After Tamerlane (14 page)

This great revenue stream was the real foundation of Mughal imperial power. It paid for the army as well as a cultural programme that drew on the practice of Timurid Samarkand. In the Turko-Iranian tradition, followed by Tamerlane, Akbar projected himself not as a Muslim warrior-king, but as the absolute monarch of a diverse subject population.
⁸⁸
His official genealogy laid claim to descent from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan,
⁸⁹
and thus to their legacy as ‘world-conquerors'. Mughal court ritual – especially Akbar's daily appearance (
darshan
) on an elevated platform (
jaroka
) – emphasized the
padshah
's supreme authority over even the greatest and wealthiest of his subjects. The court was the centre of lavish literary patronage. It promoted the study of the Muslim ‘rational sciences' and the writing of poetry, the main literary medium in the Islamic world. But Mughal court culture looked to Persian or Central Asian models for its art and literature. Persian was the language of intellectual life as well as of government. The life and landscape of Iran (not that of India) inspired the Mughal poets, who evoked a world far away ‘from the polluting influences of the subject peoples'.
⁹⁰
Like Tamerlane, too, Akbar embarked upon a great building programme, of which the short-lived imperial capital at Fatehpur Sikri was the most astonishing product. Akbar's regime was cosmopolitan and eclectic, a tribute to Central Asia's influence as a great cultural entrepô t. It is even possible that his abortive attempt to impose a more centralized government in the 1570s and '80s (which led to the great revolt of 1580–82) was remotely inspired by the Chinese system of meritocratic bureaucracy
refracted through Timurid Samarkand.
⁹¹
Famously, Akbar rejected the classic Islamic distinction between the Muslim faithful (the
umma
) and the unbelievers. He abolished the
jizya
(poll tax on non-Muslims) in 1579, and flirted with propagating a new religious synthesis of Islam and Hinduism.

The wealth and glamour of Akbar's imperium reflected the scale and productiveness of the Mughal economy. With a population of between 60 and 100 million, and a ‘fertile crescent' of rich alluvial land, the Mughals presided over a larger and wealthier economy than the Ottomans or Safavids.
⁹²
Exporting large quantities of foodstuffs, cotton textiles, tobacco, sugar and indigo, especially to its Ottoman, Iranian and Uzbek neighbours, Mughal India was a major trading power. Indian merchants maintained a far-flung network with Bukhara, Isfahan and even Astrakhan in Muscovite Russia. Artisan manufacture, especially of textiles, was widely dispersed through the countryside, and some estimates suggest that India's manufacturing capacity in early modern times dwarfed that of Europe. The Mughals were a stimulant to both internal and foreign trade. The efficiency of their revenue system created an ample surplus to be spent on luxury and manufactured goods by the privileged class of revenue-holders, the
mansabdars
and
jagirdars
, and the vast retinues that they kept. Inter-regional trade was made cheaper and easier by the Mughal pax and the convenience and safety of internal travel noted by European visitors.
⁹³
In fact the Mughal rulers had brought with them the Central Asian tradition of protecting and promoting trade (Central Asian rulers were the guardians of the Silk Route). They built forts and caravanserais, founded new towns, and expanded old centres of trade. It was true, of course, that in certain respects Mughal India displayed ‘backward' or ‘colonial' characteristics by comparison with the Turko-Iranian heartland of the Islamic world and the rival civilizations in China and the Occident. It was less advanced technologically – the fantastic dexterity of Indian artisans compensated for the scarcity of tools. Although the state was active, there was little to show that the privileged elite of revenue-receivers was devoting its wealth to the increase of agricultural output or to improving the productivity of other kinds of enterprise.
⁹⁴
A harsh and unstable environment may have discouraged them.
⁹⁵
But at the death of Akbar there was little
reason to think that the economic foundations of Mughal power would prove unequal to the task of sustaining a great imperial state and the Islamic culture that it represented.

The long sixteenth century was also a period of exceptional dynamism in East Asia – the vast region occupied by China, Japan, Korea and the Inner Asian steppe. The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctively Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan. The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested. They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism. They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts. In 1420 Peking was re-established as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.
⁹⁶
In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911. Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and over-taxation of the Mongol Yuan.
⁹⁷
In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward. Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended. Fear of the disorders that had helped pull down the Yuan, and a watchful concern for agrarian calm, made the Ming reluctant to tax heavily, despite the huge burden of frontier defence. By the sixteenth century they had come to preside over an understaffed,
underpaid and inadequate bureaucracy.
⁹⁸
An over-narrow tax base, and the refusal to allow government agencies to engage in trade, produced a fiscal crisis. By the late sixteenth century the attempt to provide for defence by an army that paid for itself from its own agrarian estates had also broken down completely.
⁹⁹
By that time, too, the level of rural disorder – relatively low during much of the Ming era – had begun rising sharply.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability. From that point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the admiral Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors. Yung-lo, the ‘second founder', who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch. His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China's primacy throughout East Asia.
¹⁰⁰
But the strain was too great. His successors adopted a drastic alternative. The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned. Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden. And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall. Built to extend and reinforce earlier frontier defences, the Great Wall was largely constructed after 1470 and brought to completion in the following centuries. It was still being built when the Ming dynasty fell in 1644.
¹⁰¹

Later Ming rulers thus chose to uphold China's place in East Asia by stressing its cultural unity and rejecting foreign commercial relations. That meant a deliberate withdrawal from Inner Asian politics, in which the Yuan had exerted a definite influence. It required a determined attempt to force both maritime and Inner Asian trade into the rigid framework of official tribute. By the early sixteenth century this had become unsustainable. Steppe-nomad demand for China's cloth and grain outstripped the supply through official channels of trade. Frontier warfare intensified.
¹⁰²
For China's nomad neighbours, raiding and freebooting yielded the goods that the Chinese refused, or were forbidden, to trade. Along the sea coasts, the same restrictive
policy bred a huge upsurge in smuggling and piracy, as China felt the early effects of Europe's commercial intrusion and, much more important, of the political and economic transformation of Japan.

Since the late twelfth century, Japan had been ruled through a compromise by which legitimate authority was vested in the emperor but actual power was in the hands of the shogun, formally acknowledged as viceroy or regent by the imperial court. The shogun or ‘generalissimo' was – or tried to be – a hereditary military dictator, and usually rose from the ranks of the emperor's generals. However, the real basis of a shogun's strength was his coalition of allies among the feudal lords and their
bushi
or samurai, the warrior class. But under the Ashikaga shoguns this ‘system' broke down in a ‘feudal anarchy' of warring fiefdoms that lasted from the 1460s until the mid sixteenth century. At about the same time, fifteenth-century Japan experienced a phase of marked commercial expansion. New crops were grown and new commodities exported, including copper, sulphur and swords. Ming controls over trade meant that Japan's principal market was mainly accessible through a network of smugglers and pirates. But the collapse of the shoguns, who had also frowned on unofficial trade, and the rise of the
daimyo
, the local ‘domain' lords, many of them with a direct interest in trade, encouraged an explosion of Japanese maritime enterprise. By the 1550s, Japanese traders, freebooters and
wako
pirates were ranging as far afield as Thailand, Burma and India. Japan's silver production made it an ‘Asian Mexico', and a key trading partner for the Portuguese and Spanish who had entered the Pacific.
¹⁰³
In 1567 the Ming emperor abandoned the struggle against illegal trade and threw open China's ports – although not to Japan.
¹⁰⁴
Canton was opened to foreign merchants in 1578. Japan allowed in the Portuguese merchants, who settled at Nagasaki in 1571.

These moves in East Asia coincided with a remarkable phase of Christian missionary enterprise. Its headquarters was at Goa, the seat of Portugal's Estado da India. Portugal's claim to a European monopoly in the exploration and trade of Asia had been sanctioned by the Pope as part of the task of taking the faith to the heathen. Goa was the gateway through which dozens of missionaries made their way into Asia. St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits, made his
way ashore in 1542, barefoot and in rags. He died ten years later on the coast of South China. His body was brought back for burial in Goa, to be displayed once a year, miraculously preserved from physical decay. Its religious prestige was so great that the Pope insisted that at least one arm should be sent back to Rome. Other Jesuits went to the Mughal court and one, Roberto di Nobili, spent years in South India in the vain attempt to reconcile Hinduism and Catholicism to the satisfaction of the Brahmins. But perhaps the most remarkable of the Jesuit priests was Matteo Ricci. He went to China in the 1580s and, after years of patient diplomacy, was granted permission to go to Peking in 1601. Once there, his learning, shrewdly adapted to the style and bearing of a Confucian scholar, gave him an entrée to court. Ricci was able to draw the first map in China to depict the Americas. His skill in cartography, medicine and astronomy became the hallmark of the Jesuit mission, and its main source of prestige. Ricci's real objective – to persuade the Confucian intellectuals that their concept of heaven was really the same as his idea of God – proved much more elusive. But long after his death the mission remained the most reliable source of European knowledge about Chinese affairs, until European merchants arrived in numbers in South China after
c
.1750.

For the Ming, however, neither commercial concessions nor their attempt to appease frontier nomad hostility brought more than temporary respite. In Japan, the years after 1570 saw a dramatic struggle for reunification as first Nobunaga and then Hideyoshi imposed a ruthless personal supremacy over the warring
daimyo
– helped by the new gunpowder technology of muskets and guns. Hideyoshi was determined to win control over Japan's trade route with China, along the Korean coast. Frustrated by Ming delays, he formulated an astonishing plan to conquer first Korea and then China itself. In 1592 he invaded Korea with an enormous army of
200,000
men. When the Chinese intervened, he bartered for a measure of power in Korea and for freedom to trade with China. When China refused, he staged a second invasion in 1597, but it was quickly aborted when he died unexpectedly. Hideyoshi's ambition outran his military power. The Ming could not just be shouldered aside. But the real casualty of the Korean wars was Ming finance – and the Ming system.

The Ming had seen off the Japanese threat, but they still faced
continuous pressure from the Mongol nomads along the Great Wall. Their most dangerous enemy was building up the frontier empire that overwhelmed them completely after 1620. During the 1590s, Nurhaci, a nomad generalissimo in the mould of Genghis Khan, had assembled a Manchurian polity that combined tribal elements from the forest and steppe with settled agrarian communities in the frontier district north-east of Peking. As Ming power dwindled amid fiscal crisis and growing internal disorder, Nurhaci strengthened his grip over frontier Mongols and Chinese, for whom his control was more real than that of their nominal suzerain. In 1601 he acquired a standing army using the ‘banner' system, in which stress on Manchu ethnic identity was combined with division into military ‘companies' as the key social and administrative units. In 1615 he sent his last tribute mission to Peking. Three years later he issued a manifesto denouncing the Ming and declaring his intention to overthrow the dynasty. By 1636, as much by winning over powerful Chinese as by military conquest, Nurhaci's successors realized this ambition – although their dynastic accession as the Manchu or Ch'ing (the Pinyin version is ‘Qing') was delayed until the fall of Peking and is conventionally dated to 1644.