A History of the World (31 page)

Hazy as he may seem to historians, Muhammad must have been a great leader. As with most religious pioneers, it is now hard to envisage how he was originally seen, but he is one of the best examples of the difference a single man can make. The change he imposed on the world easily outstrips the impact of Alexander or Julius Caesar – it is rivalled so far only by Zheng, China’s First Emperor, and by St Paul. As a religious figure, Jesus has claimed more support – perhaps around a third of the world’s believers today as against a fifth to a quarter who are Muslim. At the time when the people of Asia and North Africa were being converted to Islam, Christian missionaries were pushing north into today’s Germany, France and Britain. But as we have seen, Christianity was the work of many leaders. And Jesus was preaching to Jews, not Rome or the West.

Like Christianity, Islam would suffer splits and would be compromised by having to deal with the earthly problems of power and politics. It would take on different shades in different conquered areas; like Christianity, it would have its eras of intellectual advance and of sleepy decay. It began proudly declaring itself open to all people equally, and indeed the first voice to call Muslims to prayer was that of a black former slave, Bilal. Yet soon Islam would be a slave-owning and slave-trading society too. Proclaiming itself simple and united, it would split into warring factions, at first centring on who had the better claim to inherit leadership. The majority Sunni Muslims supported Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad’s close companions and his wife’s father; while Shias supported the claim of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Even today, the two traditions of Islam are not particularly fond of each other, as we know.

The change Islam brought to the world provides a fitting conclusion to this section. From the rise of Rome and the unification of the Chinese states, the great conundrum had been about how earthly power and new, mass religions would be able to coexist. The imperial powers, better organized than ever before, and over larger areas, had nothing to offer beyond force and security. All suffered the humdrum erosions caused by leadership crises, changes in climate, economic downturns and lost battles. No leaders, not even Caesar or Augustus, had been able to transform themselves into the focus for a successful religious movement. For most of the masses, loyalty and adherence were a practical, not an emotional, matter.

Instead, the new ethical and spiritual ideas that gave people something they felt they needed had all come from the margins: from the quarrelsome provincial Jews, the northern Indian idealists who followed the Buddha, the Christians at the edges of the Roman empire, the Arab people of the southern desert. Some rulers simply tried to repress any inconvenient religious movement; this became a habit in China, as we have seen. Others, such as Constantine, tried for full-scale takeover.

But only Islam determined that earthly power and religious belief ought to become, in effect, the same thing. The sword was strong – an old thought. The word was strong – a newer thought. But for a century of dramatic collapse and change, the word, armed with the sword, proved unstoppable.

From
AD
700 to 1480: The Great Age of Islam, the Nomads Who Built Empires, and Europe’s Awakening

In the year 800, the world was led by two great cultures, the Chinese and the Muslim. From then until the Renaissance, a span of some six centuries, Europe was a comparative backwater. There, tribal groups who had migrated from Asia, and scattered people once ruled by the Romans, slowly came together, first into feudal kingdoms ruled by families, then into nations with fixed territories and (usually) languages. They believed there had been a time of Paradise, of natural abundance, but that the sin of the original people had plunged the world into a ‘fallen’, miserable condition, to be ended when Christ returned and when judgement was passed on human behaviour. After this, time would cease. Meanwhile, though they were excellent builders in stone and increasingly interesting thinkers, their civilization lagged behind others.

To today’s educated European this may seem a grotesque idea. After all, these centuries include the rise of the papacy, the creation of Charlemagne’s empire of now misty magnificence, the Crusades, and the emergence of many nations still clearly visible in today’s world. This is the time of the unification and rise of England, France and Spain, not to mention the hammering-out of smaller nations such as Scotland and Portugal. It marks the beginnings of modern Russia and Poland. These are also the centuries of the first great Gothic cathedrals and of Christian monasticism at its peak; of the flowering of the chivalric tradition and the rule of the armoured knights. Given what we know about the explosion of European influence soon to take place worldwide, Europe’s ‘Middle Ages’ and even what used to be called ‘the Dark Ages’ are essential groundwork.

For most of this period, however, Europe would have seemed backward to Islamic scholars or Chinese administrators. Compared with the sophisticated science and architecture of the Muslim world, which embraced today’s Spain and parts of southern France while
stretching deep into central Asia, the tribes of Europe were comparatively unlettered and deeply divided. They had no city to rival Baghdad or Cairo, never mind the greater-still Chinese metropolises of Chang’an and Kaifeng. The Europeans had no properly maintained system of roads or canals; little security in towns or for rural travellers; a paucity of libraries; few places where the law was fair and sure; and boundaries more fought-over than accepted.

Their understanding of the calendar and their ability to measure time were rudimentary, and they produced few luxuries of their own. The greatest cities of the Mediterranean world were not properly European, in the later sense. Constantinople was only on the edge of the Latin European consciousness and was becoming increasingly ‘eastern’ during this period, while Córdoba, its closest rival in size for centuries, was the centre of Islamic culture until the ‘Christian reconquest’. Paris, London and Rome did not compete. Only towards the end of the period, when the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, Milan and Siena reach their most vigorous period, does European culture seriously start to rival that of the great Muslim cities or Tang and Song China.

Part of the explanation is natural: problems of plague and climate. A population of around fifty-five million people in the later Roman Empire (about
AD
400) is thought to have been halved by the ‘plague of Justinian’, which arrived in 541 and was followed by waves of bubonic death until the early 700s. This, combined with shrinking agriculture, would have made a quick European recovery after classical Roman times hard, in any case.

Justinian had been a visionary emperor, based in the Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople, whose generals Belisarius and Narses won back North Africa and Italy and briefly re-established a single empire. His wife, Theodora, was a brilliantly scandalous figure, allegedly a former circus performer and prostitute with as insatiable an appetite for men as Justinian had for land: she is said to have bitterly complained that God had given her only three orifices. At the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, their famous mosaic portraits set them among ranked officials, glaring down, knowing and hardened. Justinian’s was an astonishing achievement, but he had nothing like the military manpower, nor the taxable resources, to truly rebuild the glory that was Rome. Europe was simply too etiolated to recreate the
legions, the law, the roads and the aqueducts she had once relied on. Justinian could fight barbarian kings, but he could not fight plague and famine.

Across the Mediterranean, the Roman east and the Greek west were in any case diverging. Justinian worked hard to reconnect the broken links between the Roman popes and the patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, but the arguments were too bitter. It had taken centuries for the Roman Catholic leaders – originally local leaders of the sect – who clung on in the decaying former imperial capital, to emerge as ‘popes’ claiming authority over all Christians. They were able to do so because they enjoyed the prestige conferred on them by the fact that Rome contained the presumed graves of St Peter, referred to by Christ as the ‘rock’ on which the universal Church would stand, and of St Paul. Rome itself, for all the sad disintegration of the imperial palaces, and the sheep and cattle roaming in the Forum, had a unique history, and the early Christian community in the city was a comparatively large one. Though there were weak and even wicked early popes, there were also some gigantic figures, easily able to dispute with their Byzantine rivals and to engage in the violent power-politics necessary for survival in war-torn Italy.

Occasionally in the centuries that followed it seemed that a Roman pope allied with a powerful temporal leader might reunite the West. Had the huge Ostrogothic warrior-king Theodoric, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, not been a heretic, it might have happened even before Justinian’s wars. Because of the complex settlements of migrant people gradually rewriting the political map of Europe, popes mostly had to ally themselves with Frankish or Germanic warlords. The most obvious example is that of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who briefly created an empire stretching from northern Spain and the French Atlantic coast to western Germany, Switzerland and Bavaria. His father, Pepin, had protected the papacy already, and he gave the pope the territories that would remain – anachronistically, and thus infuriating Italian nationalists – well into the nineteenth century as the Papal States.
¹

Charlemagne came to Rome in 800 when, as it happened, an empress, Irene, was ruling in Byzantium. The Romans and the Franks had infinite male contempt for female rule, and therefore regarded the post
of Roman Emperor as vacant. Pope Leo III accordingly crowned a possibly surprised Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. But after Charlemagne’s death, the Frankish empire soon broke up, and the papacy was reminded of its own weakness when Muslim Arabs invaded Italy from North Africa, reaching and sacking Rome itself in 846. Across Europe, from the Scottish midlands to northern Spain, Roman walls crumbled and Roman roads were abandoned for ancient pedestrian tracks and pack-animal pathways.

In the east these were not Dark Ages, however, and certainly not in China. At roughly the same time as Justinian’s generals were trying to tie the Roman Mediterranean back together, the Sui emperor Wendi was successfully overthrowing the decadent Chen dynasty in the south, using massive fleets of five-deck floating fortresses. After the invasions of the northern nomads, Chinese reunification under a single efficient government allowed the rich rice-growing economy of the south to integrate once more with the more advanced north.

Above all, the 1,550-mile network of canals, rivers and locks known as the Grand Canal bound Chinese civilization together more tightly than Europeans could have envisaged. The canal system was more important in Chinese history than the Great Wall. Completed between 605 and 611, it joined the Yangtze delta to the busy northern heartlands around the city that is now called Beijing. It carried grain, salt, vegetables and luxury goods. Traders, armies and tax-collectors moved up and down it; great cities mushroomed along it. One historian likens it to ‘the first transcontinental railroads in North America. It made China’s economic integration feasible.’
²
Another says that it ‘functioned like a man-made Mediterranean Sea, changing Eastern geography by finally giving China the kind of waterway ancient Rome had enjoyed. Cheap southern rice fed a northern urban explosion.’
³

The great Muslim empires seem to have escaped the toll of plague more successfully than did the tightly packed Christian cities, and they were able, through most of this period, to use a transport system hardly less effective than the Grand Canal. Their camel and horse caravans made their way, knotted together, along great desert trading routes between fortresses such as Bokhara and Samarkand, producing a military system that united Persians, Arabs, North Africans, Indians and the tribes at the edges of China in a single faith. Cities such as
Baghdad and Cairo sat on key river systems. Sailors using dhows and new rigs of sail, as well as new instruments, spread both Islam and world trade much further than most Europeans could dream of.

‘European’ was not a word they would have recognized, anyway. The Europeans were part of ‘Christendom’, and for much of this period easterners were struggling to work out what that might mean. Europe was a geographically hemmed-in space, cut off from much of the Mediterranean by the Muslims and constantly pressed upon by the tribal migrations from the north and east – caught between salt water and the Saracens. (The word ‘Saracen’, though it became perjorative, derives from ‘Sarah’, Abraham’s wife, from whom Muhammed was supposed to have descended.)

In practical terms, Christendom did not exist as a single entity. It was fought over by the rival Greek and Latin Churches. Yet inside Europe it was a crucial idea because it constantly ate away at alternative bonds of ethnic, geographical or tribal identity. The drive to convert the heathen, and bring them into the Christian family, created alliances between old Roman families and Frankish warlords; sent Irish monks to Scotland and England, and English missionaries to Germany; and allowed former tribal leaders from the forests and swamps of the east to join a bigger idea. Rival European peoples, speaking bastardized variants of sub-Latin strengthened with thickets of words from Celtic and Germanic tongues, would compete, and their rulers would fight, but at some level (unless they were heretics, pagans or Jews) they felt they were united under Christ.

And this had a certain urgency. Overshadowing any folk memory of the lost classical world was an expectation that Christ’s second coming would not be long delayed. Paul’s warning had stuck. After food and shelter, the most pressing imperative of human life was to prepare for this event, which would mark the end of human history; building earthly civilizations came a distant second.