A Short History of the World (6 page)

Inside the empire, commanders in the more remote provinces increasingly began to behave as independent rulers, paying scant attention to Rome. It was in response to such problems that the Emperor Valerian split the empire into two zones of responsibility, one in the East and one in the West. Yet in many ways this was too little too late; when Valerian marched eastwards in AD 260 to deal with the Sassanids, who had taken control from the Parthians, he was captured by their ‘King of Kings’, Shapur I and died a prisoner after allegedly being used as a step-ladder for the Persian king to mount his horse.

The cost of all the civil wars, conquests and subsequent garrisoning of troops forced the emperors to look for new sources of income. They tried to levy further taxes on the lands they administered, but this only increased local resentment towards Roman occupation. That Rome was able to recover at all is attributed to the leadership of Emperor Diocletian who, after killing a rival claimant to the throne, was proclaimed emperor by his own troops in AD 285. Diocletian was able to institute reforms that brought an end to the terrible decades of war and civil unrest. Following the example of Valerian, he divided the empire geographically into East and West, which brought further stability. What Diocletian had perhaps not expected was that the division of the empire into East and West would contribute to the eventual downfall of Rome.
 

Diocletian’s plans for a smooth succession collapsed when Constantine, the son of the Augustus who had ruled the West, claimed the throne for himself upon his father’s death. In AD 312, in yet more war for the empire, Constantine invaded Italy to fight a rival challenger to the throne. After defeating his opponent at the battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine claimed that he had seen a cross in the sky before the battle with the words ‘In this sign you will conquer’.
 
A year later Constantine signed the Edict of Milan, a proclamation that all religions would be tolerated in the Roman Empire, including that of the religious sect of the Christians.
 

When more civil war erupted, in order to maintain control, Constantine founded a new capital in the east on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium and named it after himself. Located between Europe and Asia, Constantinople ruled the eastern half of the empire and became one of the greatest cities of the world for the next 1,000 years, while Rome languished and eventually collapsed.
 

Barbarians at the Gate

The main threat to the empire came not from the Persians but from bordering barbarian tribes, such as the Goths, the Vandals and the Alans, which all began to encroach on Roman territory. Traditionally Rome had attempted to manage these tribes by paying off their leaders – especially during periods when they were concerned about internal threats – by trading with some and by subjugating others. Barbarian fighters were often used as a source of manpower
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to fight Rome’s battles, both internal and external. For example, it was a Vandal who became a Roman general and sought to defend the Roman Empire against the invading Goths.
 

What gave a greater urgency to the situation was the rise of the Huns, nomadic pastoralists from the great Eurasian Steppe located between the fringes of Europe and the western borders of China. The westward movement of the Huns was the outcome of three centuries of chaos in China between the end of the 3rd and the end of the 6th centuries AD, commonly referred to as the ‘Age of Disunity’. Invading the lands of various Germanic tribes, the Huns conquered some and pushed others to seek shelter within the confines of the Roman Empire.
 

In AD 376, a large group of Goths fleeing the Huns turned up en masse at the river Danube and requested permission from the Eastern Roman emperor, Valens, to move into Roman territory. Thinking they might serve both as a valuable supply of manpower in his war against the Persians, as well as a buffer against the new invaders from the east, Valens granted them permission to settle on lands near the Danube. The issue he faced, however, was that the neighbouring Roman garrisons, unprepared for such a large number of immigrants, were not willing, or able, to share their valuable food and supplies. This led to an increasingly hungry and exhausted mass of barbarian troops on Roman territory, and they eventually rebelled two years later.

When Emperor Valens accompanied his troops to Adrianople, not far from Constantinople, to bring order, he led his army into one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by the Roman Empire, and was killed in the process. The defeat of the Roman army and the death of the emperor by the Goths removed the Roman army’s aura of invincibility and encouraged other more fearful Germanic barbarian tribes to grow in confidence.

Emperor Theodosius, who succeeded Valens, attempted to pacify the Goths following the debacle of Adrianople by giving them lands in modern-day Bulgaria. However, by using them as cannon fodder in his battles, he ultimately succeeded only in inflaming the situation. Under their leader, Alaric, the Goths rebelled in the early part of the 5th century and marched on Italy, sacking Rome – the heart of the western world – in AD 410.
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There was also no let up by the Huns who, encouraged by their new leader, Attila, continued their westward march, only retreating in AD 451 when they were defeated deep in Gaul by a combined army of Romans and Goths. Attila died a few years later and a succession struggle destroyed the Hunnic Empire, which gradually faded from history.
 

The End of the Roman Empire in the West (AD 476)

The Western Roman Empire managed to limp on until AD 476 when Germanic troops in Italy mutinied and elected a Gothic commander, Odoacer, as king. Odoacer promptly deposed the emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and proclaimed himself king of Italy. And so, with more of a whimper than a bang, the Western Roman Empire came to an end. The Eastern Roman Empire – encompassing modern Greece, Turkey, northern Egypt and parts of the Middle East – lasted another thousand years, gradually being whittled away until Constantinople finally fell to the invading Turks in AD 1453.
 

The Western Empire collapsed for several reasons. By overextending itself, it did not have the sufficient number of troops to protect its lengthy borders, and where it did have troops there was difficulty in supplying, paying and communicating with them when the fastest mode of transport in the world at the time was the horse. The influx of barbarians from the east and their corresponding land grab stripped the empire of the tax base that it had used to fund its armies. Troops aside, how on earth does one administer such a large politically and culturally diverse territory? Finally, a lack of strong leaders led to a series of civil wars, most notably in the 3rd century, which undermined the empire and weakened its borders.
 

The Eastern Empire managed to continue not only because it had smaller borders to defend, but also because it contained more people and more wealth. Together with the continued trade with the Orient, this enabled Constantinople to increase taxes and provide money for an army and for the civil servants it required to run its empire.
 

The Roman Empire at its height was the largest empire the world had ever witnessed. Romans were ruthless in their pursuit of victory and prisoners were routinely slaughtered or trained as gladiators for the enjoyment of its citizens. Prisoners who did not die were enslaved and slaves constituted a considerable portion of the population. But Rome also brought peace and order to a chaotic world, building roads to move troops, and aqueducts that provided populations with fresh water and public baths, among other things. Its legal and administrative traditions formed the basis for all Western governments that followed.
 

The Mayan Civilisation of Central America (AD 300–900)

As the Western Roman Empire was coming to an end, its population was entirely unaware that another great civilisation on the other side of the world, in Central America, was about to go through its golden age: that of the Mayans.
 

Building on the collapsed Olmec civilisation, the Mayans became the foremost civilisation in Central America for much of the first millennium. While never unified under one leader, they nevertheless built great stone buildings and pyramid-shaped temples that formed the core of many city-states, with populations ranging from several hundred to tens of thousands. Their largest city, Tikal, may even have had up to 100,000 inhabitants. They waged war on their neighbours, torturing and sacrificing prisoners of war in order to appease or nourish the gods, including those of the sun, the moon, and the rain.
 

The Mayans developed several incredibly precise calendars without the use of any scientific instruments. Obsessed with time-keeping, they were even able to predict solar eclipses. One of these calendars prophesied doomsday, or the end of the world, on 21st December 2012, which fortunately did not occur! An apocalypse of their own took place in around AD 900 when, due to over-population, de-forestation, drought or war, Mayan society went into rapid decline and the cities became abandoned, swallowed by the rainforest.
 

III

The Early Middle Ages

AD 500 - 1000

The Dark Ages (AD 500-800)

In Europe, the centuries that followed the fall of Rome were epitomised by chaos, warfare, feuding, disease, illiteracy and superstition – not unlike what China had experienced at the end of the 3rd century. The loss of knowledge, the lack of written history, and the general barbarity of the time has led some people, for dramatic effect, to refer to this period in Europe as the Dark Ages. Historians generally refer to it as the Early Middle Ages or Early Medieval period.
 

The classical learning that did manage to survive owed its existence primarily to the Church, which was funded by contributions and land holdings. Not only had Christianity become the official state religion of Rome in AD 380, but many of the Germanic tribes had also become Christian, if only in name, attracted by the religion’s promises of peace.

In the early 5th century, as Alaric was attacking Rome, British tribes rose against their Roman occupiers, forcing them out of England after more than three centuries of foreign rule. With the Romans out of the picture, the island was overrun by Saxons, Angles, Jutes and other tribes from northern Germany and Denmark. These tribes replaced the indigenous people as the dominant social elite and subsequently became the Anglo-Saxons. The languages they brought with them merged and became English.
 

In mainland Europe, Germanic tribes, originally composed of scattered and small autonomous units, as opposed to large groups, eventually grew to a size and strength great enough to administer a larger area and to conquer their neighbours. By AD 500 a series of successor kingdoms stood in the place of the Western Roman Empire. The Vandals had built a kingdom in formerly Roman-occupied northern Africa, the Visigoths had taken over south-west Gaul and most of the Iberian peninsula, the Burgundians had settled across south-east Gaul, the Franks had settled in northern Gaul, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Alamanni in Eastern Europe, and the Ostrogoths in Italy.
 

It was the Franks, however, who developed the most prosperous successor kingdom to the Western Roman Empire in early medieval western Europe, uniting most of Gaul under their king, Clovis, after having overthrown the last Roman governor of Gaul. The Franks also drove the Visigoths south of the Pyrenees and started a new dynastic line – the Merovingians. By the time Clovis died in AD 511, the barbarian tribes in Gaul had merged into a Frankish superpower.
 

Byzantium: The Eastern Empire

With the demise of the Western Empire, Constantinople became the centre of the civilised world and, after centuries of leadership, Rome ceased to have much power beyond Italy. The emperor in the East called himself the Roman Emperor despite the fact that the main language at his court was Greek, not Latin, and the citizens of Constantinople still called themselves Romans. Yet the Eastern Empire developed separately from Western Europe and its culture blended that of Rome and Greece with the influences of Persia and Arabia. With time its church refused to acknowledge the authority of Rome, recognising instead the Patriarchy of Constantinople, until it finally split from the Western Church completely in 1054, becoming the Greek Orthodox Church.

Termed ‘the Byzantine Empire’ by historians only in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Eastern Empire controlled a significant land area for the next several hundred years. While in the West the urban population declined and the aqueducts and magnificent buildings built by the Romans became derelict and quarried for building material, the Empire in the East actually expanded.
 

In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian sought to revive the Roman Empire by invading Italy, the African coast, and various parts of Spain, and he had much success. By AD 542 the empire extended further than it had done in more than two centuries. Justinian also introduced judicial reforms, including the complete revision of all Roman law, and building programmes which included the famous church, then mosque, and now museum of the Hagia Sophia in present-day Istanbul.