A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Part Four

  BEYOND THE MUDDY MELTING POT

  From AD 700 to 1480: The Great Age of Islam, the Nomads Who Built Empires, and Europe’s Awakening

  In the year 800, the world was led by two great cultures, the Chinese and the Muslim. From then until the Renaissance, a span of some six centuries, Europe was a comparative backwater. There, tribal groups who had migrated from Asia, and scattered people once ruled by the Romans, slowly came together, first into feudal kingdoms ruled by families, then into nations with fixed territories and (usually) languages. They believed there had been a time of Paradise, of natural abundance, but that the sin of the original people had plunged the world into a ‘fallen’, miserable condition, to be ended when Christ returned and when judgement was passed on human behaviour. After this, time would cease. Meanwhile, though they were excellent builders in stone and increasingly interesting thinkers, their civilization lagged behind others.

  To today’s educated European this may seem a grotesque idea. After all, these centuries include the rise of the papacy, the creation of Charlemagne’s empire of now misty magnificence, the Crusades, and the emergence of many nations still clearly visible in today’s world. This is the time of the unification and rise of England, France and Spain, not to mention the hammering-out of smaller nations such as Scotland and Portugal. It marks the beginnings of modern Russia and Poland. These are also the centuries of the first great Gothic cathedrals and of Christian monasticism at its peak; of the flowering of the chivalric tradition and the rule of the armoured knights. Given what we know about the explosion of European influence soon to take place worldwide, Europe’s ‘Middle Ages’ and even what used to be called ‘the Dark Ages’ are essential groundwork.

  For most of this period, however, Europe would have seemed backward to Islamic scholars or Chinese administrators. Compared with the sophisticated science and architecture of the Muslim world, which embraced today’s Spain and parts of southern France while stretching deep into central Asia, the tribes of Europe were comparatively unlettered and deeply divided. They had no city to rival Baghdad or Cairo, never mind the greater-still Chinese metropolises of Chang’an and Kaifeng. The Europeans had no properly maintained system of roads or canals; little security in towns or for rural travellers; a paucity of libraries; few places where the law was fair and sure; and boundaries more fought-over than accepted.

  Their understanding of the calendar and their ability to measure time were rudimentary, and they produced few luxuries of their own. The greatest cities of the Mediterranean world were not properly European, in the later sense. Constantinople was only on the edge of the Latin European consciousness and was becoming increasingly ‘eastern’ during this period, while Córdoba, its closest rival in size for centuries, was the centre of Islamic culture until the ‘Christian reconquest’. Paris, London and Rome did not compete. Only towards the end of the period, when the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, Milan and Siena reach their most vigorous period, does European culture seriously start to rival that of the great Muslim cities or Tang and Song China.

  Part of the explanation is natural: problems of plague and climate. A population of around fifty-five million people in the later Roman Empire (about AD 400) is thought to have been halved by the ‘plague of Justinian’, which arrived in 541 and was followed by waves of bubonic death until the early 700s. This, combined with shrinking agriculture, would have made a quick European recovery after classical Roman times hard, in any case.

  Justinian had been a visionary emperor, based in the Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople, whose generals Belisarius and Narses won back North Africa and Italy and briefly re-established a single empire. His wife, Theodora, was a brilliantly scandalous figure, allegedly a former circus performer and prostitute with as insatiable an appetite for men as Justinian had for land: she is said to have bitterly complained that God had given her only three orifices. At the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, their famous mosaic portraits set them among ranked officials, glaring down, knowing and hardened. Justinian’s was an astonishing achievement, but he had nothing like the military manpower, nor the taxable resources, to truly rebuild the glory that was Rome. Europe was simply too etiolated to recreate the legions, the law, the roads and the aqueducts she had once relied on. Justinian could fight barbarian kings, but he could not fight plague and famine.

  Across the Mediterranean, the Roman east and the Greek west were in any case diverging. Justinian worked hard to reconnect the broken links between the Roman popes and the patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, but the arguments were too bitter. It had taken centuries for the Roman Catholic leaders – originally local leaders of the sect – who clung on in the decaying former imperial capital, to emerge as ‘popes’ claiming authority over all Christians. They were able to do so because they enjoyed the prestige conferred on them by the fact that Rome contained the presumed graves of St Peter, referred to by Christ as the ‘rock’ on which the universal Church would stand, and of St Paul. Rome itself, for all the sad disintegration of the imperial palaces, and the sheep and cattle roaming in the Forum, had a unique history, and the early Christian community in the city was a comparatively large one. Though there were weak and even wicked early popes, there were also some gigantic figures, easily able to dispute with their Byzantine rivals and to engage in the violent power-politics necessary for survival in war-torn Italy.

  Occasionally in the centuries that followed it seemed that a Roman pope allied with a powerful temporal leader might reunite the West. Had the huge Ostrogothic warrior-king Theodoric, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, not been a heretic, it might have happened even before Justinian’s wars. Because of the complex settlements of migrant people gradually rewriting the political map of Europe, popes mostly had to ally themselves with Frankish or Germanic warlords. The most obvious example is that of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who briefly created an empire stretching from northern Spain and the French Atlantic coast to western Germany, Switzerland and Bavaria. His father, Pepin, had protected the papacy already, and he gave the pope the territories that would remain – anachronistically, and thus infuriating Italian nationalists – well into the nineteenth century as the Papal States.1

  Charlemagne came to Rome in 800 when, as it happened, an empress, Irene, was ruling in Byzantium. The Romans and the Franks had infinite male contempt for female rule, and therefore regarded the post of Roman Emperor as vacant. Pope Leo III accordingly crowned a possibly surprised Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. But after Charlemagne’s death, the Frankish empire soon broke up, and the papacy was reminded of its own weakness when Muslim Arabs invaded Italy from North Africa, reaching and sacking Rome itself in 846. Across Europe, from the Scottish midlands to northern Spain, Roman walls crumbled and Roman roads were abandoned for ancient pedestrian tracks and pack-animal pathways.

  In the east these were not Dark Ages, however, and certainly not in China. At roughly the same time as Justinian’s generals were trying to tie the Roman Mediterranean back together, the Sui emperor Wendi was successfully overthrowing the decadent Chen dynasty in the south, using massive fleets of five-deck floating fortresses. After the invasions of the northern nomads, Chinese reunification under a single efficient government allowed the rich rice-growing economy of the south to integrate once more with the more advanced north.

  Above all, the 1,550-mile network of canals, rivers and locks known as the Grand Canal bound Chinese civilization together more tightly than Europeans could have envisaged. The canal system was more important in Chinese history than the Great Wall. Completed between 605 and 611, it joined the Yangtze delta to the busy northern heartlands around the city that is now called Beijing. It carried grain, salt, vegetables and luxury goods. Traders, armies and tax-collectors moved up and down it; great cities mushroomed along it. One historian likens it to ‘the first transcontinental railroads in North America. It made China’s economic integration feasible.’2 Another says that it ‘functioned like
a man-made Mediterranean Sea, changing Eastern geography by finally giving China the kind of waterway ancient Rome had enjoyed. Cheap southern rice fed a northern urban explosion.’3

  The great Muslim empires seem to have escaped the toll of plague more successfully than did the tightly packed Christian cities, and they were able, through most of this period, to use a transport system hardly less effective than the Grand Canal. Their camel and horse caravans made their way, knotted together, along great desert trading routes between fortresses such as Bokhara and Samarkand, producing a military system that united Persians, Arabs, North Africans, Indians and the tribes at the edges of China in a single faith. Cities such as Baghdad and Cairo sat on key river systems. Sailors using dhows and new rigs of sail, as well as new instruments, spread both Islam and world trade much further than most Europeans could dream of.

  ‘European’ was not a word they would have recognized, anyway. The Europeans were part of ‘Christendom’, and for much of this period easterners were struggling to work out what that might mean. Europe was a geographically hemmed-in space, cut off from much of the Mediterranean by the Muslims and constantly pressed upon by the tribal migrations from the north and east – caught between salt water and the Saracens. (The word ‘Saracen’, though it became perjorative, derives from ‘Sarah’, Abraham’s wife, from whom Muhammed was supposed to have descended.)

  In practical terms, Christendom did not exist as a single entity. It was fought over by the rival Greek and Latin Churches. Yet inside Europe it was a crucial idea because it constantly ate away at alternative bonds of ethnic, geographical or tribal identity. The drive to convert the heathen, and bring them into the Christian family, created alliances between old Roman families and Frankish warlords; sent Irish monks to Scotland and England, and English missionaries to Germany; and allowed former tribal leaders from the forests and swamps of the east to join a bigger idea. Rival European peoples, speaking bastardized variants of sub-Latin strengthened with thickets of words from Celtic and Germanic tongues, would compete, and their rulers would fight, but at some level (unless they were heretics, pagans or Jews) they felt they were united under Christ.

  And this had a certain urgency. Overshadowing any folk memory of the lost classical world was an expectation that Christ’s second coming would not be long delayed. Paul’s warning had stuck. After food and shelter, the most pressing imperative of human life was to prepare for this event, which would mark the end of human history; building earthly civilizations came a distant second.

  Europeans’ greatest monuments were religious ones, the monasteries and the cathedrals built by generations who were patiently awaiting their end times. The biggest potential political project, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, never lived up to its nostalgic billing, either under the Franks or later under Germanic rulers. It was a long Gothic fantasy finally terminated by Napoleon. At a more practical level, however, there was a dogged knotting-together of European religious life. Greek may have been mostly lost, but clerical vulgate Latin was everywhere. In the early 500s St Benedict brought the monastic tradition from the Greek east into Italy, and his ‘Rule of Benedict’, obliging monks to be chaste, poor and obey their abbot, spread a rare message of peace and hope, drawing many young men from noble families away from careers of plunder and war.

  The secrets of Europe’s later success can be found in three things, which at the time seemed far from good news.

  First, there were the successive waves of tribal migration. These were caused by hunger on the huge grasslands of central Asia, where small changes in human numbers could not be sustained by the herding culture; and by similar pressures in agriculturally meagre areas such as Scandinavia. One tribal group would push the next further west, and so on, until they found themselves crossing the Danube or the Rhine and entering the old Roman world. In 376 the first rumbles of this movement began as Ostrogoths arrived in what are today Serbia and Bulgaria. They were followed by another tribe, the Alans, and then by the Visigoths, who settled in central France before heading for Spain. In 406 more tribes poured into Gaul over the Rhine, which had frozen. The Huns arrived in 441. The Vandals reached Spain and North Africa in short order, and later sacked Rome.

  Broadly, the Germanic tribes have been classed as, first, the Scandinavians; second, the North Sea peoples including Jutes, Angles and Saxons who migrated to England, Scotland, parts of France and the Low Countries; and third, the Lombards, Burgundians, Vandals, Goths and others who poured through France and into Spain and Italy.4 And behind the Germans would come the next migrant invaders, the Slavs.

  This brought with it the destruction of towns and churches, constant raiding and much misery for the settled farmers of the post-Roman continent. It created new kingdoms, carved out by warlords, who would themselves soon disappear, a fast-moving pattern of parasitic and squatter realms. The retreat of Roman rule had left behind a landscape of walled towns, cultivated fields and large estates that were still there when the marauders arrived. Neither the wine-growing landowners of southern France, nor the city fathers of Toulouse or Milan, nor the villa estates in the river valleys had any idea their world was ending. Outside Britain, the invaders met with little organized resistance as they grabbed for themselves landscapes more fertile and forgiving than any they had seen before. Farmers battened down the hatches.

  The sensible thing in dangerous times was to get protection. The migrations led to many peasants becoming voluntary serfs, accepting the control of a local armoured landowner, or knight, in return for a certain number of days’ work on his land and a payment in grain or livestock. This new departure resulted in the feudal system, which would in turn produce new political identities. For many people, perhaps most, these identities were more clearly defined by landowners than by kings – such dynasties as the Percys, Sforzas, Douglases and Brandenburgs. The Germanic tribal migrants added hugely to Europe’s already varied linguistic and cultural mix, since Celts, Latins, Iberians, Jews and Greeks remained in large numbers.

  In essence, the next centuries of European history were the story of how these invaders were digested and accommodated. But how could this story be any kind of good news?

  The answer is that competition works. It may have taken a few centuries of chopping and slashing, but the settlement and agglomeration of tribes produced a Europe of vigorously competing cultures, which would in turn become the dynastic and territorial states of later times. Lombards, Normans, eastern Franks and western Franks would evolve into Italians, French and Germans. The long-lasting conflict between Britons and Nordic invaders would eventually forge England and Scotland; and the Norman Conquest of 1066 would produce one of the strangest and most successful bastard nations of the region. Instead of living under a single emperor and a single theological authority, Europe would advance through competition and conflict, a buzzingly restless and sharp-elbowed culture. Dealing with centuries of inward migration made this change in direction inevitable.

  The second well disguised blessing has already been mentioned: the fact that the Northern Europeans were cut off from the rest of the world. The mighty Islamic caliphates, stretching from north of the Pyrenees through North Africa to the Middle East and central Asia, acted as a religious and military cordon, and one that few Christians would venture into. Inventions from other parts of the world, from algebra to paper, gunpowder to porcelain, would take a long time to reach Europe. The loss of power in what had been the Roman ocean, the Mediterranean, meant ‘Christendom’ had to look north. This forced the development of former Roman provinces which would become France, Burgundy and Britain, now brought fully into the Christian world.

  Across the European plains, with their thick soils of clay and loam, forests were torn down and heavy ploughs prepared for a landscape of barley and wheat. Popes turned to Frankish and Germanic rulers for protection because they had nowhere else to go; these Franks, Lombards and Goths were tamed in turn by southern influences. Towns in the north of Italy grew in importance. Genoa
and Venice made themselves independent trading republics.The independent cities and guilds of Germany and the Netherlands developed technologies and skills of their own. The trading cities of the Hanseatic League formed a close network. The English wool trade spread across the continent. The English, Irish and Scots, who had been marginal to Europe since the retreat of the Roman legions, rejoined the mainstream as missionaries, fighters and traders. Dynastic kingdoms such as those of Burgundy, the Habsburgs, the Jagiellons in Poland and the Plantagenets created super-sized feudal realms following little geographical logic.

  There was one significant exception to this relative isolation: the great Islamic civilization of al-Andalus in today’s Spain and Portugal, which we shall come to next. But pressed up against the Muslim world, whether in the north Spanish kingdoms of Aragón, Castile and León, or those of the Balkans such as Serbia and Wallachia, Christians defined themselves collectively as a fighting, front-line culture. The most famous example of this, the four main Crusades that aimed to recapture Jerusalem and the ‘Holy Land’ of Palestine from the Muslim Arabs, began as an attempt by the papacy to rally Europeans and bolster the authority of Rome. Though some Middle Eastern land was captured and held for generations, and though the call to war against the Heathen inspired mass devotion, their brutality and the resulting death-toll rendered the Crusades a failure. They poisoned the atmosphere fatally and semi-permanently between the two biggest Abrahamic faiths, and conclusively demonstrated that Constantine’s embracing of Jesus of Nazareth had corrupted his message: the Cross of suffering, pity and forgiveness emblazoned on the pennants of invading knights made no sense.

  The Crusades brought their military ethos back to the heart of Europe itself. The Teutonic knights carved out their own state in Prussia and Livonia, evolving from a pilgrim-warrior brotherhood dedicated to overthrowing the pagan people of the north to become a mini-empire of their own. Savage religious wars against Cathar heretics in the French Languedoc were made more brutal by the participation of battle-hardened knights-militant. Nor should we forget those who, with increasing unease, shared the continent and its islands without sharing its main linguistic roots or its political ideas at all – people such as the Irish Celts and followers of Scandinavian shamans. In Scotland a novel idea of kingship – kingship not of territory but of people voluntarily acknowledging a leader – emerged. Parts of Germany were ruled not by conventional feudal overlords but by bishops. Not only was Europe teeming with competing peoples – it was left with a far greater variety of political structures than anywhere else on the planet. Like a chemical reaction, the elements were mixed and compressed.