After Tamerlane (7 page)

What Ibn Khaldun described was a political world indelibly marked by the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Islam's triumph in the Near East had turned on the capture of its towns and cities by the Arab tribes that followed Muhammad. Islamic rule under the early
khalifas
(caliphs) depended on tribal garrisons watching over the unreliable townsmen. It was not a lasting solution. Under urban conditions, tribal unity weakened. There was no aristocracy to apply a feudal remedy, and the problem of government was control of the towns. The answer was found in recruiting military slaves, mainly from Turkic communities in Central Asia.
⁴⁰
These were slave soldiers or Mamluks, hardy and untainted by the urban societies over whom they stood guard. As slaves without kin or other ties of support, they owed total loyalty to the amir or ruler. Their cost could be met because the Islamic Near East, unlike the post-Roman West, had the commercial economy and thus the monetary means with which to buy them. Mamluk rule, sometimes by ‘slave kings', became the characteristic form of Islamic polity: in the North African Maghrib and in Central Asia, North India, Egypt, Syria, the sub-Saharan Sudan and the Iranian lands.
⁴¹
From the ninth century up till the death of Tamerlane, the political history of the Islamic world had largely turned upon the state-building (or empire-building) of Turkic tribal leaders: founding dynasties, forming slave armies, and suffering overthrow in their season.

The grand incursions into the Near East by Seljuk Turks from Central Asia, the Mongol ‘horde' of Genghis Khan and the followers of Tamerlane must be set against this background. Each of these great invasions brought destructive consequences whose scale is hard to reckon, as well as the ferment of trade and religion that we noticed earlier. For Genghis and Tamerlane, the aim was to unite the different zones of the Islamic Near East under a Central Asian ruler, as the prelude to fashioning a ‘world empire' across the whole of Eurasia.
Both were frustrated by the logistics of empire-building in a region where the centres of cultivation and trade lay far apart, and distance dissolved the ruler's authority. The repeated cycle of mass military invasion, large-scale destruction, transient unity and imperial breakup gave the Islamic world a ‘medieval' history starkly different from that of Europe or China. In Europe, the end of the great migrations permitted the gradual consolidation of territorial states whose people were subjected to ever-closer control by feudal lords, dynastic rulers and their clerical allies. In the Islamic world, the pattern was one of violent oscillation between the creation of ‘world empires' and fragmentation into smaller tribal or dynastic polities whose rulers were usually men from the steppe, not the ‘civilized' leaders of a home-grown elite.

By itself, a political tradition of such marked instability might have yielded economic and cultural chaos: a desert of futile ambition, not a civilization whose literature, science, philosophy, technology and art were more than a match for those of the medieval West. The vital elements of stability, continuity, identity and cultural cohesion were provided by Islam, a subtle fusion of religion, law and literary high culture.
⁴²
Like Latin Christianity or Confucianism, Islam offered common observances, a common ‘book', and a common language of learning. But in three important respects Islamic civilization was markedly different. Perhaps because of the distinctive ecology of the Near and Middle East, where agrarian society played second fiddle to long-distance trade, Islam was strikingly cosmopolitan. Muslims were first of all members of the
umma
, the great body of Islamic faithful, and only secondly subjects of their territorial ruler. Islamic religion was highly adaptable to alien cultures, and could coexist amicably with aspects of paganism. It was usually (not invariably) more tolerant of other faiths than medieval Christianity, though not to the point of treating their adherents as equals. Secondly, because it did not empower a priesthood as the intermediary between the faithful and their god, Islam did not bind the individual so tightly into an ordered religious community. Its clerical elite, the
ulama
, were teachers, judges and scholars, not priests. Sufis and pirs, or holy men, exerted spiritual leadership, not religious
authority
. As a result, Islamic societies did not evolve one of the most important and characteristic features of
Christianity: a powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy under whose eye the individual communicant was firmly anchored in a system of territorial units – parish, diocese, state.

Thirdly, it followed from this that the relationship between religion and state in the Islamic world diverged from that found in Europe or China. The most that a territorial ruler could claim was to be the guardian of the faithful, or at best a
khalifa
, carrying on the work of Muhammad in uniting the
umma
and spreading the faith. Unlike the monarchs of medieval Europe, whose warrant from heaven was ritually conferred in a coronation ceremony, he enjoyed no special semi-sacred status, no heavenly blessing. The amir might command the
ulama
's obedience. But it was always conditional, since their ultimate loyalty was to Koranic law (which they interpreted), and the alliance of Church and State had no meaning in Islam. Instead, Islamic states were usually marked by the disjunction between the ruler and his slave army and the agrarian notables (
ayan
),
ulama
and merchant guilds who formed the civilian elite. Since there were no territorial aristocracies with whom to share power, assemblies or parliaments were redundant. Nor would Islamic rulers grant the municipal autonomy conceded by European monarchs, usually for revenue. It remained to be seen how far the rise of ‘gunpowder empires' in the fifteenth century would arrest the cyclical instability described by Ibn Khaldun, seal off the invasion routes of the steppe and desert, and promote the creation of dynastic states on the model of Europe and China.

If Islam was ill-adapted to the role of a state religion, Islamic law and theology, and the cultural aspirations of rulers in Egypt, Iran and the Fertile Crescent, had permitted a remarkable flowering of literature, art (especially architecture), science and philosophy. Islam's cosmopolitan individualism and the wide dissemination of its legal traditions also favoured the growth of a far-flung commercial economy – the outstanding feature of the Islamic world before 1400. Muslim merchants were the middlemen of world trade. Arab seafarers based in Oman, Hormuz, Bahrein, Aden and Jeddah plied the shipping lanes to Gujarat in western India, the Indonesian archipelago and Canton in southern China.
⁴³
Muslims were pioneers in commercial institutions: the legal instruments required for mercantile credit or forms of partnership like the
commenda
, through which merchants
borrowed capital in exchange for a share of the profits. The vast reach of their trade helped to make the port cities of the Near East centres of manufacture for high-value textiles and metal goods and great centres of consumption, information and knowledge. Fourteenth-century Cairo had a population of 600,000 – far larger than any city in Western Europe.

After 1400 there were numerous signs that the commercial dynamism of the previous two centuries was now in decline. The Mamluk empire of Egypt and Syria, the wealthiest economy in the Islamic sphere, was badly damaged by Tamerlane's invasion when Damascus and Aleppo were sacked.
⁴⁴
A drastic population decline followed the Black Death. Venetian merchants tightened their grip on the maritime trade of the eastern Mediterranean. European textiles began to supplant locally made cloth.
⁴⁵
A shortage of gold sharpened the pinch of commercial depression. But it would be rash to conclude from these signs of economic change that the Islamic world was about to cede pride of place to an insurgent Europe. For much of that world, European trade was of little importance. Its huge geographical scale dwarfed the Eurasian Far West. Its merchants were formidable agents of conversion. The foundation of a new entrepôt state at Malacca (Islamized by 1425) was the prelude to Islam's rapid spread in maritime South East Asia. Yet perhaps the starkest evidence for Islam's continuing dynamism was the forward movement of Ottoman power in South East Europe. The Ottoman state, the most vigorous of the Turkic principalities in Asia Minor, had crossed the Dardanelles into Europe in the 1350s. Independent Serbia was destroyed at Kosovo in 1389; Bulgaria was in Ottoman hands by 1394. At the Battle of Nicopolis (1396) a pan-European army of would-be crusaders was crushed. Ottoman power was resilient enough to survive defeat at Tamerlane's hands in 1402, and the capture of Constantinople in 1453 marked the consolidation of a new dynastic state militarily more formidable than any the Europeans had so far faced in the East. At the death of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1481, the whole Balkan peninsula south of Belgrade and the Danube estuary was under Ottoman rule. The ‘gunpowder age' seemed to be signalling a violent new phase of Islamic expansion.

*

Around 1400, Islamic societies remained the most dynamic and expansionist element in Eurasia. But it was China whose wealth and power were pre-eminent. Despite periodic disruption by dynastic upheaval and external invasion, China displayed a political and cultural cohesion unmatched by Europe or the Islamic world. This cohesion had been severely tested. China, too, had felt the impact of Mongol imperialism. A Mongol dynasty (the Yuan) had imposed its rule for most of the century after 1260. The destructive fallout of the Mongol invasion meant the dislocation of trade, and the effects of disease (the Black Death) may have reduced the population from 100 million to 60 million. The Yuan era can also be seen in a more positive light as continuing the commercial expansion of the previous Sung period, opening China more fully to the trade and culture of Middle Eurasia. And after 1370, under the new Ming dynasty (whose founder was a Han, or native Chinese), the unity of the Chinese world was restored and strengthened.

The crucial ingredient of that unity could be found perhaps in China's social and cultural origins. China had been ‘made' by the cumulative expansion of intensive agriculture from its beginnings in the north-west, where fertile, fine-grained loess soils had been exceptionally favourable to close cultivation. A continuous process of agricultural colonization carried this ‘Chinese' culture across the plains of North China, and then to the Yangtze valley and into the south. Here the basis of agriculture changed, from the wheat and millet of the drier north to the growing of wet-field rice. This great southward expansion, absorbing new land and people into the Chinese world, was the crucial stage in the ‘making' of China. It added the hugely productive rice-growing region (where double and triple cropping was possible) to the agrarian economy. It brought new crops and commodities from the sub-tropical south to stimulate a rise in domestic trade. ‘The north in the past', claimed a contemporary writer, ‘profited from dates and millet, neither of which southern China has had at any time. Nowadays, the south enjoys abundant profits from perfumes and teas, neither of which has ever existed in the north. The north benefits from its hares, the south from its fish. None of these things has been possessed by both north and south.'
⁴⁶
The southward expansion also encouraged the relatively rapid emergence between
900 and 1300 of a commercial economy whose geographical regions were physically linked by a network of waterways. With these in place, specialization accelerated (because necessities could be brought from some distance away); an elaborate system of credit grew up; and the use of paper money eased the expansion of business. China assembled the basic components of a market economy earlier, and on a much larger scale, than any other part of Eurasia. It reaped the rewards from inter-regional exchange and the impulse this gave to technical change. Before 1300, a range of innovations in both agriculture and manufacture (cotton-textile weaving was by then well established in the lower Yangtze valley) had been widely adopted, and a culture of invention favoured the diffusion of new techniques.

This remarkable growth path, whose trajectory was quite different from the rest of Eurasia's, shaped China's political as well as economic history. To a much greater extent than anywhere else in Eurasia, the commercial economy that made China so wealthy needed the active support of public authority, mainly to build and maintain the waterways. China's communications, as well as the managing of its fragile environment – dependent on water, threatened by floods – required an unusual degree of bureaucratic liaison between centre, province and district. Secondly, it was brutally clear that without the union of north and south the pattern of regional exchange that drove the commercial economy would function poorly at best. That meant exerting effective control over a much larger land area than any other state in Eurasia was able to rule continuously. Thirdly, it was North China's acquisition of the vast, rich hinterland stretching away to the South China Sea that allowed it to meet its main geopolitical challenge – although not all the time. The Chinese Empire, with its highly evolved agrarian culture, confronted the nomad empires that erupted volcanically in the Inner Asian steppe. Indeed much of North China was dangerously close to the epicentres of nomadic energy – which usually formed where the steppe and the ‘sown' came closest together. The primary role of a Chinese emperor was to safeguard the frontier against the nomadic irruptions that threatened to wreck (physically and politically) his complex agrarian world. The resources to pay for this eternal war of attrition against the Inner Asian invader depended heavily on the south's contribution in foodstuffs and trade. Thus,