Why the West Rules--For Now (58 page)

Just four thousand Muslims invaded Egypt in 639, but Alexandria surrendered without a fight. The mighty Persian Empire, still reeling from a decade of civil wars, collapsed like a house of cards, and the Byzantines retreated into Anatolia, surrendering three-quarters of their empire’s tax base. Across the next fifty years Byzantium’s high-end institutions evaporated. The empire survived only by quickly finding low-end solutions, relying on local notables to raise armies and on soldiers to grow their own food instead of receiving salaries. By 700 barely fifty thousand people lived at Constantinople, plowing up suburbs to grow crops, going without imports, and bartering instead of using coins.

In the space of a century the Arabs swallowed up the wealthiest parts of the Western core. In 674 their armies camped under Constantinople’s walls. Forty years later they stood on the banks of the Indus in Pakistan and crossed into Spain, and in 732 a war band reached Poitiers in central France. The migrations from the deserts into the heartland of empires then slowed. A millennium later Gibbon mused:

A victorious line
of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal distance would have carried the Saracens [Muslims from North Africa] to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

“From such calamities Christendom was delivered,” Gibbon added, with no little sarcasm. Conventional wisdom in eighteenth-century Britain, like that in seventh-century Constantinople, saw Christianity as the West’s defining value and Islam as its antithesis. The rulers of cores probably always picture those who move in from the fringes as barbarians, but Gibbon understood full well that the Arabs were actually part of the larger second-wave Axial transformation of the Western core that had begun with the triumph of Christianity. We can, in fact, out-Gibbon Gibbon, putting the Arabs into a still-longer tradition going all the way back to the Amorites in Mesopotamia in 2200
BCE
, and seeing them as they saw themselves: as people who had already been drawn into the core by its conflicts, and who were now claiming their rightful place at its head. They came not to bury the West but to perfect it; not to thwart Justinian’s and Khusrau’s ambitions, but to fulfill them.

Plenty of political pundits in our own century find it convenient, like Gibbon’s eighteenth-century critics, to imagine Islamic civilization as being outside of and opposed to “Western” civilization (by which they generally mean northwest Europe and its overseas colonies). But
that ignores the historical realities. By 700 the Islamic world more or less
was
the Western core, and Christendom was merely a periphery along its northern edge. The Arabs had brought into one state roughly as much of the Western core as Rome had done.

The Arab conquests took longer than Wendi’s in the East, but because Arab armies were so small and popular resistance generally so limited, they rarely devastated the lands they conquered, and in the eighth century the West’s social development finally stopped falling. Now, perhaps, the largely reunited Western core could bounce back like the Eastern core had done in the sixth century, and the East-West gap would narrow again.

THE CENTERS DO NOT HOLD

But that did not happen, as
Figure 7.1
shows very clearly. Although both cores were largely reunited by 700 and enjoyed or suffered rather similar political fortunes between the eighth century and the tenth, Eastern social development continued to rise faster than Western.

Both the reunited cores proved politically rickety. Their rulers had to relearn a lesson well known to the Han and Romans, that empires are governed through fudging and compromise, but neither China’s Sui dynasty nor the Arabs were very good at this. Like the Han dynasty, the Sui had to worry about nomads (now Turks
*
rather than Xiongnu), but thanks to the growth of the Eastern core they also had to worry about threats from newly formed states. When Koguryo in what is now Korea opened secret negotiations with the Turks to cooperate in raiding China, the Sui emperor decided he had to act. In 612 he sent a vast army against Koguryo, but bad weather, worse logistics, and atrocious leadership brought about its destruction. In 613 he sent another and in 614 a third. And as he was raising a fourth, rebellions against his demands tore his empire apart.

For a while the horsemen of the apocalypse seemed to be breaking loose again. Warlords divided China, Turkic chieftains played them against one another and plundered at will, and famine and disease
spread. One epidemic arrived across the steppes and another, sounding nastily like bubonic plague, came by sea. But just as bungling idiocy had been enough to start the crisis, good leadership was enough to end it. One Chinese warlord, the Duke of Tang, talked the major Turkic chieftains into backing him against the other Chinese warlords, and by the time the Turks realized their mistake he had proclaimed himself ruler of a new Tang dynasty. In 630 his son exploited a Turkic civil war to extend Chinese rule farther into the steppes than ever before (
Figure 7.2
b). State control was restored; population movements, famines, and epidemics died down; and the surge in social development that created Wu’s world got under way in earnest.

Even more than in Han times, it took firm hands to hold the center together, but humans being what they are, such hands were not always available. It was in fact that most human of emotions, love, that undid the Tang Empire. According to the great poet Bai Juyi, the emperor Xuanzong—“
craving beauty
that might shake an empire”—fell madly in love with Yang Guifei,
*
his son’s wife, in 740 and made her his concubine. The story sounds suspiciously like that of the love between King You and the snake woman Bao Si that was supposed to have brought down the Western Zhou dynasty fifteen hundred years earlier, but be that as it may, tradition holds that Xuanzong was ready to do anything to please Yang Guifei. One of his bright ideas was to heap honors on her favorites, including a Turkic general named An Lushan, who was fighting on the Chinese side. Ignoring the usual safeguards around military power, Xuanzong allowed An to accumulate control of enormous armies.

Given the complexities of palace intrigues it was inevitable that An would sooner or later fall from favor; and when that came to pass, in 755, An made the obvious move of turning his enormous armies against Chang’an. Xuanzong and Yang fled but the soldiers escorting them, blaming Yang for the civil war, demanded her death. Xuanzong—sobbing, desperate to keep his love out of the soldiers’ hands—had his chief eunuch strangle her. “Flowery hairpins fell to the ground, no one picked them up,” wrote Bai Juyi.

The Emperor could not save her, he could only cover his face.
And later when he turned to look, the place of blood and tears
Was hidden by a yellow dust blown by a cold wind.

According to legend, Xuanzong hired a seer who tracked down Yang’s spirit on an enchanted island. “‘Our souls belong together,’” Bai’s poem has her tell the emperor; “‘somewhere, sometime, on earth or in heaven, we shall surely meet.’”

In the meantime, however, Xuanzong’s son crushed the rebellion, but the way he did it—granting other military governors powers as extensive as An’s and inviting in Turks from the steppes—was a recipe for further disasters. The frontiers collapsed, tax revenues shriveled, and for generations the empire stumbled back and forth between restorations of order and new uprisings, invasions, and rebellions. In 907 a warlord finally put the Tang dynasty out of its misery by murdering its teenage emperor, and for the next fifty years one large kingdom dominated northern China while eight to ten smaller ones ruled the south.

Xuanzong had exposed China’s fundamental political problem: strong emperors had too much power and could override other institutions. With skillful emperors that was fine, but the random distribution of talent and the range of challenges that arose meant that sooner or later disasters were virtually inevitable.

The Western core in a sense had the opposite problem: leadership was too weak. The huge Arab Empire had no emperor. Muhammad had been a prophet, not a king, and people followed him because they were confident that he knew what God wanted. When he died in 632 there was no obvious reason to follow anyone else, and Muhammad’s Arab alliance came close to dissolving. To prevent this, several of his friends sat up all night and chose one of their own number as
khalifa
(usually anglicized as caliph), a handily ambiguous word meaning both “deputy” (of God) and “successor” (to Muhammad). The caliph’s only claim to lead, though, came from his closeness to the late prophet.

Considering the fractiousness of the Arab chiefs (some of whom wanted to plunder the Persian and Byzantine empires, others to parcel the empires out and settle as landowners, and others still to anoint new prophets), the first few caliphs did remarkably well. They persuaded most Arabs to disturb as little as possible in the Byzantine and Persian
empires, keeping conquered peasants in their fields, landlords on their estates, and bureaucrats in their counting houses. The main change they made was to divert the empires’ taxes into their own hands, effectively paying Arabs to be professional warriors of God, living in Arab-only garrison cities at strategic points in the conquered lands.

The caliphs could not, though, settle the ambiguity over what a caliph actually was. Were they kings, centralizing revenues and issuing orders, or religious leaders, merely advising independent sheikhs in newly conquered provinces? Should they represent the pre-Islamic tribal elites? Or stand for a Muslim elect of Muhammad’s first followers? Or head an egalitarian community of believers? No caliph could please all Muslims all the time, and in 656, when the third caliph was murdered, the difficulties reached crisis proportions. Few of Muhammad’s original friends were still alive, and the election devolved on ‘Ali, Muhammad’s much younger cousin (and son-in-law).

‘Ali wanted to restore what he saw as the original spirit of Islam, but his strategy of championing the poor, leaving tax revenues in the soldiers’ hands, and sharing plunder more equally infuriated previously privileged groups. Civil war smoldered, but Muslims (at this stage) remained very unwilling to kill one another. In 661 they stepped back from the brink: instead of plunging the whole Arab world into war, ‘Ali’s disillusioned supporters murdered him. The caliphate now passed to the head of the largest contingent of Arab warriors, who built a capital at Damascus and struggled none-too-successfully to create a conventional empire with centralized taxes and bureaucrats.

In China, Xuanzong’s love had triggered political catastrophe; in the West it was brotherly love—or rather, lack of it—that spelled disaster. A new dynasty of caliphs moved the capital to Baghdad in 750 and pursued centralization more effectively, but in 809 a succession dispute between brothers left Caliph al-Ma’mun weak even by Arab standards. He boldly decided to go to the core of the problem: God. Unlike Christians or Buddhists, Muslims had no institutionalized church hierarchy, and while the caliphs had considerable secular power, they had no claim to know more about what God wanted than anyone else. Al-Ma’mun decided to change this by reopening an old wound in Islam.

Back in 680, fewer than twenty years after Muhammad’s cousin/son-in-law ‘Ali had got himself murdered, ‘Ali’s own son Husayn had
raised the flag of revolt against the caliphs. Few Muslims lifted a finger when Husayn was defeated and killed, but across the next hundred years a faction (
shi‘a
) convinced itself that because the current caliphs owed their positions to ‘Ali’s murder, they were illegitimate. This faction—the Shiites—argued that the blood of Husayn, ‘Ali, and Muhammad really did provide privileged knowledge of God, and so only imams, descendants of this line, could lead Islam. Most Muslims (called Sunni because they followed custom,
sunna
) found this story ridiculous, but the Shiites continued elaborating their theology. By the ninth century some Shiites believed that the line of imams was leading to a mahdi, a messiah who would establish God’s kingdom on earth.

Al-Ma’mun’s bright idea was to adopt the current imam (Husayn’s great-great-great-grandson) as his heir, thereby making the Shiites his personal faction. It was a clever, if manipulative, ploy, but it fell through when the imam died within the year and his son proved uninterested in al-Ma’mun’s maneuvers. Undaunted, al-Ma’mun unveiled Plan B. Some of the religious theorists he employed in Baghdad, influenced by Greek philosophy, were willing to say that the Koran was a book created by a man, rather than (as most Muslims thought) being part of God’s essence. As such, the Koran—and all the clerics who interpreted it—came under the authority of God’s earthly deputy, the caliph. Al-Ma’mun set up an Iraqi Inquisition
*
to bully other scholars into agreeing, but a few hard-core clerics ignored his threats and insisted that the Koran, God’s own words, trumped everything—including al-Ma’mun. The struggle dragged on until 848, when the caliphs finally admitted defeat.

The cynicism of al-Ma’mun’s Plans A and B weakened the caliphate’s authority, but his Plan C shattered it. With religious authority still eluding him, al-Ma’mun decided to be less subtle and simply buy military force—literally, by purchasing Turkic horsemen as a slave army. Like other rulers before him, however, al-Ma’mun and his heirs learned that nomads are basically uncontrollable. By 860 the caliphs were virtually hostages of their own slave army. Without military power or religious support they could no longer generate taxes, and ended up
selling off provinces to emirs: military governors who paid a lump sum, then kept whatever taxes they could extract. In 945 an emir seized Baghdad for himself and the caliphate decomposed into a dozen independent emirates.
*