A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (14 page)

However, it was too late for such measures to be effective. The ruler of the west, Constantius, took only token measures to enact Diocletian’s decrees, and his son Constantine opted to win the church to his side in his battle for supremacy in the western empire in 312. He began to regard himself as a Christian—he had been a sun worshipper—and the Christians certainly began to regard him as one of themselves. They were not worried by Constantine’s own behaviour, although he had a son drowned in a bath, executed his wife, and put off being baptised until his deathbed in order to ‘sin’ freely. With the persecution over, the Christians were now in a position to persecute non-believers and dissident groups within their own faith.

The years of the final winning over of the empire were also years in which new heresies affected whole sections of the church. But once the imperial administration had thrown in its lot with the church bureaucracy, any threat to that bureaucracy was a threat to itself. Having embraced Christianity, Constantine was soon deposing and exiling bishops who would not abide by his rulings.
¹³³
His successors followed the same path, creating havoc as they backed one side and then another, so that the Egyptian bishop Athanasius was removed and reinstated five times. Only the emperor Julian abstained from the controversy. He tolerated all forms of Christian worship in the hope that the rival groups would destroy each other while he set about reviving Paganism.

This final phase of the Christian takeover of the empire also saw the birth of the important phenomenon of monasticism. The very success of the church led to continual dissidence from people who felt it had abandoned its original message of purity and poverty. Bishops were now powerful figures, living in palaces, mixing much more with those who ran the empire than with the lowly people who filled the churches. A movement began, initially in Egypt, of people who felt they could only earn redemption by following a path away from the earthly success of the bishop. They would leave the towns for the desert, where they would live on bread and water brought to them by sympathisers, dress in rags and reject any sexual activity. Known as
anchorites
, these hermits believed that by deliberately entering upon a life of suffering they were saving themselves from sin, in much the way that Jesus had saved the world. Their behaviour earned the respect of other believers, who felt they were closer to the message of the gospels than the well-housed bishops.

The movement was potentially subversive. It threatened to throw up heresies in which prophets could use the words of the gospels to unleash hatred against the empire and the rich. Yet it was not long before it had become incorporated in the existing system. Some of the hermits were soon congregating close to each other for reasons of convenience, and it was only a short step from this to accepting that their sacrifice should involve labouring together under strict discipline. Basil of Caesarea turned this into a discipline of ideas as well as labour, subordinating individual self sacrifice to a higher authority. It was not long before his successors were directing their fervour into physical force against those with different Christian ideas.
¹³⁴

However, monasticism had another longer term consequence. With their large, religiously fervent labour forces, the monasteries had a degree of protection from the disorders that accompanied the decline of the empire in the west. They became havens in which scholars could find security as the empire collapsed around them. While secular libraries burned, some monastic libraries survived, their keepers regarding it as a religious duty to copy by hand page after page of sacred—and sometimes profane—texts. At the same time the monasteries also became places where those lacking religious enthusiasm could pass a time protected from the chaos of the world, with ordinary peasants increasingly doing much of the labour and leaving the monks free to pursue a life of prayer and scholarship, or plain idleness. In any case, what had begun as islands of religious devotion, intended as a rejection of a corrupt society, became a powerful force in the post-imperial west within a couple of centuries. The network of religious establishments, sustained by the surplus from the exploitation of their own labour forces and coordinated by the hierarchy of bishops with the pope at the top, became a powerful participant in the scramble for wealth and privilege across western Europe for the next 1,000 years.

AD 600 to 900

‘Dark Ages’ in Europe. Collapse of trade. Failure of attempts by Franks to re-establish Roman-type empire (Charlemagne in 800-814). Invasions by Norsemen (800-900).

Feudalism in India. Collapse of trade. Dominance of
brahmans
and caste system in villages.

Crisis of Byzantine Empire, loss of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and Balkans. Technical and economic stagnation.

Mohammed takes Mecca (630). Islamic Arab armies conquer most of Middle East (mid-640s), reach Kabul (664), Spain (711). Abbasid revolution in 750 gives some political influence to merchants. Growth of trade and handicraft industry. High point of Islamic culture, translation of Greek texts, advances in science, mathematics, great Islamic philosophers.

Centre of Chinese civilisation moves towards rice growing areas of Yangtze. Revival of industry and trade, flourishing of Buddhism, advances in technology.

Growth of civilisations in west and coastal east Africa.

10th and 11th centuries

Recovery of agriculture and trade in Europe. Use of more advanced techniques. Serfdom replaces slavery.

Muslim Abbasid Empire loses economic momentum and splits up. Rise of mystical and magical forms of Islam. Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt.

Byzantium conquers some of Balkans, but continued technical stagnation.

West African civilisations adopt Islam and Arabic script.

High point of Chinese civilisation under Sung Dynasty (960-1279). Invention of paper, printing, gunpowder, mechanical clocks, compass, growth of influence of merchants.

12th and 13th centuries

Crisis of Islamic Mesopotamia. Chinese Empire splits in two (Sung and Chin).

Mongol pastoralists ravage Eurasia from Poland to Korea. Sack Baghdad (1258). Conquer China (1279).

West European ‘Crusaders’ attack Islamic Empire from west. Capture Jerusalem (1099-1187), sack Byzantium (1204).

Conquest of north Indian heartland by Islamic peoples from central Asia. New growth of trade, use of money.

Growth of agricultural output, population, trade and handicraft industries in Europe. Spread of watermills, building of cathedrals, rediscovery through contact with Islamic Spain of Greek and Latin texts, first European universities. Use of techniques discovered in China. Rise of Italian city states. Dante (born 1265) writes in Italian.

Slave-soldiers (
mamlukes
) seize power in Egypt.

Rise of Mali kingdom in west Africa. Timbuktu a centre of Islamic scholarship.

14th century

Great crisis of European feudalism. Famine, black death, revolts in Flanders, France, England, Wales, northern Italy. Rival popes. Hundred Years War between England and France.

Hunger and plague in China. Red Turbans rebellion against Mongols in China, founding of (Chinese) Ming Dynasty. Revival of agriculture. Ottoman Turks begin to conquer Asia Minor.

Building of Great Zimbabwe.

Aztec people found Tenochtitlan.

15th century

Renewed economic growth in China, fleet sails thousands of miles to east coast of Africa.

Aztec Empire in Mexico. Incas conquer whole Andean region after 1438.

Rise of Benin in west Africa.

Slow economic and population recovery in western Europe. Decline in serfdom. Spread of market relations. Printing. Renaissance in northern Italy. Improved shipbuilding and navigation techniques. Portuguese sail down west African coast, reach Cape. Spanish monarchs conquer Moorish Granada (1492). Columbus crosses Atlantic (1493).

The 5th century was a period of break up and confusion for the three empires which had dominated southern Eurasia. There was a similar sense of crisis in each, a similar bewilderment as thousand year old civilisations seemed to crumble, as barbarians swept across borders and warlords carved out new kingdoms, as famine and plagues spread, trade declined and cities became depopulated. There were also attempts in all three empires to fix on ideological certainties to counter the new insecurity. In Roman north Africa, Augustine wrote one of the most influential works of Christian doctrine,
City of God
, in an attempt to come to terms with the sacking of the earthly city of Rome. In China, the Buddhist doctrines elaborated almost a millennium before in India began to gain a mass of adherents, especially among the embattled trading classes. In India new cults flourished as Hinduism consolidated itself.

The similarity between the crises of the civilisations has led some historians to suggest they flowed from a global change in climate. But to blame the weather alone is to ignore the great problem that had beset each of the civilisations for centuries. It lay in the most basic ways in which those who worked the land made a livelihood for themselves and everyone else. Advances in agricultural productivity were nowhere near comparable to those associated with the spread of ironworking a millennium before. Yet the consumption of the rich was more lavish and the superstructure of the state vaster than ever. A point was bound to be reached at which things simply could not go on as before, just as it had with the first Bronze Age civilisations.

The crisis was gravest for the Roman world. The flourishing of its civilisation had depended on an apparently endless supply of slaves. The result was that the imperial authorities and the great landowners concerned themselves much less with ways of improving agricultural yields than their equivalents in India or China. The collapse was correspondingly greater.

The period which followed in Europe is rightly known as the ‘Dark Ages’. It saw the progressive collapse of civilisation—in the sense of town life, literacy, literature and the arts. But that was not all. The ordinary people who had paid such a price for the glories of Rome paid an even greater price with its demise. Famine and plague racked the lands of the former empire and it is estimated that the population halved in the late 6th and 7th centuries.
¹
The first wave of Germanic warriors to sweep across the former borders—the Goths and Franks, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes—began to settle in the Roman lands and soon adopted many Roman customs, embracing the Christian religion and often speaking in Latin dialects. But behind them came successive waves of conquerors who had not been touched by Roman influence in the past and came simply to loot and burn rather than settle and cultivate. Huns and Norsemen tore into the kingdoms established by the Franks, the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, making insecurity and fear as widespread in the 9th and 10th centuries as it had been in the 5th and 6th.

Eventually all the conquerors did settle. The majority had, in fact, been cultivators in their lands of origin, already beginning to use iron for tools as well as for the weapons that enabled them to defeat ‘civilised’ armies in battle. Their societies had already begun to make the transition from primitive communism towards class division, with chieftains who aspired to be kings, and aristocrats ruling over peasants and herders who still had some remaining traditions of communal cultivation. Had Roman agriculture been more advanced and based on something other than a mixture of large, slave-run
latifundia
and the smallholdings of impoverished peasants, the conquerors would have successfully taken over its methods and settled into essentially Roman patterns of life. We shall see that this is what happened with successive waves of ‘barbarians’ who carved out empires in China and its border lands. But Roman society was already disintegrating as its conquerors swept in, and they simply added to the disintegration. Some of the conquerors did attempt to adopt Roman agriculture, cultivating huge estates with captives from war. Some also attempted to re-establish the centralised structures of the old empire. At the end of the 5th century the Ostrogoth Theodoric proclaimed himself emperor of the west. At the end of the 8th, Charlemagne established a new empire across most of what is now France, Catalonia, Italy and Germany. But their empires fell apart at their deaths for the same reason that the original Roman Empire fell apart. There was not the material base in production to sustain such vast undertakings.

Soon the cities were not only depopulated but often abandoned and left to fall apart. Trade declined to such a low level that gold money ceased to circulate.
²
Literacy was confined to the clergy, employing a language—literary Latin—no longer used in everyday life. Classical learning was forgotten outside a handful of monasteries, at one point concentrated mainly on the Irish fringe of Europe. Itinerant, monkish scholars became the only link between the small islands of literate culture.
³
The books which contained much of the learning of the Graeco-Roman world were destroyed as successive invaders torched the monastic libraries.

Such was the condition of much of western Europe for the best part of 600 years. Yet out of the chaos a new sort of order eventually emerged. Across Europe agriculture began to be organised in ways which owed something both to the self contained estates of the late Roman Empire and the village communities of the conquering peoples. Over time, people began to adopt ways of growing food which were more productive than those of the old empire. The success of invaders such as the Vikings was testimony to the advance of their agricultural (and maritime) techniques, despite their lack of civilisation and urban crafts. Associated with the changing agricultural methods were new forms of social organisation. Everywhere armed lords, resident in crude fortified castles, began simultaneously to exploit and protect villages of dependent peasants, taking tribute from them in the form of unpaid labour or payments in kind. But it was a long time before this laid the basis for a new civilisation.