You Can't Read This

by Val Ross

  Lady Murasaki suspects Lord Michinaga himself. “While I was busy attending to Her Majesty, His Excellency came quietly into my room and found a copy of The Tale that I had brought home for safekeeping,” she writes in her journal. “He may have given it all to his daughter. I no longer have the master copy, and I am afraid that the rough version she now has may hurt my reputation.”

  Lady Murasaki cannot challenge Michinaga openly; in this era, Japanese women have no power. If he asks what is troubling her, she will try to prompt him to confess.

  Her opportunity comes on a soft morning as she sits with her screen shutters open, looking out at the mist hovering over the empress’s formal gardens. She hears a footfall on the path. Suddenly she sees Lord Michinaga plucking some flowers, then heading in her direction. She retreats modestly behind the paper screen that forms a wall of her room. But there’s no stopping him when he wants something. He tosses the flowers over the screen to provoke her into responding. “Give me a reply !” he commands.

  Lady Murasaki is taken aback, but only for a moment. She pulls out her inkstone and brushes and writes something about the dew doing too much honor to the mere flower. She passes him the piece of paper. He studies it, reading her poem as a coded message: “Why are you, the dew, favoring me, of all people, with your attention?”

  Lord Michinaga requests her brush and writes a response. The dew, he writes, cannot help where it falls. The flower, however, can accept the dew by showing whatever color it wishes. His poem means that she has more power than she admits.

  Then he boldly looks behind the screen to study her reaction. She picks up her fan in self-defense. The women of Heian Japan understand that the rules of etiquette are a kind of protection. Like paper screens and paper fans, they may not be sturdy, but they do set limits.

  Fujiwara no Michinaga, normally the most confident of men, wonders if this literary lady is angry at him. Does she know that he has ordered his servant to “borrow” her manuscript? Lady Murasaki’s dark eyes glance knowingly at him from above the brim of her fan. He can read her Tale of Genji. But she will not let him read her face.

  The Pillage of Baghdad

  SOME OF THE world’s greatest books can no longer be read. They have been destroyed by those who wanted to destroy a civilizations voices, its stories, its ideas, the very memory of its existence.

  he extraordinary library at Alexandria, founded after the II death of Alexander the Great, was ravaged many times. When Julius Caesar sailed into the harbor at Alexandria to help Queen Cleopatra, he torched the ships of her enemies and the flames leapt ashore, sending about forty thousand papyrus scrolls of the old library up in smoke. In the fourth century AD, a Christian mob tore apart the library – and several librarians who were trying to guard the books. In 641, when Caliph Omar – a leader of the new Muslim faith – arrived in Alexandria at the head of an army of converts, he is said to have stopped in front of the ancient library and told his warriors, “If what is in those books agrees with the Word of God, then the books are not required. If they disagree, they are not desired. Therefore, destroy them.” The Chinese emperor Shi Huang-di was a great book-burner in the second century BC. In the 1500s, in Mexico, Bishop Landa burned hundreds of precious books of the local Maya people, saying they were filled with “superstition and the devil’s falsehoods.” Five hundred years later, as we shall see, Adolf Hitler took his turn at the bonfire.

  But amid all this ruination of books, one atrocious act of vandalism stands out from the rest – the orgy of sheer destruction that wrecked one of the greatest centers of ancient, classical, and Muslim learning in the world. It happened in the spring of the year 1258. “Hardly ever has Islam survived a more disastrous and mournful event than the destruction of Baghdad,” wrote a Muslim scholar of the time. “Never in history had a civilization suffered so suddenly so devastating a blow,” the American historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote in 1950, seven centuries after the crime.

  Medieval Baghdad was more than a city. It was a world cultural capital, like New York or Paris today. It was the city where storytellers compiled The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, where mathematicians developed algebra and the concept of zero. Its libraries contained collections of ancient Greek and Persian and Hindu manuscripts. It was the center of Islamic culture, and made Europe’s cities at the time seem primitive and illiterate by contrast. “Blessed be Baghdad, seat of learning and art/None can point in the world to a city her equal,” the Persian poet Anwari wrote in the 1100s. “Her suburbs vie in beauty with the blue vault of the sky…. And thousands of gondolas on the water/Dance and sparkle like sunbeams in the air.”

  In 1258, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and other sects from all over Asia – more than a million people – lived in Baghdad. It was home to poets, philosophers, librarians, scribes, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, translators, and students at the public university. Before its enemies struck, the city had around thirty-six public libraries, more than a hundred booksellers, and countless book collectors. One Baghdad doctor refused an invitation from the Sultan of Bokhara because, the doctor explained, it would take four hundred camels to move his book collection. If the doctor was still in Baghdad in 1258, he must have regretted that decision.

  Because the Mongols were coming.

  These alarming warriors lived in the grasslands of Central Asia, where since the dawn of time they had had nothing but their flocks of sheep and goats, their horses, their freedom, and their bravery. Around 1200, a single Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan, suddenly decided to conquer the world. The Khan’s Mongol hordes were almost irresistible; they destroyed king-doms from Poland to China. And they were contemptuous of the people they conquered – fools who had lost the taste for riding wildly across the plains, fools who preferred to live like fat sheep penned up in smelly cities. Once, someone asked Genghis Khan, “What is the greatest happiness in life?” He replied, “To crush your enemies, chase them before you, steal their riches, see their families weep, ride their horses, and carry off their wives and daughters.”

  Genghis Khan made sure that his sons and grandsons would carry on this happy work. On one occasion the old man took his grandsons – young Kublai, eleven, and his little brother Hulagu, nine – out hunting. Kublai, fast and alert, shot a darting rabbit. Little Hulagu brought down a slower but bigger target – a goat. Their conqueror grandfather called them over and smeared the blood from the boys’ first kill on their faces.

  The family believed it was destined to rule the world. To prepare the boys, their mother, a Christian named Sarkhaktani, arranged for Kublai to have a Chinese tutor. For young Hulagu she arranged Christian teachers from Persia. In 1252 the Mongol hordes gathered to decide the fate of Asia, and all agreed: Kublai would rule China, while Hulagu would subjugate the lands from Persia to Egypt. “Treat with kindness and good will any man who submits,” Hulagu was told. “Whoever resists you, plunge him into humiliation.”

  Hulagu and his army rode south into Persia, accompanied by siege engineers (experts in besieging cities) sent from China by his brother Kublai, and reinforced with troops of Christians keen to strike a blow against Islam. He destroyed the castle fortress of Alamut, home of the fearsome Muslim sect known as the Assassins. Then, in 1257, he sent word that Baghdad should surrender.

  This Persian miniature painting shows the Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mustasim, being brought before Hulagu. The Mongol invader killed most of the city’s Muslims, but spared some Christians because his own mother was a Christian.

  The city’s ruler, Caliph al-Mustasim, and his advisers just laughed at Hulagu’s threat. Surrender? Ridiculous. The Caliph of Baghdad was one of the most powerful men in the Muslim world. In theory, he could summon a million warriors from his Muslim allies to fight for him. As well, he had sixty thousand troops of his own. Alas, Caliph al-Mustasim was a fool who preferred to practice his beautiful calligraphy rather than drill the city’s troops. The caliph had no idea that his own vizier was alread
y in secret communication with Hulagu – or that some of Baghdad’s Christians were discussing deals with the Mongols.

  The caliph dismissed Hulagu’s delegates with the message “By what counsel, what armies, and what lasso will you bring a star [me] into your bonds?” As the Mongol messengers walked out of Baghdad, ordinary people pummeled them and jeered at them. The messengers reported these insults to Hulagu. Enraged, the Mongol warrior sent a final warning. The caliph, who was starting to sense danger, replied that the city would surrender after all. But he refused to do so in person.

  Have it your way, said Hulagu.

  The Mongols arrived on the outskirts of Baghdad in January 1258. First, Hulagu lured the city’s defenders into a marshy area, where his men opened a dike so that waters of the Tigris River trapped and drowned them. Next, his Chinese siege engineers began smashing Baghdad’s walls with huge battering rams, and his catapults bombarded them with boulders. This went on for a month. The people of Baghdad cowered inside the shaking walls, but no one came to their rescue. By February 4, the walls had been breached.

  The caliph surrendered three days later. Baghdad trembled for a week, while the Mongols waited like tigers on a leash. Then Hulagu gave the word. His warriors grabbed their curved bows, their axes and swords, and put on their helmets of leather hardened with lacquer. Below them lay the great city, its treasuries, palaces, parks, and pleasure gardens bordering the glinting river. The Mongols hoisted their small round shields. The hour had come.

  Some say the sack of Baghdad went on for a week, some say it lasted forty days. Carpets and pillows were slashed; so were people. It is said that two hundred thousand people were murdered, and their heads piled in pyramids, but some reports say more than a million died. Scholars and poets were cut down in the streets. There were reports that so many scrolls were thrown into the Tigris River that the water ran black with ink. Other reports said so many libraries were dumped into the water that the Mongols could ride their horses across on the ruined books.

  The Mongols left most of Baghdad in ashes and rubble. Fifty years later, travelers to the city found that the caliph’s personal library, though empty, was still standing, in the midst of a ruined palace and a garden completely overrun with weeds.

  Even other Mongols were shocked by what Hulagu had done to Baghdad. His own son Teguder converted to Islam, and changed his name to Ahmad. His cousin Berke Khan, a convert to Islam, became his mortal enemy.

  As for the monster himself, after his job was done, he turned his horse back to Mongolia, which he preferred to the cities of the south. While his generals and army marched on to Damascus, Hulagu spent his later years studying astrology.

  But Hulagu’s attack had some curious results. Like many Mongols, he had a passion for almanacs, pamphlets of astrological forecasts. Mongols also loved gambling with playing cards. Both the cards and the almanacs were often printed with wood blocks, using technology imported from Kublai Khan’s domains in China. As the Mongol conquests brought a kind of peace to Asia, trade routes opened up, and these printed objects were traded to the West. In 1265 two Italian travelers, Niccoló and Maffeo Polo, came through Mongol lands. They were given safe passage from Hulagu’s realm to Kublai Khan’s court in China. Kublai Khan, a more civilized man than his brother, told Niccoló and Maffeo that his mother had been Christian, and he asked the Polos to carry a message to the Pope in Rome.

  Six years later the Polo brothers returned to the Mongol court in China, taking Niccoló’s young son Marco with them. Marco noted how the Mongols used block printing to make things like cards and paper money. He also observed that they were always checking their astrology texts “to see in books how the sky stands now.”

  Marco Polo wrote an account of his adventures, The Travels of Marco Polo. Although it’s not clear how much of it is true, his reports of the treasures of the East inspired European explorers to look for easier trade routes to Asia. When Christopher Columbus sailed to America in 1492, hoping to reach the Indies, he carried a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels with him.

  So while the Mongols wreaked destruction, they also helped open up the world to trade and travel between East and West. Perhaps their printed almanacs and paper money found their way to Europe – because the idea of printing certainly did.

  Still, when you attack writers and poets, chances are good they will attack you back. They will turn your name to mud in the history books. And Hulagu, when he is remembered at all, is mostly remembered as the monster who turned a city of wonders into a wasteland.

  Giving Books to the People

  FOR THOUSANDS OF years, ordinary people couldn’t read books because they were rare and expensive. Suddenly a new invention made it possible to mass-produce books cheaply. Then the problem wasn’t finding books; it was controlling them.

  his is the story of two men who both had a brilliant idea, an idea that would revolutionize the world and the way we think and learn.

  Both men were born around 1400, on opposite sides of the world. One was the King of Korea, popular, powerful, respected, rich, and able to command the resources of his country to carry out his idea. Yet his name, Sejong, is unknown to most of the world. The other was a commoner who spent much of his life in debt, working in secret. He often got tangled up in lawsuits, so he seems to have been a prickly character. Yet it was this man, Johannes Gutenberg, whose name became synonymous with the idea they both had: printing with movable type.

  The process of printing by carving a whole page of text into a wooden block and then inking the block and stamping it on paper had been around for a long time, but it was time-consuming and inconvenient. Both Sejong and Gutenberg, independently, came up with a better idea. What if you didn’t have to create a separate block for each page? What if you could just go to a box and choose individual metal letters to build a sentence, then another, until you had a whole page, and then use those letters again to build the next page? That way, you could print many more books than had ever been printed before.

  The earliest known portrait of Johannes Gutenberg may not look like him: the artist, Andre Thevet of Paris, did it more than a hundred years after Gutenberg’s death.

  The idea was first tried in Korea. This mountainous land of cool pine forests where ginseng grows lies between China and Japan, and has always had to struggle for its independence from both its neighbors. Back in the 1400s, Korea’s royal family was also at war with itself. Sejong’s grandfather, King Taejo, had had two wives, and the sons of the first hated the sons of the second. Sejong’s father, Taejong’s, had come to the throne after the murders of at least two of Sejong’s uncles.

  Korea had adopted the ideas of the Chinese moral philosopher Confucius, who had lived almost two thousand years earlier. The Confucian tradition took reading and learning seriously, and all royals were supposed to attend lectures, write poems, and respect scholars. But young Sejong, perhaps retreating from his family’s troubles, read all the time. Once, his father the king ordered a servant to remove all reading material from the prince’s quarters. One book fell between the screens and wasn’t noticed. Prince Sejong found that one book and, according to legend, read it a hundred times.

  In 1418 King Taejong was worried about Japanese pirate attacks on his southern coasts. He decided to step down from ruling his country and concentrate on defending it. But who would become king in his place? His eldest son, Crown Prince Yangnyong, was notorious for drinking too much and chasing other men’s wives, and had been sent into exile. The middle son had become a priest.

  So Taejong, splendid in his dragon robes and seated under his red parasol of kingship, summoned his youngest son into the throne room. The bookworm Sejong arrived, walking under the blue parasol of a prince. His father told him it was time for him to accept the king’s red parasol.

  “Your Majesty, I am unworthy to receive this,” Prince Sejong begged. “Please take it back.”

  The king refused. Mounting his sedan chair, he ordered his men to carry him out of the pa
lace. For days Sejong sent letters begging his father to return. Taejong was adamant. The reluctant Sejong became king.

  From the beginning, King Sejong showered favors on a group of people who would ultimately betray his dreams: the intellectuals, who were mostly followers of Confucius. To please them, Sejong banned their rivals, Buddhist monks, from Korea’s capital city, Seoul. To further please the Confucians, he also established a center of learning, called the Jade Hall of Scholars, where twenty of the country’s most respected men were brought to study undisturbed. It is said that, when it got very cold, the king ordered that they be draped with his own fur-lined robes.

  Though the king honored and protected his scholars, he knew that Korea must grow stronger to be able to stand up to its powerful neighbors. He dreamed that his people, from doctors to farmers, might be taught to read, so they could learn how to be wiser and more skilled. In 1403 his father had established a foundry to make bronze characters in order to print books – an idea that had been around for a while in China, Japan, and Korea – but the results were sloppy. To secure the letters in their proper order the printers used beeswax, which kept melting. The lines of type slid sideways, and the print was blurry.

  And there was a bigger problem. Korean writers were using Chinese characters, which are whole words or parts of words, rather than letters of an alphabet. Any serious printing operation would need thousands of characters. Not only did this make printing complicated; King Sejong suspected that few of his subjects would have the time to learn all those Chinese characters.