A History of the World (32 page)

Europeans’ greatest monuments were religious ones, the monasteries and the cathedrals built by generations who were patiently awaiting their end times. The biggest potential political project, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, never lived up to its nostalgic billing, either under the Franks or later under Germanic rulers. It was a long Gothic fantasy finally terminated by Napoleon. At a more practical level, however, there was a dogged knotting-together of European religious life.
Greek may have been mostly lost, but clerical vulgate Latin was everywhere. In the early 500s St Benedict brought the monastic tradition from the Greek east into Italy, and his ‘Rule of Benedict’, obliging monks to be chaste, poor and obey their abbot, spread a rare message of peace and hope, drawing many young men from noble families away from careers of plunder and war.

The secrets of Europe’s later success can be found in three things, which at the time seemed far from good news.

First, there were the successive waves of tribal migration. These were caused by hunger on the huge grasslands of central Asia, where small changes in human numbers could not be sustained by the herding culture; and by similar pressures in agriculturally meagre areas such as Scandinavia. One tribal group would push the next further west, and so on, until they found themselves crossing the Danube or the Rhine and entering the old Roman world. In 376 the first rumbles of this movement began as Ostrogoths arrived in what are today Serbia and Bulgaria. They were followed by another tribe, the Alans, and then by the Visigoths, who settled in central France before heading for Spain. In 406 more tribes poured into Gaul over the Rhine, which had frozen. The Huns arrived in 441. The Vandals reached Spain and North Africa in short order, and later sacked Rome.

Broadly, the Germanic tribes have been classed as, first, the Scandinavians; second, the North Sea peoples including Jutes, Angles and Saxons who migrated to England, Scotland, parts of France and the Low Countries; and third, the Lombards, Burgundians, Vandals, Goths and others who poured through France and into Spain and Italy.
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And behind the Germans would come the next migrant invaders, the Slavs.

This brought with it the destruction of towns and churches, constant raiding and much misery for the settled farmers of the post-Roman continent. It created new kingdoms, carved out by warlords, who would themselves soon disappear, a fast-moving pattern of parasitic and squatter realms. The retreat of Roman rule had left behind a landscape of walled towns, cultivated fields and large estates that were still there when the marauders arrived. Neither the wine-growing landowners of southern France, nor the city fathers of Toulouse or Milan, nor the villa estates in the river valleys had any idea their world was ending. Outside Britain, the invaders met with little organized resistance as they grabbed for themselves landscapes
more fertile and forgiving than any they had seen before. Farmers battened down the hatches.

The sensible thing in dangerous times was to get protection. The migrations led to many peasants becoming voluntary serfs, accepting the control of a local armoured landowner, or knight, in return for a certain number of days’ work on his land and a payment in grain or livestock. This new departure resulted in the feudal system, which would in turn produce new political identities. For many people, perhaps most, these identities were more clearly defined by landowners than by kings – such dynasties as the Percys, Sforzas, Douglases and Brandenburgs. The Germanic tribal migrants added hugely to Europe’s already varied linguistic and cultural mix, since Celts, Latins, Iberians, Jews and Greeks remained in large numbers.

In essence, the next centuries of European history were the story of how these invaders were digested and accommodated. But how could this story be any kind of good news?

The answer is that competition works. It may have taken a few centuries of chopping and slashing, but the settlement and agglomeration of tribes produced a Europe of vigorously competing cultures, which would in turn become the dynastic and territorial states of later times. Lombards, Normans, eastern Franks and western Franks would evolve into Italians, French and Germans. The long-lasting conflict between Britons and Nordic invaders would eventually forge England and Scotland; and the Norman Conquest of 1066 would produce one of the strangest and most successful bastard nations of the region. Instead of living under a single emperor and a single theological authority, Europe would advance through competition and conflict, a buzzingly restless and sharp-elbowed culture. Dealing with centuries of inward migration made this change in direction inevitable.

The second well disguised blessing has already been mentioned: the fact that the Northern Europeans were cut off from the rest of the world. The mighty Islamic caliphates, stretching from north of the Pyrenees through North Africa to the Middle East and central Asia, acted as a religious and military cordon, and one that few Christians would venture into. Inventions from other parts of the world, from algebra to paper, gunpowder to porcelain, would take a long time to reach Europe. The loss of power in what had been the Roman ocean,
the Mediterranean, meant ‘Christendom’ had to look north. This forced the development of former Roman provinces which would become France, Burgundy and Britain, now brought fully into the Christian world.

Across the European plains, with their thick soils of clay and loam, forests were torn down and heavy ploughs prepared for a landscape of barley and wheat. Popes turned to Frankish and Germanic rulers for protection because they had nowhere else to go; these Franks, Lombards and Goths were tamed in turn by southern influences. Towns in the north of Italy grew in importance. Genoa and Venice made themselves independent trading republics.The independent cities and guilds of Germany and the Netherlands developed technologies and skills of their own. The trading cities of the Hanseatic League formed a close network. The English wool trade spread across the continent. The English, Irish and Scots, who had been marginal to Europe since the retreat of the Roman legions, rejoined the mainstream as missionaries, fighters and traders. Dynastic kingdoms such as those of Burgundy, the Habsburgs, the Jagiellons in Poland and the Plantagenets created super-sized feudal realms following little geographical logic.

There was one significant exception to this relative isolation: the great Islamic civilization of al-Andalus in today’s Spain and Portugal, which we shall come to next. But pressed up against the Muslim world, whether in the north Spanish kingdoms of Aragón, Castile and León, or those of the Balkans such as Serbia and Wallachia, Christians defined themselves collectively as a fighting, front-line culture. The most famous example of this, the four main Crusades that aimed to recapture Jerusalem and the ‘Holy Land’ of Palestine from the Muslim Arabs, began as an attempt by the papacy to rally Europeans and bolster the authority of Rome. Though some Middle Eastern land was captured and held for generations, and though the call to war against the Heathen inspired mass devotion, their brutality and the resulting death-toll rendered the Crusades a failure. They poisoned the atmosphere fatally and semi-permanently between the two biggest Abrahamic faiths, and conclusively demonstrated that Constantine’s embracing of Jesus of Nazareth had corrupted his message: the Cross of suffering, pity and forgiveness emblazoned on the pennants of invading knights made no sense.

The Crusades brought their military ethos back to the heart of
Europe itself. The Teutonic knights carved out their own state in Prussia and Livonia, evolving from a pilgrim-warrior brotherhood dedicated to overthrowing the pagan people of the north to become a mini-empire of their own. Savage religious wars against Cathar heretics in the French Languedoc were made more brutal by the participation of battle-hardened knights-militant. Nor should we forget those who, with increasing unease, shared the continent and its islands without sharing its main linguistic roots or its political ideas at all – people such as the Irish Celts and followers of Scandinavian shamans. In Scotland a novel idea of kingship – kingship not of territory but of people voluntarily acknowledging a leader – emerged. Parts of Germany were ruled not by conventional feudal overlords but by bishops. Not only was Europe teeming with competing peoples – it was left with a far greater variety of political structures than anywhere else on the planet. Like a chemical reaction, the elements were mixed and compressed.

Eventually, even the division of Christendom into those two halves – Latin-Roman-papal in the west and Greek-Byzantine-Orthodox in the east – proved a strength, not a weakness. Byzantium, whose story comes later, stood for centuries against attackers both from the Germanic and Slavic north-west and the Tatar and Muslim east. After Justinian, it was unable to exert real influence in Italy. That left Christian Rome free to develop its own theology and continent-wide system of bishoprics, monasteries and alliances on the rubble of the Roman world. In its religious art and culture, as well as its feudal system of landholding, and its free cities, Western Europe went its own way. When eventually city-states and local rulers were sufficiently wealthy and secure to turn again to the lost learning and techniques of the classical world – learning preserved by both Islam and Byzantium – they would exploit it with a vigour all their own.

At the time, nobody could have foreseen this. While Saxons were chanting their war poems, the sophisticated Japanese Murasaki Shikibu was writing her epic novel,
The Tale of Genji
. When warlords such as Offa on the Welsh-British border decided to mint coins, he made rough and awkward copies of Muslim dinars. And later, when the first big Sicilian, German and French cathedrals were rising, in other parts of the world equally extraordinary stonework was being crafted by Toltecs and Maya. Before Europeans had seen paper, the Chinese were
using it as currency. In the 1100s, while Englishmen were hacking each other to death in the conflict over the rise of the Plantagenets, and Germans and Italians were wading in gore during their wars of succession, Angkor Wat – which would be the world’s largest religious building – was being created, first as a Hindu, later a Buddhist, centre by the Khmer civilization of Cambodia. Europe seemed, in short, nowhere particularly exciting.

Islam’s Golden Age

The year 711 is not much remembered today, but the Muslim invasion of Spain shook Christendom and terrified rulers far to the north. For the best part of seven centuries, castles, mosques and cities ruled by Islamic rulers challenged the idea that ‘Europe’ and ‘Christian’ meant the same thing. The Visigothic kingdom of Spain, which quickly collapsed after Arab armies made the short crossing to Gibraltar, was a not an untypical model of post-Roman Europe. Its Germanic rulers, though frequently feuding amongst themselves and holding to an anti-Catholic version of Christianity, nevertheless managed to run a relatively well organized society, farming and living simply in the grand ruins of the Roman age and speaking a decayed version of Latin. The Visigoths were not so different from the Carolingians in France, the Saxons in England or the Ostrogoths in Italy. Yet within nine years of the first probing Arab advance, the Visigoths had lost almost all of the peninsula. The Arab armies were halted only at Poitiers in France, and then merely because their lines were already so far extended.

These ‘Arabs’ advancing through Spain were in fact a vivid mix of peoples. Some were from today’s Arabia and Yemen, others were Syrians, and others still were Berber people of North Africa, who had only recently converted to Islam. Frightened Europeans called them ‘Moors’, even as they learned from them. (English Morris dancing, for instance, is really ‘Moorish’ dancing, originating with African Muslims.) What the watching Europeans did not know was that this Moorish eruption into Spain had only happened because of a cataclysmic event at the other end of the Mediterranean.

In 750 the Umayyad dynasty, whose empire extended for five
thousand miles and who had been the undisputed successors of the Prophet, were toppled, in a bloody revolt, by the Abbasids. The caliphate, that core expression of political Islam, had become hugely important. Many Arabs resented the former Byzantine and Persian officials who seemed to have taken over, and the Syrians who formed a phalanx around the ruler. So they rose up. The new Abbasid caliphate would survive for hundreds of years, moving the capital of the Muslim world from Damascus inland to a new great city, Baghdad – with momentous consequences, since this in itself made Islam more eastern. But the new caliphate would not include al-Andalus. The grandson of one of the defeated Umayyad caliphs escaped to Spain, where he and his successors would rule an independent state, the Mild West of the Muslim world.

Unlike the Baghdad-centred caliphate, this one was wedged, provocatively, deep into what had been Christian territory. Al-Andalus would alter Christendom irrevocably, mainly because of the remarkable intellectual and trading achievements of its Baghdad rival, with whom it kept closely in touch. The Abbasids saw themselves as inheritors of the learning of the ancient Greeks, but also of the Persians and the Hindu Indians. Part of their claim against the Christians of Byzantium was that they had forgotten, or had shunned, the great classical heritage. They were right; and in Western Christendom too there had been a deliberate turning-away from the knowledge of the classical age in favour of a fervent, God-soaked, symbol-drenched view of the world.

This made the Franks, Germans, English and others quite spiritual, but not very well informed about the material world around them. They could not accurately tell the time of day, and struggled along with a defective, slipping calendar. Their maths was primary-school primitive and their geography little better. The shape of the world outside Europe and the Near East was a mystery; but it was probably flat, and if you travelled too far, you would fall off. The Abbasids, by contrast, prided themselves on their curiosity and hard science, in a world that they mapped and whose circumference they measured. This was an almost perfect mirror image of the Mediterranean of the 1700s, by which time the Christians had fallen in love with science and technology and the Muslim world had become conservatively God-soaked and hostile to intellectual enquiry.