by Morris, Ian;
Along with merchants came clerics, drawn by the Mongols’ relaxed attitudes about religion. “Just as God gave different fingers to the hand,” Ögödei’s successor told a Christian, “so He has given different ways to men.” Curious about these ways, in 1254 the khan decided to stage a public debate among Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Only in Karakorum could this have happened.
A great crowd gathered to watch the learned doctors, but the experiment was not a success. Following Mongol traditions, the contestants were served fermented mares’ milk between rounds of debate, and as the day wore on, their arguments lost focus. Their dialectical skills blunted by alcohol, the Christians lapsed into singing hymns. The Muslims responded by chanting Koranic verses, and the Buddhists withdrew into silent contemplation. Eventually, too drunk to go on, the Christians and Muslims followed their example.
Figure 8.4. The Second Old World Exchange: eight overlapping zones of trade and travel that carried progress and disaster from one end of Eurasia to the other
Despite the failure of interfaith dialogue, Westerners kept coming. Muslim traders carried Eastern goods to Caffa in Crimea, selling them there to Italians, who not only sold them on to north Europeans (Chinese silk first showed up in French markets in 1257) but also followed the goods back to their source. Marco Polo’s uncles left Caffa in 1260 and kept moving until they reached Beijing, then made a second trip, with young Marco in tow, in 1274. Missionaries followed, and in 1305 a Christian friar who had just arrived in Beijing could boast that the steppe route was faster and safer than the sea route.
The First Old World Exchange had strung a few gossamer-thin threads end-to-end across Eurasia, but the Second spun a real web, with enough people moving across it to make the centuries after 1100 the first true age of technological transfer. This worked almost entirely to the advantage of the backward West. Something so seemingly obvious as the wheelbarrow, invented in China around the first century CE, made it to Europe only around 1250, and horse collars, used in China since the fifth century CE, arrived there about the same time.
By far the most important technological transfer, though, was cheap cast-iron tools. These appeared in China in the sixth century BCE and were common by the first. Arabs knew about cast iron by the eleventh century CE, but Europeans not until 1380. If you have ever tried moving earth without iron picks and shovels you will know what a difference this made. Once when I was a graduate student on an excavation in Greece the key to our storeroom went missing and we had to start digging without our collection of iron tools. Soil seems remarkably hard and heavy when you approach it like a pre-1380 European. I can vouch that the Second Old World Exchange revolutionized Western energy capture.
So, too, its information technology. Chinese artisans first made paper from mulberry bark in 105 CE, and wood-pulp paper was common by 700. Arabs learned of paper around 750 (reputedly by capturing Chinese papermakers in central Asia) but Italians only started buying it from them after 1150 and making their own in 1276. By then Chinese publishers had been using engraved woodblocks to print paper books for five centuries and using movable type for two centuries; Europeans only borrowed or reinvented woodblocks around 1375 and movable type around 1430. Chinese and Indian innovations in rigging and steering also moved west, passing through Arab hands into the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century.
Along with ancient technologies such as the wheelbarrow, Westerners also picked up the newest advances. The magnetic compass, first mentioned in a Chinese text in 1119, had reached Arabs and Europeans by 1180, and guns moved even faster. During the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of China, Eastern craftsmen learned how to make gunpowder oxidize quickly enough that it would explode, not just burn, and started using this nasty new trick to propel arrows from bamboo tubes. The oldest known true gun—a foot-long bronze tube found in Manchuria that could fire lead bullets—probably dates to 1288. In 1326, barely a generation later, a manuscript from Florence described a brass gun, and illustrations painted in a manuscript from Oxford the next year show two crude but unmistakable cannons. The first known Arabic use of guns came soon after, in a war in Spain in 1331. Most likely western Europeans learned about guns directly from Mongols on the steppes and then taught Spanish Muslims. It took another generation, until 1360, for these loud new weapons to work their way back to Egypt.
Over the next few centuries guns would change much in the West, but even so, the most important commodities being moved around in the Second Old World Exchange, as in the First, were germs. “Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague that devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” wrote the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. “It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.” The Black Death* had arrived.
The plague probably evolved in Inner Asia and spread along the Silk Roads. One Arabic scholar (who himself died of it) said it began on the steppes around 1331, and in that same year an epidemic raged along the middle Yangzi Valley, reportedly killing nine people out of ten. We cannot know if this was the same bacillus that devastated Eurasia over the next two decades, but a plague mentioned on Mongolian tombstones in 1338 and 1339 almost certainly was. In 1340 we lose sight of it for a few years; then—abruptly—it was everywhere at once. Sickness gripped China’s east coast in 1345, and the next year a Mongol army brought the plague to Caffa in Crimea,* the very city from which Marco Polo’s uncles had departed for Beijing nearly a century before. The Second Old World Exchange had come full circle.
In 1347 merchants carried the pestilence to every harbor in the Mediterranean. From England to Iraq the classic symptoms of bubonic plague showed up—“Swellings appeared suddenly in the armpit or the groin, in many cases both,” a French chronicler recorded in 1348, “and were infallible signs of death.” A pneumonic mutation, spread by coughing, was even deadlier. “People spat bits of blood, and one was covered with blotches and died,” a poet in Damascus bluntly commented. He died of plague in 1363.
Author after author describes graveyards too full to accommodate more corpses, priests dropping dead while reading the last rites, and entire villages emptied. “The souls of men have become very cheap,” another Damascus poet observed. “Each soul is worth but a kernel”—a gruesome pun on the word “habbah,” meaning both “kernel of grain” and “pustule,” the bubonic plague’s first symptom.
By 1351 the disease had killed a third or even half of all westerners, working its way from the Mediterranean to the fringes of Muscovy, whence it raced back to China. That year the “green-eyed Christian[s]” whom the emperor recruited from Inner Asia to fight rebels brought the plague with them. It killed half the army and then ravaged China every year until 1360. We cannot calculate the death toll, but it was clearly horrendous.
There is no good time for something like the Black Death to visit humanity, but it is hard to think of a worse time than the 1340s. The balmy Medieval Warm Period had drawn to a close, ushering in what climatologists often call the Little Ice Age. From Norway to China, glaciers grew. The Denmark Strait, separating Greenland and Iceland, regularly froze after 1350. Norsemen abandoned their settlements on Greenland and polar bears wandered across the ice bridge to Iceland, which was now cold enough for them. The Baltic Sea froze in 1303 and again in 1306–1307; in 1309–1310 the river Thames in temperate England iced over too. Between 1315 and 1317 it rained so much in northwest Europe that crops rotted in the ground and—a truly astonishing detail—it got too muddy for knights to fight.
With harvests failing and loved ones dying, it was hard not to conclude that God was sending a message. In China endemic banditry turned into religious revolt, directed mainly against the Mongol occupiers. As the alien emperor amused himself with pleasure boats and orgies, messianic cult leaders announced that the Buddha was returning to right the world’s wrongs and usher everyone into Paradise. By 1350 the empire was disintegrating.
We know rather little about events in the old Western core
in Iraq, whose Mongol rulers were every bit as incompetent as those in China, but in Egypt and Syria the plague may have strengthened Islam. Clearly not everyone bought the official line that the plague was meant to punish only infidels (for believers, death from it was a mercy and a martyrdom)—the chronicler al-Wardi, for instance, wrote, “We ask God’s for giveness for our souls’ bad inclination; the plague is surely part of His punishment,” and vendors of magical defenses had a field day—but the most popular responses by far were mass prayer sessions, processions to the tombs of holy men, and tougher laws against alcohol and moral laxity.
Things looked much grimmer to many Christians. Not only did God seem to be punishing them—“My mind reels as I prepare to write of the sentence that divine justice, in its infinite mercy, meted out to men,” one Italian lamented—but the church itself also seemed to be coming apart. In 1303 a French king had had the pope himself beaten up and thrown in prison, and soon thereafter the papal court relocated to Avignon in France, where it became a byword for corruption and decadence. One pope even made it illegal to say that Jesus had been poor. Eventually some cardinals decamped back to Rome and elected a counterpope, who squabbled with the Avignon pope over every conceivable issue; and for a few debilitating years after 1409 there were actually three rival popes, all claiming to be God’s vicar on earth.
Since the church had failed them, people took matters into their own hands. The most creative were the Flagellants:
Stripped to the waist, they gathered in large groups and bands and marched in procession through the crossroads and squares of cities and good towns. There they formed circles and beat upon their backs with whips, rejoicing as they did so in loud voices and singing hymns … Many honorable women and devout matrons, it must be added, had done this penance with whips, marching and singing through towns and churches like the men.
Others favored more traditional remedies such as massacring Jews, even though (as one of the popes pointed out in 1348) Jews were dying as fast as Christians. But nothing worked, and social development in the Western core around the Mediterranean fell as fast in the great plague delivered by the Second Old World Exchange as it had done during the plagues delivered by the First. No wonder the end seemed nigh.
DIFFERENT RIVERS
History looked to be repeating itself. In the first century CE Western social development had risen to a hard ceiling around forty-three points, strained against it, and set off a centuries-long, Old World–wide collapse. Eleven hundred years later, Eastern social development rose to the same level and set off similar disasters. Had von Däniken’s aliens from outer space been orbiting Earth again in 1350 they might well have concluded that human history was locked in a series of boom-and-bust cycles, bouncing against an unbreakable hard ceiling.
But like all the spacemen I have imagined so far, they would have been mistaken, because another historical law was also operating. I commented earlier that not even Genghis Khan could step into the same river twice; and neither could the horsemen of the apocalypse. The cores across which the horsemen rode during the Second Old World Exchange were very different from those they had devastated during the First Old World Exchange, which meant that the Second Exchange had very different consequences from the First.
Most obviously, both cores were geographically bigger when the Second Exchange intensified around 1200 than they had been during the First (Figure 8.5), and size mattered. On the one hand, larger cores generated larger disruptions: it is hard to quantify calamity, but the plagues, famines, and migrations that began in the thirteenth century do seem to have been even worse than those that began in the second century. On the other hand, though, larger cores also meant greater depth to absorb shocks and larger reserves to hasten recovery. Japan, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean Basin, and most of Europe escaped Mongol devastation in the thirteenth century; Japan and Southeast Asia avoided the Black Death in the fourteenth too; and in the very heart of China the Yangzi Delta region seems to have come through the disasters remarkably well.
Economic geography had also changed. Around 100 CE the Western core was richer and more developed than the Eastern, but by 1200 the reverse was true. It was the Eastern core, not the Western, that was now straining against the hard ceiling, and Eastern commercial networks (especially those linking southern China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean) dwarfed anything in the West.
Figure 8.5. Size matters: horizontal lines mark areas in the Eastern and Western cores ruled by states around 100 CE, on the eve of the first Old World crisis, and diagonal lines show where states had spread by 1200, just before the second crisis
Changes in political geography reinforced economics. Back in 100 CE most trade in each core had gone on within the boundaries of a single great empire; by 1200 that was no longer true. Both cores were politically messier than they had been in antiquity, and even when great empires once again consolidated the old heartlands after the Black Death, the political relationships were very different. Any great empire now had to deal with a surrounding ring of smaller states. In the East the relationships were mainly commercial and diplomatic; in the West they were mainly violent.
Put together, these changes meant that the cores not only recovered faster from the Second Old World Exchange than from the First but also recovered in different ways.
In the West the Ottoman Turks quickly rebuilt an empire in the old heartland in the fourteenth century. The Ottomans were just one of dozens of Turkic clans that settled in Anatolia around 1300 after the Mongols had shattered the older Muslim kingdoms (Figure 8.6), but within a few years of the Black Death they had already got the better of their rivals and established a European bridgehead. By the 1380s they were bullying the pitiful remnants of the Byzantine Empire, and by 1396 they scared Christendom so badly that the squabbling popes of Rome and Avignon briefly agreed to join forces in sending a crusade against them.
It was a disaster, but Christian hopes briefly revived when Tamerlane, a Mongol chieftain who made Genghis Khan look well adjusted, led new steppe incursions into the Muslim world. In 1400 the Mongols annihilated Damascus and in 1401 sacked Baghdad, reportedly using the skulls of ninety thousand of its residents as bricks for a series of towers they built around the ruins. In 1402 Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans and threw the sultan into a cage, where he expired of shame and exposure. But then Christian hopes failed. Instead of staying to devastate the remaining Muslim lands, Tamerlane decided that the emperor of distant China had insulted him and swung his horsemen around. He died in 1405 while riding east to avenge the slight.
Saved by the bell, the Ottomans bounced back into business within twenty years, but as they advanced through the Balkans they had to learn some tough lessons. When the Mongols defeated them in 1402 both armies had fought as steppe warriors had done for two thousand years, with clouds of mounted archers enveloping and shooting down slower-moving foes. European armies could not compete head-to-head with these swarms of light horsemen, but they had improved their newfangled guns to the point that in 1444 a Hungarian army gave the ottomans a nasty shock. With small cannons mounted on wagons that were roped together as mobile forts, Hungarian firepower stopped the Turkish cavalry in its tracks. Had the Hungarian king not galloped out ahead of his men and got himself killed he probably would have won the day.
Figure 8.6. The revival of the West, 1350–1500. The shaded area shows the extent of the ottoman Turkish empire in 1500—by which time the Western core was moving decisively northward and westward.
The Turks, quick learners, figured out the best response: buy European firepower. This new technology was expensive, but even Europe’s richest states, such as Venice and Genoa, were paupers next to the sultans. Hiring Italians as admirals and siege engineers, training enslaved Christian boys as an elite infantry corps, and recruiting European gunners, the Ottomans were soon on the move again. When they began their 1453 assault on Constantinople, still the greatest fortress on earth and the main barrier to Turkish power, the Turks
hired away the Byzantines’ top gunner, a Hungarian. This gunner made the Ottomans an iron cannon big enough to throw a thousand-pound stone ball, with a roar loud enough (chroniclers said) to make pregnant women miscarry. The gun in fact cracked on the second day and was useless by the fourth or fifth, but the Hungarian also cast smaller, more practical cannon that succeeded where the giant failed.
For the first and only time in its history, Constantinople’s walls failed. Thousands of panic-stricken Byzantines crowded into the church of Hagia Sophia—“the earthly heaven, the second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory of God,” Gibbon called it—trusting in a prophecy that when infidels attacked the church an angel would descend, sword in hand, to restore the Roman Empire. But no angel came; Constantinople fell; and with it, Gibbon concluded, the Roman Empire finally expired.*
As the Turks advanced, European kings fought more fiercely against one another as well as against the infidel, and a genuine arms race took off. France and Burgundy led the way in the 1470s, their gunners casting cannons with thicker barrels, forming gunpowder into corns that ignited faster, and using iron rather than stone cannonballs. The result was smaller, stronger, and more portable guns that rendered older weapons obsolete. The new guns were light enough to be loaded onto expensive new warships, driven by sails, not oars, with gun ports cut so low in the hull that iron cannonballs could hole enemy ships right at the waterline.
It was hard for anyone but a king to afford this kind of technology, and slowly but surely western European monarchs bought enough of the new weapons to intimidate the lords, independent cities, and bishops whose messy, overlapping jurisdictions had made earlier European states so weak. Along the Atlantic littoral, kings created bigger, stronger states—France, Spain, and England—within which the royal writ ran everywhere and the nation, not far-flung aristocratic clans or popes in Rome, had first claim on people’s loyalties. And once they had muscled their lords aside, kings could build up bureaucracies, tax the people directly, and buy more guns—which of course forced neighboring kings to buy more guns too, and pushed everyone to raise still more money.
