one by Faxian (fah-shee-en), who died between 418 and 423, and the other by Xuanzang (shoo-wen-zahng), who died in 664. On their journeys both men stayed along the way in Buddhist communities and monasteries that previous generations had established.
Islam Arises and China Recovers (600-1000)
The second half of the first millennium of the Common Era saw the meteoric rise of Islam, starting in 630 in the Arabian Peninsula and spreading across the arid areas of the central core of Afro-Eurasia from the Pyrenees to the Indus River by 750.
People in the Arabian Peninsula at that time specialized in camel trade, carrying goods north from coastal cities in Yemen on the Arabian Sea to settled farming lands in Palestine, Jordan, and Syria. Polytheism was still the native religion, focused on natural forces and celestial bodies. Travelers carried the ideas of Christianity and Judaism, which became familiar in the peninsula. Some sources indicate a monotheistic cult existed, heavily influenced by Jewish practice and thought.
5The prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was born in 570 in Mecca, a caravan city near the Red Sea coast halfway between Yemen and Syria. An orphan reared by his uncle, Muhammad engaged in trade as a merchant and married a wealthy widow, Khadija, after successfully leading several of her caravans. In about 610 Muhammad began meditating in the mountains near Mecca. During one vigil, the “Night of Power and Excellence,” a being that Muhammad understood to be the angel Gabriel (Jibra’il in Arabic) spoke to him. These revelations continued until his death; he recited them in rhythmic and rhymed verse in public but never wrote them down.
Muhammad’s earliest revelations called on people to submit to the one God, Allah, who had created the universe and everything in it. At the end of time, people would be judged and the blameless would go to Paradise to enjoy the delights of the flesh, while the sinful would taste hellfire. Muhammad revealed himself as the last of Allah’s messengers in the tradition of the Jewish prophets and Jesus, calling on each person to become a Muslim, or one who makes a submission, Islam, to the will of God. People who submitted would constitute the umma (community) uniting all Muslims in a universal community of social equality.
Since the leaders of Mecca did not accept Muhammad as the sole agent of the one true God and persecuted his weakest followers, Muhammad and his followers fled in 622 to a nearby city, Medina, 215 miles (340 kilometers) to the north. There he led a large community, conducting sporadic war with Mecca, which surrendered in 630. Muslims start their calendar with the year of the flight to Medina, known as the hegira; the Roman year 622 is year one for Muslims.
In 632 Muhammad died after a brief illness, leaving no arrangements for succession to his leadership. The father of one of his wives, Abu Bakr, became caliph, the spiritual and political leader; he had Muhammad’s revelations written down into the Quran, which assumed its final form about 650. Conflicts over who should be caliph ensued in 656 and again in 680 and resulted in a permanent split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Before Muhammad died, Muslims under his leadership were able to unite most of southern and western Arabia. After his death, Muslims united the whole Arabian Peninsula and won decisive victories over the Byzantine Empire and over the Sassanians in Persia (now Iran) between 634 and 651. The only material basis for these victories was camels—Muslims could supply armies across the desert landscape. Possibly the Muslims’ conviction that Allah was on their side mattered most to the outcome of their battles. Other possible explanations for the rapid Muslim expansion include overpopulation of the Arabian Peninsula, whose people had begun migrating even earlier.
Muslims set up permanent military camps across a wide area—two in Iraq, one in Egypt, one in Tunisia. They moved their capital to Damascus in 661. Twice they failed to conquer the city of Constantinople, but they succeeded across northern Africa, and in 710 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain. They pushed across Spain to the Pyrenees and into France, where a raiding party was defeated in 732 by French nobles at Tours 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the English Channel. France probably was not in real danger of being conquered and absorbed, but Muslims had struck terror into the heartland of Europe.
The decisive battle for Christian civilization took place at Constantinople in 717 to 718; if the Byzantine Empire had not held, despite tremendous losses, Europe might have become Muslim. The Muslim conquests of the seventh to the ninth centuries proved culturally decisive, however; Christians eventually recaptured only the Mediterranean islands and Spain. In a bit more than a century after Muhammad’s death, Islam went from the faith of one merchant in Mecca to an imperial state stretching from the Pyrenees Mountains in northwest Spain to the Hindu Kush—one of the most dramatic expansions in world history. Muslims did not force religious conversion and, except for Egypt, expanded into areas with sparse populations.
By 724 Muslims had reached the western frontier of China. They introduced gold and silver coins, called dinars and dirhems, inscribed in Arabic religious phrases, which circulated as one monetary exchange from Morocco to the edge of China. A consistent system of laws and contracts also was in place, facilitating trade.
In 747 a new family, the Abbasids, took charge of the caliphate and moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad, where they ruled for over 500 years until Mongols killed the family in 1258. Two centuries of glory for Baghdad began with the Abbasids. The splendor of the court is reflected in the stories of the Arabian Nights, set in the time of the poetry-loving caliph Harun al Rashid, who ruled from 776 to 809. Cultural currents from Greece, Iran, central Asia, and Africa met in the capital, giving rise to rich literature, facilitated by the introduction of papermaking from China just as the city of Baghdad was being built in the 760s.
Devoted to books, Muslims produced more in their centuries of ascendancy than did any, and perhaps all, previous cultures. Papyrus had been harvested to near extinction, and in the middle of the second century unknown people in an unknown place invented a new form of book, the codex. The codex form consisted of leaves of parchment or papyrus, later paper, folded and bound between covers, the same as in present-day books. Muslims learned papermaking from Chinese prisoners of war, and by the tenth century it had largely displaced papyrus for writing in the Muslim world. Muslims also introduced the use of linen rags, beaten to a pulp, for papermaking in place of the mulberry bark used by the Chinese but unavailable in the Islamic world.
6Muslims called their Iberian territories al-Andalus. (Iberia was the ancient Latin name for the Spanish and Portuguese peninsula.) There they introduced the most sophisticated agricultural economy in Europe, featuring new crops of citrus fruit and sugar, and new irrigation systems. Cordoba, Seville, and Toledo grew larger than other cities in Europe. Cordoba and Grenada became centers of learning in which germinated the intellectual revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries of Western Europe (Fig. 8.1).
8.1 Ninth Century Afro-Eurasia
On the eastern side of Afro-Eurasia, after the fall of the Han dynasty, the Chinese people experienced more than 300 years of disorder and instability. During this time Buddhist and Taoist thought rose precipitously and became dominant in some areas of China.
7By the end of the sixth century the Sui family (589-610) succeeded in uniting China again and completing a new system of canals, accomplished by 5.5 million people laboring under 50,000 policemen. Under the Tang dynasty (618-907), China became the most advanced society in the world. With the Muslim empire providing stability from the Hindu Kush westward, and with Turkish people, mostly Uighurs, controlling the steppe lands, trade and travel could resume at high levels of participation as low-risk activities.
8Under the Tang, China consolidated control of its southern coastal area, increasing its access to the Indian Ocean. Chinese seamen excelled in the design of large seagoing ocean vessels; their ships carried two times as much volume as those from Constantinople or from Baghdad. Exports from China consisted mainly of superior silks and porcelain, a special kind of clay developed under the Tang. Chinese exports dwarfed other world trade. Anecdotes claimed that Chinese ships outnumbered others by a hundred to one; they did carry twice as much.
9Imports changed China. Men shifted from wearing robes to the pants favored by horse-riding Turks in central Asia. As the Chinese learned how to produce cotton, it replaced hemp as the most commonly worn fabric. Grape wine, tea, sugar, and spices modified the Chinese diet. All this trade was conducted with no central banking system; the Tang were wary of great accumulations of wealth. Individual scholars and landholders loaned money at interest.
The Tang capital at Changan became the largest urban center in the world with nearly 2 million people, 1 million within the walled area of thirty square miles. China had twenty-six cities with a population over half a million. Twenty percent of its citizens lived in cities, the most urbanized society of its day.
Under its Tang rulers China welcomed ideas and culture from outside its borders. Many cities had special areas set aside for traders and merchants from abroad who came to live in China to conduct business for their landsmen. Many of China’s leading figures were of foreign origin; for example, the general An Lu-shan was Sogdian and the poet Li Po was born in Afghanistan.
10The Tang dynasty relied on paper to conduct its bureaucracy. A court eunuch, Tsai Lun, had invented paper production in the early second century of the Common Era. Printing experiments began in China in the sixth century. Under the Tang, literacy rates were 15 to 20 percent compared to at most 10 percent in Europe at that time. Paper money was first issued in the eleventh or twelfth century. Paper was also used to cover windows, as glass production required the burning of too much wood by Chinese standards.
11In about 850 Chinese alchemists seeking the elixir of immortality stumbled onto gunpowder, made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and carbon. By the late twelfth century, when gunpowder came to the attention of the West, the Chinese had developed it through many stages and had perfected the barrel gun and the cannon.
12For over a century the Tang dynasty controlled much of central Asia. Its westward expansion ended in 751 in the significant battle of the Talas River, which took place in the area between Tashkent and Lake Balkhash, in what is now Kazakhstan. Arabs, Turks, and Tibetans defeated the Chinese, and from this time Tang power began to decline, yet the battle also stopped Islam’s eastward expansion.
After the battle of the Talas River, knowledge of the technique for making paper was passed to Arabs by Chinese prisoners of war. Muslims established a paper mill in Baghdad; paper became widely used in Egypt by 1000 and spread from Muslim Spain to the French Pyrenees, where the first European paper mill was built in 1157.
13Four years after the battle of the Talas River, the huge, overweight, diabetic General An Lu-shan led his province, Hopei, in revolt against the lavish, cosmopolitan court in Changan. Chinese military governors suppressed the rebellion, then seized power themselves. Heavy tribute to steppe leaders ensued. By the mid-800s the Tang dynasty was experiencing political and military decay and the decline of foreign trade.
As the prosperity of the empire declined, a cultural backlash set in. Confucian advisors to the emperor persuaded him that their woes could be traced to foreign influences, particularly to Buddhists, whose monasticism was undermining the Chinese family and the tax base of the dynasty (monasteries paid no taxes). In 845 The Chinese government tried to purge the country of Buddhist ideas by crushing the monasteries, secularizing 260,000 monks and nuns and destroying temples and shrines. Buddhist ideas survived, since many had been absorbed into Confucian practices, and monasteries became legal again in later times, but the cosmopolitanism of the Tang court dissolved under the reestablishment of orthodoxies and did not reappear for centuries. Smaller states succeeded the Tang dynasty after 907.
14
The Edges and Limits of the Afro-Eurasian Network
So far we have examined urban life and trade in the core areas connecting the Afro-Eurasian network. Now we shift our perspective to that of the peripheral areas, where people experienced urbanization, long-distance trade, and universal religions coming at them as new, disturbing experiences.
People in cities depended for the most part on food brought in from outlying agricultural areas. Over much of Eurasia another pattern of society existed, that of nomadic pastoralism, in which people depended on certain animals and followed them around to new pastures as they needed fresh supplies of grass. In the heartland of northern Eurasia, people depended on horses, which they had tamed first in what is now southern Ukraine, by about 4000 BCE. By about 1500 BCE the people of the steppes had developed a culture dependent on mounted horses.
15Nomads had special incentives for trading, since their own products were limited by their need to keep moving. They could survive on their animals alone, but they greatly desired grain, fabric, and metals. Their options for acquiring these products were trading or raiding. Since they were superb warriors, they could negotiate payments in return for protection of local farmers, as they often did with Chinese rulers and governors. From 368 to 534 the Toba confederation of nomads even ruled the civilized populations in northern China.
On the western side of the steppe lands, a succession of new steppe people arrived in Eastern Europe during the years 200 to 1000, driven west by nomads further east. The new groups were called Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Ostrogoths, and Magyars. The Huns (374-453), who were headquartered on the Hungarian plains, raided far and wide into Gaul and the Rhineland, withdrawing from invading Italy ostensibly at the plea of Pope Leo the Great (440-461). When the Huns’ leader, Attila, died in 453 and the plague struck the rest of them, the Huns dispersed.
The Huns were not able to conquer the Byzantine Empire. It held at the Danube River, but Gaul, the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and northern Africa fell to Germanic peoples fleeing the Huns, and the legacy of Rome in the west went underground. Over the next 600 years, culture wars played out as Roman and Christian traditions competed with those of Germanic peoples and those of succeeding waves of invaders—more Germanic invasions from 568 to 650, followed by invasions from Vikings, Magyars from Hungary, and Muslims from Spain. During this period western Europe reverted to a fringe area of the Afro-Eurasian network, lacking central government and secure trading routes.
In the matter of language, the vulgar Latin of the Roman tradition evolved rapidly into the Romance dialects—Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian—which held their own against the languages of the new invaders, except in the northern areas, where Latin gave way to Germanic and Scandinavian languages. The Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons conquered England between 410 and 442, creating a Germanic-based language and bringing the soil under cultivation for the first time.
In Italy a pious hermit, Benedict of Nursia, organized several monasteries of monks, each headed by an abbot. Benedict wrote the manual for monastic life in western Europe, called the Rule of Benedict, which emphasized poverty, celibacy, and obedience to the abbot. Without the work of monks over the next centuries, most of the surviving ancient Latin works would likely have been lost. Only one copy of nine plays by Euripides, one copy of Tacitus, and one copy of
Beowulf made it through the dark times.
16From the south, Muslims captured Spain from the Visigoths in 711 and tried to conquer Gaul, as described earlier. The major threat to Europe, however, came from the Viking population in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, commonly called Norsemen by Europeans and Varangians by Russians and Ukrainians. The Vikings had developed a society based on three classes: slaves, free peasants, and warrior-chieftains. Without heavy plows until about 1000, Vikings consumed mostly oats and barley, sheep and goats, cattle and fish. They traded in a far-flung network, shipping down the Dnieper and Volga rivers to the Black Sea and beyond to Baghdad on the Tigris River. They captured slaves from the British Isles and from Slavonic areas to trade to Europeans and to Muslims. Fur was their other chief commodity—bearskins, sable, marten, and squirrel. They also traded lumber, reindeer hide, salt, glass, horses and cattle, white bears, falcons, walrus ivory, seal oil, honey, wax, woolens, and amber (Fig. 8.2).
The Vikings believed that a tree of fate, the Yggdrasill, occupied the center of the divine world, where the gods sat in council every day. The tree had three roots, one to the world of death (Hel), one to the world of frost giants, and one to the world of people. The Yggdrasill, they believed, held up the universe; they considered a special tree in their town of Uppsala the earthly replica of Yggdrasill. Every nine years all the Viking people gathered at the temple in Uppsala to make sacrifices to their gods for nine days. On each day a sacrifice was made of nine living creatures, including one man, and the bodies were hung on trees near the temple.
What the Vikings believed is known because they created an alphabet called runes, which appeared at the end of the second century or the beginning of the third. The letters were made of straight strokes, suitable for carving into wood or stone. The Vikings adopted about two-thirds of their alphabet from Latin and Celtic letters, inventing the remainder. Sagas of their travels to Iceland remain to tell us how they viewed life.
8.2 Viking Trade Routes
The brief period of Viking expansion started shortly before 800 and ended by 1070. Overpopulation is conjectured as the chief cause for this swarm to neighboring lands, as men sought land, wealth, and fame in places with no central empire to protect the inhabitants. Possibly the Vikings were responding to the conquest of the Saxons by the French king, Charlemagne, which brought him to the border of Denmark. Improved techniques of shipbuilding contributed to the expansion. Vikings learned to make ships of oak, up to seventy feet long, which drew only three and a half feet and carried from thirty to over a hundred men. They made masts of pine and sails of wool. Few human artifacts match the beauty of a Viking ship.
By 820 Vikings had settled Novgorod. In 839 they invaded Ireland, and from 866 to 878 they invaded England, where they took five eastern districts to rule. They attacked the coast of Normandy from 841 to 884 and were given land in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. Later they sailed farther south in France and around the coast of Spain until they reached Barcelona, Marseilles, and the coast of Italy. They sailed west to set up colonies in Iceland (875), in Greenland (982), and briefly in Newfoundland soon after 1000. Remains of Viking-built houses were discovered at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland in 1962, proving that the Vikings had been there.
In about 965 Harald Bluetooth (940-985), the king of Denmark, converted to Christianity and recognized Otto I, the Holy Roman Emperor of the German confederacy, as his overlord. Norwegians were forcibly converted in about 995, although the temple at Uppsala was not destroyed until well into the twelfth century. Viking influence, brief though it was, proved a significant contribution to the making of western European culture.
17After the fall of centralized government in Rome, farmers in western Europe, under attack from nomads on all sides, took shelter with local landowners strong enough to offer hope of protection. The Germanic tradition of manors, or self-sufficient farming units, became widespread. Agricultural workers, known as serfs, came to belong to the manor and could not leave, in exchange for protection from landowners who, under conditions of nearly constant warfare, became noble knights. Outright slavery, a mainstay of the Roman economy, diminished. Cities lost population, roads fell into disrepair, trade languished, literacy declined—no wonder Europeans call this period medieval or the Middle Ages, coming between the grander Greco-Roman civilization and the Renaissance of the fourteenth century.
Unexpected though it may seem, agricultural production during this period increased due to improvements in the plow. In northern Europe heavy clay soils made plowing more difficult than in other kinds of soil. Heavier plows were developed, eventually ones so heavy that they required six to eight oxen to pull them, with moldboards that turned the dug-up soil to one side. By 1000 carpets of grain fields (wheat, barley, and rye) stretched across the landscape of northern Europe, where the basic diet consisted of beer, lard or butter, bread from wheat, barley or rye, pork from forest pigs living on acorns, and wild game. In southern Europe the human diet was based on wheat, wine, and olive oil.
The displacement of Roman governance by Germanic states across western Europe could have resulted in the disappearance of Christianity as an important cultural force. Yet it survived to dominate Western civilization; how come?
18The papacy in Rome did not collapse. It offered a strong source of unity, authority, and organization, especially beginning in the sixth century when popes proved willing to ally themselves with Germanic rulers, who converted early, and to absorb enough Germanic traditions to make Christianity palatable to polytheists. Not that it was easy to wipe out pagan practices; clerics in some parts of western Europe were still issuing prohibitions against the worship of trees, rivers, and mountains as late as the eleventh century.
The events that led to the domination of Christianity took place primarily in the British Isles and in France. In Britain the Irish Celts, never conquered by Rome, had been converted to Christianity by St. Patrick, a Romanized Christian Briton, in the first half of the fifth century. After the Saxons and Angles took over England, Christianity survived only in Ireland, where monasteries sent monks and scholars as missionaries who promoted “Celtic Christianity ” in England. Pope Leo I (590-604) also sent missionaries from Rome. In 664 Christians in England met and decided to choose the Roman over the Celtic church. During the eighth to tenth centuries the Saxons in England fought invading Vikings, who gained possession of a large territory in eastern England, as noted earlier. A Danish king, Canute, ruled England from 1017 to 1035, and in 1066 a Norman, William the Conqueror, descendant of Vikings who had settled in Normandy, seized the throne. William agreed to pay the customary dues to the Church of Rome but refused to acknowledge the pope’s authority over him; the English church recognized no new pope and accepted no papal commands without the king’s assent. Hence, the English king chose Christianity but on his own terms.
In what is now France, a Germanic group known as the Franks originated in the Rhineland. Some of them had lived in the Roman Empire and had converted to Christianity. After the dissolution of the Roman empire, the Franks extended their kingdom southward all through what is modern France. Their first great leader, Clovis, who ruled from 481 to 511, converted to Roman Christianity in 508, apparently through his wife, Chrodechildis, or Clotilde in French, who was already Christian. The Frankish kings made alliances with the popes, gave them land taken from defeated Lombardians, and, under Charlemagne (r. 768-814), pushed eastward into Saxon territory to the Elbe River and along the Danube below Vienna. In 772 Charlemagne and his troops destroyed a grove of trees sacred to the Saxons, whose religion closely resembled that of the Vikings.
Since the Saxons strongly resisted giving up their religious practices, Charlemagne forced Christian baptism on them, imposing the death penalty for those who violated the Lenten fast, killed a bishop or priest, cremated the dead in Saxon fashion, refused baptism, plotted against Christians, or disobeyed the Frankish king. Saxons fought for over thirty years to resist Charlemagne and Christianization, but monks and priests followed the military victories of the Franks, establishing a secure enough presence to Christianize Germany over the long term.
19Charlemagne’s empire in the eastern lands, in what is now Germany, fell into local duchies until a strong monarch emerged, Otto I, who could win papal coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor in 962. The Holy Roman Empire continued as a loose confederation of German princes who named one of their own to the office of emperor.
By 1000 large landowners in Europe had become knights in armor defending their manors and allying themselves with local kings, who had become Christians over the centuries since Roman rule had vanished. Christianity itself had shifted in the translation from a pacifist religion, taught by the rabbi Jesus to marginal social groups in an isolated province of Rome, to a warrior religion used to defend the people of Europe and the Byzantine Empire.
20While western Europe experienced its dark age of migrations and warfare, Africa was coming more into the network of trade and stability emanating from the Muslim world. North Africa converted to Islam, as described earlier, while sub-Saharan Africa continued to be something of a special case, isolated from the main currents of world trade far longer than most of the Eurasian landmass (Fig. 8.3).
The use of camels as pack animals came to Africa from Arabia sometime before the start of the Common Era, reaching Lake Chad at around 300, when caravan traffic across the Sahara began. Since camels are superior to other pack animals, carrying more for less food and water, the Sahara became a favored region of cheap transportation. Egypt and northern Africa came under Muslim control between 636 and 711, after which African contacts with the rest of the world were chiefly through Muslims. During the early centuries of trade with Muslims, West African rulers resisted accepting the Muslim faith, with its literacy and world participation, because it required repudiation of local religious traditions that gave kings their claim to sacred powers. The first known African king to convert did so in 985.
21Along the eastern coast, sailors from what is now Indonesia reached Madagascar in about 500, bringing bananas, yams, and taro root, which the native Bantus cultivated, allowing settlement of more forest zones. Islam spread along the coast, where a common culture and language developed, based on African grammar and vocabulary but enriched with many Arabic and Persians terms and written in Arabic script. In time, the people and the language became known as Swahili, from the Arabic name sawahil al sudan, meaning “shores of blacks.” The Islamic traders did not go inland, where Bantu-speaking Africans remained content with their own religions for centuries to come.
Camels that could cross the Sahara were useless in the sub-Saharan humid climate because of the tsetse fly and the trypanosomes it carried, which caused sleeping sickness. Other diseases in sub-Saharan Africa—malaria and yellow fever—proved fatal to people not used to that disease environment. Geography also kept people out of sub-Saharan Africa; the largest rivers, the Niger and the Congo, were cut off from the sea by rapids or waterfalls near their mouths. A complex array of parasites kept the local population in check. The interior of Africa remained isolated from the rest of the world until the nineteenth century, without the density to develop urban societies; local traditions, using about 2,000 languages, remained characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa.
22Africans developed iron smelting, beginning sometime early in the first millennium CE, possibly by themselves or by importing the idea and/or technique. The Bantus, who lived on the edge of the rain forest near known sites of early iron smelting, close to the modern boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon, moved south and took iron smelting with them into southern Africa by 800.
8.3 African Trade Routes About 1000 CE
In the hot, wet tropical forests and humid savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, all goods that were traded had to be carried on the heads of people. No other pack animals could survive. This fact favored the lightest, most valuable commodities, particularly gold. Two kingdoms based on trading gold emerged before 1000—Ghana in West Africa and Zimbabwe in the east.
Ghana appears in an Arabic text of the late eighth century as a “land of gold.” Covering parts of Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania, the kingdom of Ghana was developed by the Soninke people, who traded gold dust to the Berbers along the northern coast in exchange for copper and manufactured goods. The ancient capital of Ghana was a double town before 1000, with one area for merchants of all origins and another area for military and political leaders and their followers.
23On a plateau south of the Zambezi River, another powerful state emerged, based on gold mined locally and carried to the coast. The capital of this state, now known as the Great Zimbabwe, had about 18,000 inhabitants at its height in about 1400. Historians suspect that people in the capital used up nearby forests for firewood, while their cattle overgrazed nearby pastures, hastening the state’s decline in the fifteenth century. On the whole, however, the shorelines of Africa remained a frontier to the Afro-Eurasian network before 1000, and the interior remained a frontier long after that.
On other frontiers, the Vikings were settling Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, as mentioned earlier. A lot of seafaring was going on in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but nothing written, like the Icelandic sagas, remains to tell the story. Polynesians settled the Easter Islands and Hawaii in about 400 and New Zealand in about 1300, but they had no contact with the rest of the world. By about 400 the western Pacific and Indian oceans had become one large sea room. Ships, able to navigate long distances, no longer had to hug the coast or pay local duty. Many goods circulated widely—pepper and cotton from India, porcelain and silk from China, nutmeg and cloves from Indonesia, gold and ivory from Africa. The tempo of complex interactions had increased dramatically in eight hundred years.
In summary, the 800 years between 200 and 1000 witnessed a dramatic intensification and expansion of the Afro-Eurasian network. Ships and caravans strengthened and extended trade and communication. Before 200 agrarian civilizations existed only spottily across the area of the core network; by 1000 parts of Africa, the whole of southeastern Asia and the south Pacific islands, Korea, Japan, northern Europe, and the steppes had been added to the network, which by then included some 200 million of the world’s 253 million people.
24This period was characterized by the spread of religions of salvation into areas where people had formerly worshipped local gods or natural spirits. Islam culminated the transition from an identity based on local ethnicity and localism to one based on a universal religion. When Muslims encountered polytheistic peoples in northern Africa and among the Turks of the western steppes, mass conversions followed. Christians met with success among Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples. Vikings resisted until 1000, but by then all Europe was Christian except pockets along the southern shore of the Baltic, where people were the last to convert in 1387. Buddhist ideas spread into central Asia, China, and southeast Asia. The commonality in the religions of salvation lay in their directing human aspirations toward an external, transcendental world—heaven, paradise, nirvana, union with Shiva and Krishna. They gave hope of redress in a future life to people distressed by the realities of urban life. Cities were unstable, inequitable in times of prosperity, and liable to break down in times of retrenchment. The new religions sustained hope and helped maintain the social differentiation required by city organization. The increase in urban societies was connected to the increase in conversions to salvation religions; both were a common feature of human life in Afro-Eurasia from 200 to 1000 even as many nonurbanized areas remained.
Costs of Complexity
There were costs associated with this increased complexity. To achieve it, humans had to divert more of Earth’s energy to flow through their systems. One way they did this was to cut down trees.
If one could have hovered above Eurasia in a spacecraft, once in about 200 and again in about 1000, the most notable difference would be the vanishing forests. Across China all the way to India, one of the world’s great blocks of tropical forest disappeared as trees were removed for rice paddies to feed more people. Across Europe virgin forests were felled to plow the heavy soil for grain crops to feed more people. People who worshipped the forests converted or were converted into believing religions that promised salvation later, in exchange for more human survival and complexity now.
Despite these losses of forest, more than 75 percent of the Earth’s trees remained. As currently estimated, deforestation did not reach 25 percent of the trees that remained in 1985 until about 1700, with 50 percent reached by about 1850 and 75 percent by about 1915. Even though the pattern of deforestation was evident by 1000, its pace had not reached the rapid acceleration of the past three centuries.
25The shift in the balance of power between humans and all other animal species also continued. Humans increased their dominance over all other mammals, hunting them into small remnants and pressing many of them into the service of human needs as food and pack animals.
The total number of people on Earth decreased slightly from 200 to 1000, from 257 million to about 253 million people. In 1000, Europe, excluding Russia, had about 30 million, 14 million less than it had in 200. China had about 56 million people, or about 22 percent of the world’s population, Africa had about 15 percent of the population, and the Americas had about 7 percent.
26By 1000 five patterns common to the history of the human species could be discerned in Afro-Eurasia, at least in retrospect. People were gradually, but over time consistently, increasing in numbers. As their total numbers increased, so did the concentrations in which they lived. As their concentrations increased, so did the degree of stratification, organization, and specialization in skill and knowledge. In any given year over the past ten millennia, these five aspects of human living could be found in greater size and degree than before. The increase was not steady; it fluctuated. But charted by thousand-year intervals, the patterns held, with the prevailing pattern of increasing complexity.
27The last three chapters have told the human story in Africa and Eurasia. Now it is time to turn the globe on its axis to bring into view the Americas, still not regularly connected to Afro-Eurasia but inhabited by humans for at least 13,000 years, and possibly for as long as 30,000 years, and where a separate experiment in the emergence of complex societies was being conducted.
Unanswered Questions
1. Was there contact between Africa and the Americas prior to 1492?
Some tantalizing evidence suggests there may have been. The currents in the Atlantic Ocean flow off the coast of Africa in two places—the Cape Verde Islands and the Senegambian coast—toward the northeast coast of South America and the Caribbean. The Norwegian adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl, had a ship of papyrus reed built by Africans to ancient specifications and succeeded in sailing in it from Safi to the Barbados Islands in 1969. Others duplicated this trip. Indeed, the Portuguese captain Pedro Alvares Cabral verified this current when his ships, on their way around Africa, were accidentally carried to the coast of Brazil in 1500.
Evidence of African attempts to reach America appear in a book by an Arabic geographer in Damascus, Ibn Fadl Alah al-Umari (1301-1349), who was in Cairo twelve years after the emperor of Mali, Mansa Kankan Musa, passed through in 1324. The man who hosted Mansa Musa told al-Umari stories recounted by Mansa Musa, including an account of how he got to be king. It seems that his predecessor, Mansa Muhammed, believed it was possible to reach the limit of the Atlantic Ocean. He provisioned 200 ships and sent them out from the Senegambian coast (then Mali). Finally, one returned to report that the others had encountered a river with a powerful current in the open sea. The others entered and were not seen again, so the one turned back. Mansa Muhammed then outfitted a larger expedition, left Mansa Musa as king, and, in 1311, departed himself, never to be seen again. It is possible that the current was the mouth of the Amazon and that these sailors landed in Central America.
The hypothesis that Africans did reach the Americas before 1492 has been defended primarily by Ivan van Sertima, an anthropologist from Guyana and professor of African Studies at Rutgers University. His books include They Came Before Columbus and Early America Revisited; most mainstream historians have not accepted his evidence.
