by Kevin Reilly
The sufi opens his hands to the universe and gives away each instant, free.26
As often happens in the winning of hearts and minds, the least demanding were the most persuasive.
Geographically, the realms of steppe-nomad Islam and maritime-merchant Islam were also quite different. The northern Muslim states were more accomplished in military might than mercantile prowess. Descended from pastoral nomads, their skills and interests led more to military maneuvers, and their economic techniques tended more to extraction than production. The armies of the northern land empires were huge, and the military officers, tribal or slave, dominated nobility, clergy, landowners, and merchants (usually in that order). In the south, especially along the sea routes, Muslim merchants played a leading role in the governance of smaller maritime states. Some of the most notable—Malacca, Hormuz, and Aden—were not much larger than the port city itself. From an economic standpoint, however, these smaller city-states turned out to hold more of the future than the vast continental empires.
Yet from a military and political perspective, the large Turkic land empires dominated the century between 1350 and 1450. Timur the Lame (1336-1405) revived Mongol ambitions of global conquest in a period of feuding khanates at the end of the fourteenth century, briefly conquering central Asia from Delhi to Greek Smyrna in the eastern Mediterranean. When European ships sailed to relieve Smyrna, Timur warned them away by filling the harbor with floating plates carrying the severed heads of the garrison defenders lit from inside the skulls by burning candles. Typical of many tribal conquests, Timur’s empire did not last beyond his death. Much longer lasting, however, was the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who conquered not only Turkey but extended their control in the fifteenth century to eastern Europe and the Balkans, including Greece. Having surrounded the city of Constantinople for generations, the Ottomans finally captured the city in 1453, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire. From there, the Ottomans created a sophisticated military state and went on to threaten Europe as far west as Vienna until 1683. Seven hundred years of conflict between Christianity and the Muslims remained as unresolved as it was at the beginning of the First Crusade in 1095.
Europe in the Making of
an Afro-Eurasian Network
Revival and Expansion
The European economy began to revive from the debacle of Roman decline, nomadic incursions, and urban depopulation by the end of the eighth century. The ascendancy of Charlemagne in 800 was a sign and agent of that revival. Charlemagne brought to his court scholars from as far afield as England and Italy and was visited by representatives of the patriarch at Constantinople and Slavic and Muslim lands. Recent historians have discovered evidence of hundreds of travelers between Europe and the Byzantine and Muslim worlds in the ninth century as well as hordes of Arab and Byzantine coins that indicate a level of trade that grew from 780 to 900.27 With little to export for such “real money” and Arab spices and pharmaceuticals, European merchants supplied their one surplus product: other Europeans, whom they sold as slaves for the bustling slave markets of Africa and the caliphate.28
European population and agricultural land expanded simultaneously. Between 800 and 1200, Europeans brought new lands under cultivation by reclaiming marshes, clearing forests, and colonizing new areas. The expansion of agriculture was aided by a range of new technologies. After 800, northern Europeans began using a heavy plow that could turn over the heavy soils of northern fields. A new horse collar permitted the harnessing of horses in a way that did not choke them, and teams of horses could be harnessed to the heavy plow.
An Irish legend tells of a king in the third century who supposedly brought the first water mill builder from “beyond the sea” to give a rest to the slave girl who was bearing his child.29 Whether the legend is true or apocryphal (and the date is probably too early), it calls attention to the correlation between labor and technology. Societies that were too poor to keep slaves might be quicker to substitute machines. The use of water mills, which had been used in classical times in Rome and China, increased dramatically in Europe after the ninth century. Windmills are more recent, dating from about 700 in the Middle East. They were used first in the dry plains of Iran and Afghanistan, where they served the same purposes as water mills—mainly pumping water and grinding grain. Persian windmills were introduced into Europe through Muslim Spain, but by 1185, Europeans had invented a different kind of windmill. The Persian windmill was a fixed conical structure with open doors that drew the prevailing winds inside to turn the central pillar and its grinding stone. European windmills employed large exterior sails that swiveled on a horizontal axis to catch the changing direction of the wind. By the sixteenth century, the new windmill had sprung up everywhere in Europe—even in Spain, where Don Quixote imagined that the windmill sails were the threatening arms of invading giants.
Good Weather and Good Luck . European growth also came during a time of good weather. Between 700 and 1200, the climate of northern Europe warmed considerably. The combination of warming and abundant rainfall aided the expansion of farming into new regions, especially in the north. The Vikings settled in Greenland and Iceland. In the early 1200s, the east coast of Greenland permitted agricultural cultivation, grapes were grown and wine was produced in southern England and northern Germany, and farmers grew crops at high altitudes in Norway and Switzerland. Medieval warming was not limited to Europe, but there it coincided with a period of agricultural expansion in the northern marshes and forests. European growth slowed a bit during a colder period from the later 1200s to 1450,30 when Viking settlement in Greenland ended and wine production and farming in high latitudes and mountain sides of Europe was curtailed.31
Europe also had good luck in escaping the more serious nomadic invasions of the period between 1000 and 1250. Viking attacks and Magyar (Hungarian) migrations caused serious disruption in parts of Europe in the ninth century, but after 1000, Europeans escaped the equivalent of the Jurchen, who destroyed Beijing; the Seljuk Turks, who overran much of the Byzantine Empire; and the Mongols, who overwhelmed the cities of China, central Asia, Russia, most of the Muslim heartland, and eastern Europe.
Two Europes, Four Economies . The expansion of settlement and farming in the north created a second Europe that had barely existed in classical times. The Greeks and Romans had colonized the Mediterranean. While Roman legions fought as far north as England and maintained a line of village forts across France and Germany, the forests of northern Europe were sparsely settled. Medieval settlement changed that balance. Around 700, the population of northwestern Europe overtook that of Mediterranean Europe for the first time, an advantage the north retained until about 1900.
The fledgling economy of Charlemagne’s Franco-German Empire did not thrive much beyond his grandchildren, but in the tenth and eleventh centuries a new economy developed in France that attracted merchants, bankers, and traders from wealthy Venice. International merchants came to trade at the seasonal fairs in Champagne in central France. One of the more desired items was the cloth from Flanders (modern Belgium), which was made from the best English wool.
The economies of Venice, Champagne, and Flanders were very different. Venice was an international banking and trading center with interests in Constantinople and the Muslim world. Venetian bankers provided much of the capital and financial know-how for the merchants at the Champagne fairs. Flanders and Champagne were local economies attached to international markets. Together, they added a European loop to the great Mongol-Muslim circle of trade.
A fourth European economy developed farther north along the Baltic Sea and the coast of northern Germany. These cities constituted themselves as the Hanseatic League and traded codfish, salt, lumber, and furs. After 1200, some of the Hanseatic port cities, like Hamburg and Lubeck, and the Belgian city of Bruges began to challenge the dominance of the European Mediterranean cities like Venice and Genoa, although Venice remained the dominant European sea power before 1450.
Cities and States
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The nomadic incursions of the fourth century destroyed not only the Western Roman Empire but also its many cities. The area of that empire became a deurbanized patchwork of agricultural estates run by local notables and worked by dependent laborers. Between the fall of Rome around 400 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, there was no states and few cities. Except for southern Italy, there were few cities of any size in Europe in 1000. Northern Europe was particularly rural. London and Paris were “small muddy towns” of a few thousand inhabitants in 1000, while Cordoba in Islamic Spain contained 260,000 houses, 80,000 shops, and 4,000 markets.32
Urban Renewal . Europe produced an unusual number of cities after 1000. The Hanseatic League alone included more than 60 cities at its height in the fourteenth century. The growth of cities after 1000 was due in part to the increased productivity of European agriculture and the expansion of the population.
New cities were also a product of changes in European politics and society. Feudal society allowed little freedom or social mobility. Knights, vassals, serfs, and even lords were bound by contracts, some made generations earlier. New cities grew up on the coasts and boundaries of the great agricultural estates, kingdoms, and principalities. The residents of the cities provided arts, crafts, precious goods, advice, and financial support useful to the neighboring lords and kings. In return, local rulers often gave cities control over their own affairs. City finances, courts, taxes, tariffs, and even laws were turned over to the people of the city. Kings and city leaders drew up contracts that spelled out the freedoms of the city. A common saying of the time declared that freedom was in the city air; indeed, in some cases, a serf was legally free after living in the city a stipulated amount of time. In addition to cities that negotiated their independence, there were cities that fought for it. Between 1080 and 1132, the cities of northern and central Italy, which had been ruled by German emperors since 962, declared their independence, each setting up a municipal government that they called the “commune.”
City-States and Citizenship . Many of these late medieval cities became city-states. In northern and central Italy, the newly independent cities proceeded to control surrounding territory and create city-states that included farmland as well as urban areas. Relations between city-states were not always peaceful. Pisa and Genoa fought frequently over their mutual designs on neighboring Sardinia, to give just one example. Yet because they were independent states, they had to find a way to conduct their affairs. Often there was a leading family or group of families, sometimes even an individual, who seized control. An elite group of families governed Venice for centuries; a single family, the Medici, did the same for Florence. For a brief period in Florence, the monk Savonarola ruled—before the townspeople turned on him and burned him at the stake in the public square. Even in abeyance, the rule of the new city-states required the participation of all who lived within the walls. By contract or custom, these city-states became the first self-governing states since those of ancient Greece. These autonomous zones required a high degree of public participation. A budget for the city of Siena in 1257, which had an adult male population of about 5,000, included 860 holders of public office, including police (but not military, which would have potentially included all). City-states created the first legislative bodies since the classical era, and these too demanded a high degree of public participation. In Italy, city councils normally had a Great Council of 400 or more and an Inner Council of about 40.
Urban residents, at least men with property, were citizens, not subjects, of their city-state. They voted on issues ranging from the choice of an architect for the cathedral to matters of war and peace. They served in the city councils, staffed government offices, and fought when they called on themselves to do so. This experience—by no means universal—shaped a different idea of politics, government, and the role of the individual than commonly existed in other societies.
A Muslim like Ibn Battuta could live and work in Delhi, India, or Fez, Morocco, but he was a citizen of neither. He could even govern as a judge in India, but he played no role in making the law and served only at the pleasure of the sultan. Marco Polo was a proud citizen of Venice. Thanks to Muslim universalism and hospitality, he could travel freely anywhere in the Dar al-Islam, but he had to be much more careful in Italy; when he returned, the great Venetian was captured by rival Genoese and had to dictate his “million tales” from a “foreign” jail.
Law and Science
Ibn Battuta did not make the law in India; in truth, no one did. In Islamic societies, there was no need for human law because there was God’s law—the sunna, or summation, of the Quran and the hadiths (witness reports). Judges like Ibn Battuta might enforce or interpret the law, and they might issue a fatwa or judgment based on the law, but there was no need for humans to add to the laws, rules, and advice that God provided.
Natural Law and Natural Reason . When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it adopted Roman law. Long after the empire had breathed its last, the church continued to use Latin and Roman law to run its affairs and shepherd its flock. In the early Middle Ages (400-800), Europeans followed the particular customs, rules, and laws of their clans. In addition, they were subject to the laws of the land, ruler, or government, if there was one. But when it came to religion, they talked of following the “Roman law” of the church.
Roman law, like Greek law, was a universal code based on territorial sovereignty that applied to everyone equally. Roman law was legislated, but it purported to be fair and just because it was based on principles of “natural law” accessible to “natural reason.” We have already traced this idea of a correspondence between human law and natural law back to the ancient Greeks. We have noticed the fit between the idea of an ordered universe and a society ruled by law. Greeks and Romans believed that people had a capacity to understand the laws of nature through their own powers of reason. Thus, the public sphere could be effectively managed by citizens. Some of these ideas continued to operate in the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople. Many Roman laws were enshrined in the code of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the seventh century. Nevertheless, most people of medieval western Europe knew as much Roman law as most Christians today know Latin.
Along with the loss of Roman law, medieval Europeans lost much of Greek science, which also derived from the idea that laws of nature could be discovered by human reason. Early medieval Christianity was sometimes indistinguishable from the mystery religions and pagan folk customs that bubbled up in the post-Roman world. The term “dark ages” would be an appropriate characterization of the enormous loss of classical texts, knowledge, and universal law and science.
Twelfth-Century Renaissance . Western Europeans began to retrieve the classical texts and revive legal-scientific ways of thinking in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Two events in the late eleventh century revitalized awareness of natural law. One was the discovery of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s law code, showing what a vast, sophisticated, coherent, and equitable system Roman law had been. The other was a conflict between the emerging kingdom in Germany and the papacy that brought to a head the budding conflict between state and church authority. The conflict established the principle of a separation of church and state—two powers, two jurisdictions—that became an essential element of western European thought. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the Roman papacy had declared itself free of secular control, including the appointment of its clergy, which had previously been chosen by local government officials. As a result, from that time on, every western European Christian faced two governments with overlapping jurisdictions—religious and secular. Further, at least one of those governments, the church, claimed universal validity, representing God’s law and natural law. Some historians have suggested that, ironically, this competition led to the beginning of the modern Western state.33 In opposition to the claims of secular rulers who ruled because they could, the church declared itself a sovereign body, an indep
endent public authority, with the right to make laws according to accepted principles and to administer those laws with its own hierarchy over a defined territory. The key is that it did not deny the right of other bodies like secular governments to do the same (as a Muslim caliphate or Chinese emperor would have). It therefore encouraged the development of overlapping but separate authorities, many of which could claim universal or natural validity within their own jurisdictions. The result was a world of multiple sovereignties: cities (as we have seen), states, and the church but also guilds, parishes, and corporations. Europeans grew accustomed to participating in different governing institutions in different ways. Some, like guilds and cities, were relatively democratic; others, like monasteries, were egalitarian but not democratic; and others still were neither democratic nor egalitarian, but even they had to defend their jurisdiction in terms of certain principles that would be generally recognized.
Between 1200 and 1350, Europeans created dozens of universities that were similarly independent with separate jurisdictions and hierarchies. Committees of faculty (or students in student-run Bologna) set standards, awarded degrees, and administered these institutions as corporate bodies—ministates on the model of the larger ones. The first European universities copied the earlier Muslim models, but the Muslim universities were not independent entities with faculties and degrees, and they were always administered by religious authorities.
