Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  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. With
out 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.*

  By then the Eastern and Western cores had each fragmented into ten-plus states, yet despite the similarities between the breakdowns in the two cores, Eastern social development continued to rise faster than Western. The explanation once again seems to be that it was not emperors and intellectuals who made history but millions of lazy, greedy, and frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. Regardless of the mayhem that rulers inflicted on them, ordinary people muddled along, making the best of things; and because the geographical realities within which Easterners and Westerners were muddling differed strongly, the political crises in each core ended up having very different consequences.

  In the East, the internal migration that had created a new frontier beyond the Yangzi since the fifth century was the real motor behind social development. The restoration of a unified empire in the sixth century had accelerated development’s increase, and by the eighth century the upward trend was so robust that it survived the fallout from Xuanzong’s love life. Political chaos certainly had negative consequences; a sharp dip in the Eastern score in 900 (Figure 7.1), for instance, was largely the result of rival armies wiping out the million-strong city of Chang’an. But most fighting remained far from the vital rice paddies, canals, and cities, and may actually have accelerated development by sweeping away the government micromanagers who had previously hobbled commerce. Unable to supervise state-owned lands in such troubled times, civil servants started raising money from monopolies and taxes on trade and stopped telling merchants how to do business. There was a transfer of power from the political centers of northern China to the merchants of the south, and merchants, left to their own devices, figured out still more ways to speed up commerce.

  Much of northern China’s overseas trade had been state-directed, between the imperial court and the rulers of Japan and Korea, and the collapse of Tang dynasty political power after 755 dissolved these links. Some results were positive; cut off from Chinese models, Japanese elite culture moved in remarkable and original directions, with a whole string of women writing literary masterpieces such as The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book. Most results, though, were negative. In northern China, Korea, and Japan economic slowdown and state breakdown went together in the ninth century.

  In southern China, by contrast, independent merchants exploited their new freedom from state power. Tenth-century shipwrecks found in the Java Sea since the 1990s contain not only Chinese luxuries but also pottery and glass from South Asia and the Muslim world, hinting at the expansion of markets in this region; and as local elites taxed the flourishing traders, the first strong Southeast Asian states emerged in what is now Sumatra and among the Khmers in Cambodia.

  The very different geography of western Eurasia, with no equivalent to the East’s rice frontier, meant that its political breakdown also had different consequences. In the seventh century the Arab conquests swept away the old boundary that had separated the Roman world from the Persian (Figure 7.7), setting off something of a boom in the Muslim core. Caliphs expanded irrigation in Iraq and Egypt, and travelers carried crops and techniques from the Indus to the Atlantic. Rice, sugar, and cotton spread across the Muslim Mediterranean, and by alternating crops farmers got two or three harvests from their fields. The Muslims who colonized Sicily even invented classic Western foods such as pasta and ice cream.

  However, the gains from overcoming the old barrier between Rome and Persia were increasingly offset by the losses caused by a new barrier across the Mediterranean, separating Islam from Christendom. As the southern and eastern Mediterranean grew more solidly Muslim (as late as 750, barely one person in ten under Arab rule was Muslim; by 950, it was more like nine in ten) and Arabic became its lingua franca, contact with Christendom declined; and then, as the caliphate fragmented after 800, emirs raised barriers within Islam, too. Some of the regions within the Muslim core, such as Spain, Egypt, and Iran, were big enough to get by on internal demand alone, but others declined.

  Figure 7.7. The fault line shifts: the heavy dashes represent the major economic-political-cultural fault line between 100 BCE and 600 CE, separating Rome from Persia; the solid line shows the major line after 650 CE, separating Islam from Christendom. At the top left is the Frankish Empire at its peak, around 800; at the bottom the Muslim world, showing the political divisions around 945.

  And while China’s ninth-century wars had mostly avoided the economic heartlands, Iraq’s fragile irrigation network was devastated by competing Turkic slave armies and a fourteen-year uprising of African plantation slaves under a leader who at various times claimed to be a poet, a prophet, and a descendant of ‘Ali.

  In the East, Korea and Japan drifted toward political breakdown when the northern Chinese core went into crisis; similarly, in the West the Christian periphery fragmented still further as the Muslim core came apart. Byzantines slaughtered one another by the thousands and split from the Roman Church over new doctrinal questions (especially whether God approved of images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints), and the Germanic kingdoms, largely cut off from the Mediterranean, began creating their own world.

  Some on this far western fringe expected it to become a core in its own right. Since the sixth century the Frankish people had become a regional power, and small trading towns now popped up around the North Sea to satisfy the Frankish aristocracy’s insatiable demand for luxuries. Theirs remained a low-end state, with little taxation or administration. Kings who were good at mobilizing their quarrelsome lords could quickly put together large but loose realms embracing much of western Europe, but under weak kings these equally quickly broke down. Kings with too many sons usually ended up dividing their lands among them—which often simply led to wars to reunite the patrimony.

  The later eighth century was a particularly good time for the Franks. In the 750s the pope in Rome sought their protection against local bullies, and on Christmas morning, 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne* was even able to get Pope Leo III to kneel before him in St. Peter’s and crown him Roman emperor.

  Charlemagne vigorously tried to build a kingdom worthy of the title he claimed. His armies carried fire, the sword, and Christianity into eastern Europe and pushed the Muslims back into Spain, while his literate bureaucracy gathered some taxes, assembled scholars at Aachen (“a Rome yet to be,” one of his court poets called it), created a stable coinage, and oversaw a trade revival. It is tempting to compare Charlemagne to Xiaowen, who, three centuries before, had moved the Northern Wei kingdom on China’s rough frontier toward the high end, jump-starting the process that led to the reunification of the Eastern core. Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome certainly speaks of ambitions like Xiaowen’s, as do the embassies he sent to seek Baghdad’s friendship. So impressed was the caliph, Frankish chronicles say, that he sent Charlemagne an elephant.

  Arab sources, however, mention neither Franks nor elephants. Charlemagne was no Xiaowen, and apparently counted for little in the caliph’s councils. Nor did Charlemagne’s claim to be Roman emperor move the Byzantine empress Irene* to abdicate in his favor. The reality was that the Frankish kingdom never moved very far toward the high end. For all Charlemagne’s pretensions, he had no chance of reuniting the core or even turning the Christian fringe into a single state.

  One of the things Charlemagne did achieve, unfortunately, was to raise social development enough to lure raiders into his empire from the even wilder lands beyond the Christian periphery. By the time he died in 814, Viking longboats from Scandinavia were nosing up rivers into the empire’s heart, Magyars on tough little steppe ponies were plundering Germany, and Saracen pirates from North Africa were about to sack Rome itself. Aachen was ill equipped to respond; when Vikings beached their
ships and burned villages, royal armies came late or not at all. Increasingly, countryfolk turned to local big men to defend them, and townspeople turned to their bishops and mayors. By the time Charlemagne’s three grandsons divided the empire among themselves in 843, kings had ceased to mean much to most of their subjects.

  UNDER PRESSURE

  As if these strains were not enough, after 900 Eurasia came under a new kind of pressure—literally; as Earth’s orbit kept shifting, atmospheric pressure increased over the landmass, weakening the westerlies blowing off the Atlantic into Europe and the monsoons blowing off the Indian Ocean into southern Asia. Averaged across Eurasia, temperatures probably rose 1–2°F between 900 and 1300 and rainfall declined by perhaps 10 percent.

  As always, climate change forced people to adapt, but left it up to them to decide just how to do that. In cold, wet northern Europe this so-called Medieval Warm Period was often welcome, and population probably doubled between 1000 and 1300. In the hotter, drier Islamic core, however, it could be less welcome. Overall population in the Muslim world probably fell by 10 percent, but some areas, particularly in North Africa, flourished. In 908 Ifriqiya,* roughly modern Tunisia (Figure 7.8), broke away from the caliphs in Baghdad. Radical Shiites† set up a line of officially infallible caliph-imams, known as Fatimids because they claimed descent (and imamhood) from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. In 969 these Fatimids conquered Egypt, where they built a great new city at Cairo and invested in irrigation. By 1000 Egypt had the highest social development in the West, and Egyptian traders were fanning out across the Mediterranean.