The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  A Bureaucracy of Experts . The Chinese civil service exams were part of a larger process of change in Chinese society. To prepare candidates from all social classes for the exams, the northern Song emperor Shenzong (1068-1086) and his chief minister Wang An-Shih created a national university, perhaps the first in the world (although it was displaced by exam preparers in the succeeding Southern Song period [1127-1279]).

  Exams may not strike modern college students as a major step forward in world history. In fact, modern society may expect exams to do too much. But in a world in which family and class stamped one for life, a test of ability or intelligence was a creative innovation. Rulers could be assured of experts, the ruled could expect fairness, and the talented could hope for success.

  Mongols in the Making of

  an Afro-Eurasian Network

  A network is a regional system in which the various parts (countries, nations, and peoples) not only connect but also interact with each other in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. Today, we live in a world network that embraces virtually every square foot of the planet. There are still places where one can be alone, even hide, but virtually no one on the planet anymore is unaffected by what others do and have done.

  History over the very long term is a story of larger and larger spheres of interaction. The classical empires were larger than the ancient empires. The network that connected the worlds of China, the Mongols, and Muslims in the thirteenth century was larger still. This thirteenth-century network12 was a root of the modern world network that has embraced both Eastern and Western hemispheres since 1492. Some historians call that modern network the “capitalist world system”; others might call it the beginning of globalization.

  The Mongols

  The Mongols of the thirteenth century were very different from Song dynasty China. While the Mongols may have participated in the development of some Chinese technologies like gunpowder, they were in no sense industrial, bureaucratic, or capitalist. Theirs was a nomadic pastoral society: tribes of herders who periodically organized themselves to exploit “a new type of herd—human.”13 The rise of the Mongols under Temujin, who became Great Khan (Genghis Khan) in 1206, was the culmination of a series of changes that had occurred in the grasslands of Eurasia since the period of mass migrations and upheaval that had brought an end to the Han dynasty and the Western Roman Empire. Increasingly, the peoples of the steppe—Turkmen, Tatars, Uighurs, and Mongols—chose to charge transport duties and extract “protection” instead of raiding settled societies. But sometimes this more peaceful arrangement would break down. In addition, after 1000, when the tribes of the steppe broke the new balance with the settled peoples, the impact was often more lasting. This happened in the eleventh century, when the Seljuk Turks conquered most of what is today called Turkey (after them) as well as parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. The Mongol expansion of the thirteenth century marked a similar break with the peaceful system of get and take.

  The Mongols helped make the Afro-Eurasian network in two important ways: one positive and one negative.

  Death and Destruction . The negative side of Mongol expansion was the enormous human cost and its economic consequences. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, his body was carried back across the vast empire he had created to be buried near the Mongol homeland. So that no one would reveal the burial place, however, every person along the way who aided or witnessed the procession was killed.

  Genghis Khan died as he had lived. He created something very close to the world empire he envisioned when he declared himself Khan of Khans and “ruler of all who dwell in felt tents” at a Mongol meeting of the tribes in 1206. He conquered the great cities along the Asian Silk Road (Beijing, Samarkand, and Bukhara), slaughtering perhaps a million people in the process. His rules of engagement were simple. Those who surrendered immediately became slaves; those who resisted were killed. Great civilizations were lost with their cities: the Muslim Kwarezmian civilization in Samarkand and Bukhara and the Chinese-Jurchen civilization at Beijing.

  After his death, his successors continued his global conquests in Russia, eastern Europe, and the Muslim heartland. In 1237, Mongol cavalries under his nephew Batu Khan swept westward to Russia, defeated the forces of Alexander Nevsky, and destroyed Russia’s two largest cities, Kiev and Novgorod, in 1240. In 1241, Batu’s armies conquered a combined Polish and German army and threatened western Europe. In front of the gates of Vienna, he suddenly turned back to attend the funeral of his uncle Ogedai and the selection of a new Khan in Mongolia. Europe was not threatened again, but the Muslim world was the next to feel the fury of the Mongols. In 1258, the great city of Baghdad, already living on memories, fell to the Mongols, finally bringing an end to the Abbasid caliphate. In 1279, Kublai Khan conquered China, ending the Southern Song dynasty at Hangzhou. In less than 50 years, the Mongols had conquered the known world of Eurasia.

  Trade and Tolerance . The positive contribution of the Mongols was to bring all of Eurasia—from eastern Europe to the China Sea—under a single regime of trade and administration. The Mongols united all of Eurasia north of the Islamic lands. They permitted the free exchange of goods along the northern Silk Road, vastly reducing the costs of duties, robbery, and other risks in international trade. The northern arc of the Silk Road also completed a great Eurasian circle of trade that sped goods and ideas from China to Europe to Africa to the Indian Ocean.

  The trade routes of this “Pax Mongolica” were not accidental consequences of Mongol conquests. Rather, the Mongols actively sought to increase trade and the well-being of traders. The Mongol cultural attitude toward merchants was much more positive than the Chinese Confucian attitude. Mongols benefited from the flow of goods along the Silk Road, enjoyed luxury items like silks and porcelains, profited as other central Asians had from the sale of horses and sheep, and prospered more from modest taxes than occasional plunder. In central Asia and in their conquered realms, the Mongols also aided the growth of financial instruments that have since become common. We have mentioned paper money, which the Mongol Yuan dynasty made legal tender in China. The Mongols also attempted to introduce paper money into Persia, though there they were less successful. In addition, the Mongols created a financial institution called the ortogh, which had elements of modern ideas of the corporation and insurance. The ortogh was an instrument of common ownership of a caravan; like a modern corporation, it divided costs and risks among a number of merchants or investors, allowing them to share the profits. The Mongols also encouraged the building of caravan stops and ensured that merchants would have access to food and financial needs. And for the Mongols, the lending of money for interest was not prohibited or restricted as it was in Christian and Muslim cultures.

  In religion, Mongols were not monotheists; they practiced traditional rites of shamanism, ancestor worship, and respect for natural forces. Mongols were open to other religions. Many Mongols married wives from tribes that were Nestorian Christian. But they neither expected other peoples to follow Mongol religion nor disparaged foreigners who followed different traditions. Consequently, Mongols respected and eagerly learned from foreigners. Without a written language, they borrowed the script of the neighboring Uighur people and developed a written body of literature from the thirteenth century on.

  Mongol hospitality to travelers was well known. The Mongol capital at Karakorum held many foreign residents, including some Christians who lived under Mongol rule because they found Mongol religious tolerance greater than in their Christian country.

  Political Divisions and Economic Unity . By the end of the thirteenth century, almost all of Asia was ruled by a single extended family. You might think that the existence of Mongol Khans governing all the major civilizations from Baghdad to Hangzhou would have created a unified Mongol Empire. In fact, the Mongol Khanates of Persia, called the Illkanate, and China, called the Yuan dynasty, adopted many of the traits of their respective Persian and Chinese subjects. The rulers of the I
llkanate eventually became Muslims. Kublai Khan did not become either Confucian or Chinese, but he and his administrators adopted many aspects of Chinese culture.

  Economically, the Mongol world from 1250 to 1330 was one. Goods traveled easily across the great continent again. Chinese styles of art and architecture filtered across Eurasia and fused with traditional central Asian and Persian styles (though, interestingly, fewer Persian motifs were adopted by Chinese artists). Precious objects were made by a new class of international artists in a developing international style. One fitting symbol of the new global age was the invention of world history.

  World History for a Global Age . Rashid al-Din (1247-1318) lived at the apex of Mongol global unity. His own life brought together the crosscurrents of global interaction. He was born into a Jewish family in Persia. His grandfather had been an adviser to Hulegu Khan, the conqueror of Baghdad and founder of the Illkanid dynasty. At the age of 30, Rashid al-Din converted to Islam. Soon after, he began a career in his grandfather’s footsteps, serving three Khans successively as court physician, steward, and vizier (chief adviser). The first two Khans were, like Hulegu, sympathetic to the Buddhists, but they also held debates among representatives of different faiths and awarded prizes to the most convincing. In 1295, the new Khan, Ghazan, chose Islam as the official faith, but in order to ensure that Mongol traditions were not lost, he commissioned Rashid al-Din to write a history of the Mongol conquests. The project grew into a multivolume encyclopedic history of all the people the Mongols encountered. Ghazan threw open the Mongol and family archives, instructed all to cooperate with the historian, brought in a Chinese historian to help with Chinese history, and instructed his emissaries to Europe and India to provide information.

  The enormous compendium, the Jami al-Tawarikh, written in Persian and Arabic and beautifully illustrated in numerous manuscript editions, may be called the first world history book. From 1307 until his death, Rashid al-Din supervised the writing and illustrating of numerous manuscripts of his history and other works. For his efforts, he was generously rewarded by his mentor, the Khan. A later historian who knew him said that Rashid was the highest-paid civil servant in history. He was granted an entire suburb of the city of Tabriz and employed many of its residents in producing his manuscripts, he worked on the various estates that he had been given in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, he revived the efficient Mongol postal system, and he coordinated activities with his sons, eight of whom governed major provinces of the Illkanate. At the age of 70, however, Rashid al-Din ran afoul of the jealous courtiers of a new Khan. Accused of poisoning his predecessor, he was summarily executed.

  Ecological Unity: A Dark Victory . Ecologically, the Mongol conquest left a dark legacy. The Mongol victory had incorporated all of Eurasia into a single environment. With few exceptions (Rashid al-Din noted in his history that there were no snakes in Ireland, and so it remained), the previously local animals, plants, and pests became Eurasian, at home far from their roots. Fleas could travel across a continent by horseback; rats could live long enough in the hold of a ship to wipe out an entire crew. Within a few years of the death of Rashid al-Din, that fact was to have dire consequences.

  The bubonic plague, called the Black Death because of the darkened blood-stained corpses, probably originated in China in the 1320s and spread to western Asia and Europe by 1347. Plague is an endemic disease among certain burrowing rodents like rats. When these rodent populations are disturbed by contact with humans, fleas can transfer the disease to humans or their animals. This is what happened in the wake of Mongol migrations and conquests. Plague had spread before, most notably in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it would strike again and again, but the fourteenth-century contagion had catastrophic consequences. The population of China declined from about 125 million to 90 million in the fourteenth century, partly as a result of disease. Between 1345 and 1347, the plague traveled west along the caravan routes through Russia to the Black Sea and Constantinople. From the Black Sea, it traveled by ship to Alexandria, Cairo, and Italy. Between 1348 and 1350, the plague claimed the lives of a third to a half of the population of the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Since the plague was easily spread by contact, cities lost a higher proportion of their inhabitants. Half to three-quarters of the population of Florence died the first year. The poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) recalled in The Decameron “that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day.”14

  After 1350, the disease had taken its toll. Those who survived had earned their immunities to future outbreaks that occurred with somewhat less virulence through the seventeenth century. But the population was slow to rise. Cities bounced back most quickly but only because the countryside emptied out. In Europe, population did not return to pre-1350 levels until 1500 or 1600.

  Europe was lucky. Having escaped the Mongols, Europeans suffered only from the Black Death. The Chinese population peaked at 115 million around 1200, before the Mongols, a level it did not reach again until about 1550. Parts of Asia escaped both the Mongols and the plague. The Japanese population grew steadily throughout, tripling between 1000 and 1500. The population of the Indian subcontinent grew steadily but more gradually.

  The area that suffered the most severe population losses was the Muslim heartland. The case of Iraq is most striking. Its population peaked at about 2.5 million around 800, declined to 1 million by 1300, and remained at that level until around 1850. Since that decline began before the Mongols and was not a result of the plague, it is part of a larger story.

  Islam in the Making of

  an Afro-Eurasian Network

  The story of the Muslim world between 1000 and 1450 is one of simultaneous expansion and decline. At the core of the Dar al-Islam, the great Abbasid caliphate faded away, steppe nomads looted cities, populations stagnated, and warfare became endemic. During the same period, however, the Islamic religion spread to India, the islands of Indonesia, central Asia, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa. In territory and population, the Dar al-Islam probably doubled. Further, as Islam spread, its followers created cultural and economic ties that made Islam a medieval stateless web. In place of an Arab faith and a centralized government, the Dar al-Islam became a continental civilization.

  New Muslims from the Steppe

  We have seen how the history of Eurasia has been frequently shaped by the interaction of the steppe grasslands where nomadic pastoralists tended their flocks and the agriculture-based cities of China, South Asia, and Europe. Major migrations from the grasslands—in 1700 BCE, 1200 BCE, 200 CE, and, now again, 1000 CE—initiated new eras of history. In this context, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were part of a larger steppe migration that began with the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. The Turkic-speaking pastoralists lived farther west than the Mongols and closer to the cities of the Abbasid caliphate. Consequently, they became Muslims before they displaced the armies and administration of the caliphate. In fact, many Turks had already been brought into the Abbasid army. Without much difficulty in the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia (modern Turkey), leaving the Abbasid caliphate to govern in name only. Baghdad was left as a shell. Seljuk tribal leaders governed entire countries with their tribal armies.

  The government of the Turks was very different from that of a bureaucratic state like the Abbasid caliphate. But it set a pattern that would be duplicated from Egypt to India. “Thus arose,” Marshall Hodgson, a leading historian of Islam, has written, “what was to be typical of much of Islamadom for several centuries, a fluid set of purely military governments most of them founded chiefly on the personal prestige of the emir or his father.”15 The centralized state was replaced by garrisoned troops. Emirs governed by whim and wile, their display of force the final authority. But unlike the centralized state, which presumed an evenness of command, the effective authority of the emir extended only as far as his eye could see. Beyond the view of his fort lay large areas of anarchy
.16

  Slaves, Soldiers, and Sons . As the Abbasid state atrophied, sultans and emirs lacked a bureaucratic system to raise taxes and soldiers. Since they were themselves tribal leaders, they could draw on a large following of retainers and troops, but they were always wary of other leaders, in their own and other tribes or clans, who were prepared to challenge their authority. This was especially problematic since, under the rules of the steppe, it was customary for brother to challenge brother in a system of election by contest that was intended to ensure that the strongest would always lead.

  Who could a ruler trust? Without an institution of state loyalty, Muslim rulers developed an ingenious—but to modern sensibilities unusual—solution. It was common practice in ancient and medieval warfare for victors in battle to take the defeated as slaves. In fact, this was one of the main sources of slaves. Slavery was not necessarily permanent or inheritable, and there was a Muslim rule against enslaving fellow Muslims. Therefore, since at least Abbasid times, Muslim armies would capture non-Muslims and make them slave soldiers. Initially, Turks, Mongols, and other steppe peoples were thought prime candidates for slave soldiers. Later, captives were taken from the Christian Balkans, the “slavic” areas of eastern Europe, the Caucasus Mountains, and sub-Saharan Africa.

  Now the idea of a slave soldier might seem a contradiction in terms. It would hardly seem prudent to give a slave a weapon or send him away to do battle. But the system of slave soldiers worked because the captives were enslaved rather than killed and then converted to Islam—qualifying their slave status somewhat, although they were still slaves to God and to the sultan; in addition, they were well trained and well cared for. In fact, slaves became officers and generals, even emirs and sultans. Since the government was military, slaves were trained for the most important positions in the administration of many Muslim governments.