Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (23 page)

Initially Hermenegild was doubtful about converting, and it is probable that if Baetica had not been adjacent to imperial Roman territory and Roman military strengths, he would not have taken such an enormous risk.
⁶

As it was, he took out what he thought was a reliable insurance policy by signing a treaty with the empire that guaranteed Roman military help if he needed it. With Roman backing, Hermenegild’s Catholic mini-kingdom began to force the Arian king Leovigild to make major politico-religious changes.

Hermenegild’s propaganda against his father was overwhelmingly religious in content. He claimed that Leovigild was persecuting his son on purely religious grounds—a propaganda spin designed to appeal to Catholics, whether Romano-Spaniards, recent Visigothic converts, or the authorities in the papally influenced Roman province of Spania.

King Leovigild was therefore obliged to try to portray himself as highly liberal in his attitude to Catholicism if he wanted to spike his son’s propaganda guns and therefore reduce his son’s ability to rally his rebel troops. It was under such political pressure that Leovigild took two dramatic courses of action in 582, just as he was preparing to attack his son.

First, he announced that he would henceforth be prepared to worship at the shrines of Catholic martyrs and even, on occasion, in Catholic churches—something the Arian Visigothic kings had never done before.

Second—and much more fundamentally—he made a statement saying that Christ and God were equally important and equally divine. Although he did not extend this equality to the third part of the Trinity (the Holy Spirit), his statement brought his theological viewpoint as an Arian king very close to that of his Catholic son and of his imperial Roman backers.

In putting Christ on an equal footing with God, the royal announcement of 582 jettisoned in a few words the central belief of Arianism as it had been for more than two centuries. It was a breathtaking concession, virtually negating the theological raison d’être of the entire Arian faith. What had begun as a tactical PR maneuver to outpropagandize the rebel prince had the effect of preparing the ground for even more fundamental change just five years later.

With his new Catholic-friendly, highly diluted religious beliefs in place and on record, the king moved swiftly against his son. The city of Merida fell, and Leovigild minted special commemorative coins bearing the legend “Victoria.” Then, early in 583, just a few miles from Seville, he seized the key rebel fortress of Osset and the ancient town of Italica.

Leovigild then faced the prospect of doing battle with the imperial Roman army, which had been called in by Hermenegild under the terms of his treaty with the empire. But the king succeeded in bribing the imperial general with thirty thousand gold coins, and the imperial army stayed in its camp as Leovigild stormed Seville. His son, Hermenegild, however, managed to escape and took refuge in independent Catholic Cordoba. His father seized control of that city and cornered his son, who had sought sanctuary in a church.

The king sent his younger son, Reccared, into the building to persuade the rebel prince to give himself up and appeal for royal mercy. Hermenegild prostrated himself before his father, and in an apparent act of mercy the king helped him up and kissed him. And yet the prince was rapidly sent into exile to Valencia and then to some sort of prison in Tarragona, where he was kept in chains. Then, at Easter 585, the king tried to trick Hermenegild into accepting Holy Communion from an Arian bishop. The prince—still a Catholic—refused, and his father, the king, ordered his murder. The Hermenegild saga was over.

The tragedy remained a forbidden subject in Spain for many generations, but the process of politico-religious change that had been set in motion could not be stopped.

In 586 several top Catholic clergymen who had gone into exile during the war with Hermenegild returned to a warm welcome—and some contemporary Catholic sources even claimed that the Visigothic king, Leovigild, converted to Catholicism in secret shortly before he died in April 586. Leovigild’s younger son, Reccared, took the throne, and ten months later converted to Catholicism—secretly, for fear of how the Arian nobility would react.

First the new king called a conference of Arian bishops to try to persuade them to move in a Catholic direction, but with little success. Then he called a joint meeting of Arian and Catholic bishops, and finally he convened a meeting solely for Catholic bishops at which he announced his conversion. There followed at least two Arian assassination attempts and an armed Arian revolt, but all three failed, and Arian church property was given to the Catholic Church. The ban on Catholic Church councils was lifted, and Arianism became an illegal heresy in Spain, just as it had been for many years in much of the rest of Europe.

In Toledo in 589, Reccared presided over the first Catholic Church council to be held in Spain for forty years. Addressing the assembled bishops, he criticized his father’s Arianism and proposed the adoption of a specifically oriental eastern-Roman element into church services, namely, the Creed of Constantinople. This, he said, should be recited in unison by congregations before the Lord’s Prayer “so the people would believe that which they had to repeat regularly, and would therefore be unable to plead ignorance of the true faith.”
⁷

Perhaps more sinisterly, he also accepted the Catholic clergy’s demands for a clampdown on the Jews. In an effort to further ingratiate himself with the Catholic clergy, he introduced new legal restrictions on Spain’s Jewish population. Jews were banned from holding a whole array of public offices, and all sexual contact between Jews and Christians was banned. In some areas the Church further decreed, or tried to decree, that Jews were forbidden to chant the Psalms at funerals and that Jewish slaves would be whipped a hundred times if they did not rest on the Christian Sabbath.

R
eccared’s conversion in 587 marked, in a real sense, the birth (or more accurately, the conception) of modern Spain. Before 587, Spain had been a strictly binational state, with two utterly distinct legal systems, languages, religious traditions, and political systems. Now suddenly there was only one religion—Catholicism. Gothic, as a language, was fading and a local Latin dialect, proto-Spanish, was coming into general use. Roman dress and fashion prevailed. Intermarriage between Visigothic Spaniards and Romano-Spaniards had been allowed for a decade or so, and Spanish anti-Semitism had snarled its way into existence and would reach horrific proportions within a generation, remaining a key aspect of Spanish culture for centuries.

The more accessible monarchy of the Germanic past, with its lack of hereditary law, had already been dead for fifteen years, replaced by a more centralized, exalted, semihereditary system that enhanced its power by making the Catholic Church of the majority Romano-Spanish population a virtual tool of government. The internal needs of the monarchy and the catalytic role of the external force of the Roman Empire brought about a state that was fast developing as a more centralized, devoutly Catholic, nationalistic, and stridently anti-Semitic entity, the key traditions and characteristics of which were revived in opposition to the Islamic conquest and occupation, survived in exile during the Islamic interlude—and reemerged as the ideological foundations of imperial and modern Spain.

Spain—and indeed Europe as a whole—had been transformed by the climatic and epidemiological developments of the sixth century.
⁸
In a very real sense, 535 and its aftermath had helped bring ancient Europe and the ancient Middle East to a close and had given birth to their proto-modern successors.

DISASTER IN
THE ORIENT

C H I N E S E
C A T A S T R O P H E

C
hina is today the world’s most populous nation, accounting for around 20 percent of the world’s total population. In terms of area, it is the third biggest on the planet. Its unity and its huge number of inhabitants are likely to combine to make this giant among nations one of the prime political and economic players of future world history. The concept and even the name of China as a united political entity go back to the Qin (pronounced “chin”) Dynasty of the third century
B.C.,
but in terms of real political continuity, the unification of China dates from the late sixth century
A
.
D
.

Although China had been politically united between 221
B
.
C
. and
A
.
D
. 220, for most of the succeeding 369 years the country was politically fragmented at any given time into a number of independent states (up to sixteen in the north and just one or two in the south). Thus, with the exception of 60 years of total fragmentation in the tenth century and 180 years of a straight north-south split in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, China has since the sixth century enjoyed almost a millennium and a half of political unity.

It was the history of the sixth century that produced that unity—and it was the climatic disaster of the 530s that, probably more than any other factor, shaped that century’s history.

“Y
ellow dust rained down like snow.”

Thus wrote the author of one of the great chronicles of sixth-century China, the
Nan shi,
or
The History of the Southern Dynasties,
describing the beginning of a terrible and fateful sequence of events that began sometime between mid-November and early December 535.

A similar entry, adding only that the dust (
ch’en
in Chinese) could be “scooped up in handfuls,” was included for the month of December 536. And a third entry (for 1 February 537) reported that on that day “it rained
hui
” that was “yellow in colour.” The word
hui
was also used in another record of the 536 event, one contained in the
Sui-shu,
or
The History of the
Sui Dynasty.
Whereas
ch’en
means “dust” or “dirt,”
hui
means “dust” or “ashes.”

The potential difference in meaning lies at the heart of a great climatic conundrum. The mysterious
ch’en
or
hui
falling from the sky in late 535 and the winter of 536–537 must have been either volcanic ash or a totally extraordinary and unseasonable series of very severe dust storms caused by massive climatic disruption. But whatever the nature of the celestial dust, its arrival was the first evidence in China of a period of severe climatic dislocation.

Other evidence of climatic chaos was not slow in coming. In July 537 China was hit by frost, while in August it snowed.
The History of the South
ern Dynasties
recorded that “in July in Qingzhou and [another province] there was a fall of frost” and that “in August in Qingzhou there was snow,” which “ruined the crops.” Qingzhou, a low-lying province, is roughly at the same latitude as southern Spain and central California; summer frost and snow were, in normal times, virtually unknown.

With the crops destroyed in Qingzhou and several other provinces, there was a widespread famine. The crop failure must have lasted for two years, for in September 538, “since there had already been deaths from famine,” there was an amnesty of rents and taxes.

All these entries come from the
Ben ji
(the basic annals) of
The History
of the Southern Dynasties.
However, the northern Chinese annals (the
Bei
shi
) also record a sharp climatic deterioration and a series of famines for the mid-530s.

“Because of drought, there was an imperial edict which ordered that in the capital [Ch’ang-an], in all provinces, commanderies and districts, one should bury the corpses,” says the
Bei shi
for late April to early May 535.
¹
“[There was] great drought. [The government] had to provide water at the city gates [of Ch’ang-an] and the hall gates [of the palace] as well as the gates of the government offices,” says the entry for late June and early July of the same year. Then in September 536, in the north Chinese “provinces of Bian, Si, Zhuo and Jian, hail fell” and there was “a great famine.” By December the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that the government had to send special inspectors “to investigate [the conditions of] the famished refugees who were roaming around north of the Yellow River.”