by Morris, Ian;
As times got tougher, Western rulers tried to raise the costs of revolt by insisting more firmly that they represented God’s will made flesh. Ottoman sultans courted religious scholars more aggressively and western European intellectuals developed theories of “absolutism.” Kings’ authority, they claimed, came from God’s grace alone, and neither parliaments, nor churchmen, nor the will of the people could curtail it. According to the French catchphrase, it was “un roi, une foi, un loi”: one king, one faith, one law. Challenging any part of this package deal meant challenging everything good and pure.
But plenty of disgruntled subjects were ready to do just that. In 1622 Osman II, who as Turkey’s sultan and caliph was both Muhammad’s successor and God’s representative on earth, tried to curtail his increasingly expensive Janissaries; they responded by dragging him from his palace, strangling him, and mutilating his divine body. Osman’s brother tried to salvage the situation by allying himself with hard-line clerics, even banning coffee and instituting the death penalty for smoking to please them, but in the 1640s the sultans’ legitimacy failed completely. In 1648 the Janissaries, now allied with the clerics, executed Sultan Ibrahim the Crazy (perhaps none too soon; he fully deserved his nickname) and fifty years of civil wars began.
The 1640s were a royal nightmare almost everywhere. Anti-absolutist rebellions paralyzed France, and in England Parliament went to war with its pushy king and cut off his head. That let the genie out of the bottle; if a godlike king could be tried and executed, what was not possible? For perhaps the first time since ancient Athens, democratic ideas bubbled up. “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he,” asserted one colonel in the parliamentary army; “every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.”
This was strong stuff for the seventeenth century, but splinter groups of English radicals were even wilder. The Levellers, as one faction called itself, rejected all social distinctions. “None comes into the world with a saddle upon his back,” they pointed out, “neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” And if hierarchy was unnatural, surely so too was property. Within a year of the king’s execution a group calling themselves True Levellers had split off and set up ten communes. Another splinter group, the Ranters, labeled God “that mighty Leveller” and preached permanent revolution—“Overturn, overturn, overturn … Have all things in common, or else the plague of God will rot and consume all that you have.”
Leveling was an idea whose time had come. Take, for instance, a 1644 report on Levellers who
sharpened their hoes into swords, and took to themselves the title of “Leveling Kings,” declaring that they were leveling the distinction between masters and serfs, titled and mean, rich and poor. The tenants seized hold of their masters’ best clothes … they would order the masters to kneel and pour the wine for them. They would slap them across the cheeks and say: “We are all of us equally men. What right had you to call us serfs?”
These leveling warlords, however, were not Englishmen; they were in fact rampaging around China’s east coast. In East and West alike, the radical challenges to established hierarchy discussed earlier—such as Wang Yangming’s to Zhu Xi thought in 1490s China and Martin Luther’s to Catholicism in 1510s Europe—combined with state failure to produce new ideas about the equality of man. As we will see, though, these ideas had very different fates in the eighteenth century.
In China, the Ming dynasty was paralyzed by bankruptcy and factionalism, and when famine—a third horseman of the apocalypse—broke loose in 1628, the emperors seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. Rebels increasingly felt that no act was too extreme. The country dissolved into warlordism in the 1630s; in 1644 Beijing fell. The last Ming emperor hanged himself from a lonely tree behind the palace. “I, feeble and of small virtue, have offended against Heaven,” he painted on his robe. “Ashamed to face my ancestors, I die. Removing my imperial cap and with my hair disheveled about my face, I leave to the rebels the dismemberment of my body. Let them not harm my people!”
He was wasting his last words. The warlords no more had the money to pay their swollen armies than did Europe’s kings, Turkey’s sultans, or the Ming emperor himself, so they turned their men loose to extract payment from civilians. Armies have plundered the innocent since war began, and probably worked out all the possible variations on savagery quite early on, merely repeating them in resounding counterpoint through subsequent ages of horror. But all over Eurasia, angry, greedy, and frightened soldiers seem to have plumbed new depths of cruelty in the harsh seventeenth century. Torture, mass executions, and gang rapes fill our sources. When Beijing fell civilians
were subjected to cruel beatings to extract any silver they might have. Some were tortured with finger or limb presses more than three or four times. And some implicated others, so that thousands of commoner households were affected … people began to lose interest in living.
If anything, the violence unleashed by state failure was even worse in the West. Europe’s religious wars reached a terrible climax in Germany between 1618 and 1648. From every corner of Christendom came enormous armies; paid irregularly, if at all, they lived off the land, extorting whatever they could. The surviving sources are full of outrages and brutalities. The little town of Beelitz, which had the misfortune to be in the path of the Holy Roman Emperor’s army in 1637, is as good (or bad) an example as any. A customs officer wrote that after rounding up locals,
the robbers and murderers took a piece of wood and stuck it down the poor wretches’ throats, stirred it and poured in water, adding sand or even human feces, and pitifully tortured the people for money, as transpired with a citizen of Beelitz called David Örtel, who died of it soon after.
Another band of soldiers hung a Beelitzer over a fire and roasted him until he led them to his savings; only for yet another band, hearing that their comrades had scorched money out of him, to carry him back to the fire and hold his face in it “for so long that he died of it and his skin even came off like that of a slaughtered goose.”
Historians long assumed that stories like these were religious propaganda, too awful to be true, but recent research suggests otherwise. More than 2 million died violently (numbers not matched until the twentieth-century world wars) and maybe ten times as many from the famines and disease—the third and fourth horsemen—that came in the wake of the armies. Both China and central Europe saw population fall by perhaps one-third, like a man-made Black Death.
The plague itself, back in fierce new forms, played its own part. Daniel Defoe’s fictionalized Journal of the Plague Year, put together fifty years after the facts, vividly described the rumors, panic, and suffering that swept London in 1665, and Chinese doctors’ reports are almost as graphic. “Sometimes everyone has swollen neck glands and sometimes everyone’s face and head swell up,” one recorded in the Yangzi Delta in 1642; or “sometimes everyone suffers from diarrhea and intermittent fever. Or it might be cramps, or pustules, or a rash, or itching scabs, or boils.”
Four of the five horsemen of the apocalypse were riding in force, yet as Figure 9.1 shows, there was no seventeenth-century collapse. Social development kept moving up, passing forty-three points, the level where Roman and Song scores had both peaked, in the East in 1710 (give or take twenty-five years, depending on the index’s accuracy) and in the West in 1723 (again, thereabouts). By 1800 both East and West were approaching fifty points. Why, we have to ask, did development buck the historical trend?
CLOSING THE STEPPES
Nerchinsk, August 22, 1689. Siberia’s short summers can be strangely beautiful. Every year as the ground thaws, dark shoots of grass carpet the gentle hills with green, splashed with red, yellow, and blue wildflowers and butterflies. But this summer was different: along the banks of the Shilka River (Figure 9.5) a tent town sprang up and hundreds of Chinese negotiators, using Christian missionaries to present their terms in Latin, sat down with grizzled Russ
ians to work out a mutual frontier.*
The Russians were far from home. As recently as 1500 Moscow had been just one principality among many in Europe’s wild east, struggling to find space between Mongols raiding from the steppes and knights pushing outward from Poland, Germany, and Lithuania. Its thuggish, illiterate princes called themselves tsars (that is, caesars), signaling Byzantine and even Roman pretensions, yet they often seemed unsure whether they wanted to be European-style kings or Mongol-style khans. Not until the days of Ivan the Terrible—sadistic even by the disturbing standards of Russian rulers—in the 1550s did Moscow count for much, but Ivan quickly made up for lost time. Musket-toting adventurers crossed the Ural Mountains and in 1598 defeated the local Mongol khan, opening the way to Siberia.
Figure 9.5. The end of the steppes: the empires strike back. By 1750 Russia and China had shut down the steppe highway.
Best known now as the frozen setting of Solzhenitsyn’s tales from the gulag, Siberia then struck Russians as a place to get rich. Fur fever gripped them: having long ago hunted their own marten, sable, and ermine into extinction, Europeans would now pay well for their coats. Within forty years Russian fur men, racing across the tundra to feed this lucrative market, stood on the shores of the Pacific. They had strung a thin line of stockades across the edge of Siberia’s frozen forests, and from these they ventured out to trap mink or extort skins from the local Stone Age hunters; and though these empty wastes were hardly an empire by the standards of Suleiman or Hideyoshi, taxes on fur saved more than one tsar from disaster.
Russian trappers and Chinese troopers soon clashed along the Amur River, but by the 1680s both sides were ready to talk. Each feared that the other, like so many misguided monarchs before them, would invite in the Mongols as allies and unleash the fifth horseman, steppe migration; and so they came to Nerchinsk.
Their agreement in that Siberian summer formalized one of the great shifts in world history. For two thousand years the steppes had been an East-West highway largely beyond the control of the great agrarian empires. Migrants, microbes, ideas, and inventions had rushed along it, tying together East and West in linked rhythms of development and collapse. Under rare circumstances, and at great cost, conquering kings such as Darius of Persia, the Han emperor Wudi, or the Tang emperor Taizong had imposed their will on the steppes, but these were exceptions. The rule was that agrarian empires paid whatever the nomads asked and hoped for the best.
Guns changed all that. Nomads regularly used firearms (the oldest known gun, from 1288, was found in nomad country in Manchuria*) and it was probably Mongols who brought guns from China to the West. But as guns got better (shooting farther and faster) and empires got more organized, generals who could afford to recruit tens of thousands of infantry, arm them with muskets and cannons, and train them to fire volley after volley started defeating nomad cavalry. Around 1500, mounted archers from the steppes still regularly beat infantry from agricultural kingdoms. By 1600, they sometimes did so. But by 1700 it was almost unheard of.
The Russians took the lead. In the 1550s Ivan the Terrible’s artillery had swept weak Mongol khanates out of the Volga Basin, and across the next hundred years Russians, Turks, and Poles steadily enclosed the dry Ukrainian steppes with garrisons, ditches, and palisades. Villagers armed with muskets first channeled the nomads’ movements and finally cut them off altogether, and at Nerchinsk, Russia and China agreed that no one—not refugees, traders, deserters, and above all not migrating nomads—would move along the steppes without their permission. All would now be subjects of agrarian empires.
The Inner Asians’ last hurrah, in 1644, reveals how much had changed. China’s Ming dynasty collapsed that year when a warlord took Beijing, and as civil war spiraled out of control, a former Ming general decided that inviting the Manchus—seminomads from Manchuria—to cross the Great Wall and reestablish order would be the lesser of numerous evils. Chinese leaders had a long tradition of bringing Inner Asians into the empire’s civil wars, generally with disastrous results. But unlike earlier invaders, the Manchus came not as nomadic cavalry but with an army virtually indistinguishable from China’s, based on massed infantry using muskets and cannons copied from the Portuguese.
The Manchus took Beijing unopposed, announced themselves to be a new Qing dynasty, and then spent almost forty years fighting to consolidate their power. These struggles also differed from the aftermaths of earlier steppe invasions. Rather than opening the floodgates for more nomads to come in from the cold, the long struggle just forged a Qing army capable of pushing back into Inner Asia. In 1697 the Qing destroyed a great nomad force deep in Mongolia and in 1720 extended Chinese power for the first time into mountainous Tibet. In the 1750s the Qing imposed a final solution on the nomad problem, dragging their guns, powder, and shot to the borders of modern Kyrgyzstan, where they smashed the last resistance.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the agrarian empires—above all, Romanov Russia and Qing China—effectively killed one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Because of this, the pressure of social development against the hard ceiling did not trigger waves of steppe migration the way it had done in the second and twelfth centuries; and because of that, it seems, even the combined weight of state failure, famine, disease, and climate change was not enough to drive the cores into collapse. The steppe highway had been closed, and with it closed an entire chapter of Old World history.
For nomads this was an unmitigated disaster. Those who survived the wars were increasingly hemmed in. Free movement, the foundation of their way of life, came to depend on the whims of distant emperors, and from the eighteenth century onward the once-proud steppe warriors were increasingly reduced to hired hands, thugs such as the Cossacks, deployed to keep unruly peasants in line.
For the empires, though, closing the steppe highway was a triumph. Inner Asia, so long a source of danger, became a new frontier. As nomad raids declined, a million or two Russians and five or ten million Chinese drifted from the crowded cores to new lands along the edges of the steppe frontier. Once there, those tough enough to make it carved up the landscape for farming, mining, and logging, sending raw materials and taxes back to the empires’ heartlands. Closing the steppe highway did not just avert collapse; it also began a steppe bonanza, cracking the hard ceiling that had for millennia limited social development to the low forties on the index.
OPENING THE OCEANS
As the Russians and Chinese were closing the old steppe highway, western Europeans were opening a new oceanic highway that would change history even more dramatically.
For a century after western Europeans first crossed the Atlantic and entered the Indian Ocean, their maritime empires did not seem so very unusual. Venetians had been enriching themselves by tapping Indian Ocean trade since the thirteenth century; by sailing around Africa’s southern tip rather than haggling their way across the Turkish Empire, Portuguese sailors simply did the same thing more cheaply and quickly. In the Americas the Spaniards had entered a wholly New World, but what they did there was really quite like what the Russians would later do in Siberia.
Both Spaniards and Russians outsourced everything possible. Ivan the Terrible gave the Stroganov family a monopoly on everything east of the Urals in return for a cut of the takings; Spain’s kings gave more or less anyone who asked the right to keep whatever they could find in the Americas so long as the Habsburgs got 20 percent. In both Siberia and America tiny bands of desperadoes fanned out, scattering stockades built at their own expense across mind-boggling expanses of unmapped territory and constantly writing home for more money and more European women.
Where fur fever drove Russians, bullion fever drove Spaniards. Cortés set Spain on this path by sacking Tenochtitlán in 1521, and Francisco Pizarro speeded them further along it. In 1533 he kidnapped the Inca king Atahualpa and as ransom ordered his subjects to stuff a room twenty-two feet long, seventeen feet across, and nine feet high with treasure. Pizarro melted the accumulated artistic tri
umphs of Andean civilization into ingots—13,420 pounds of gold and 26,000 pounds of silver—and then strangled Atahualpa anyway.
The relatively easy pickings ran out by 1535, but dreams of El Dorado, the Golden King of a realm where treasure lay all around, kept the cutthroats coming. “Every day they did nothing else but think about gold and silver and the riches of the Indies of Peru,” one chronicler lamented. “They were like a man in desperation, crazy, mad, out of their minds with greed for gold and silver.”
The madness found a new outlet in 1555, when improved techniques for extracting silver suddenly made New World mining highly profitable. Output was prodigious: some fifty thousand tons of American silver reached Europe between 1540 and 1700, two-thirds of it from Potosí, a mountain in what is now Bolivia that turned out to be virtually solid ore. By the 1580s Europe’s stock of silver had doubled and the Habsburg take had grown tenfold—even though, as a Spanish visitor to Potosí claimed in 1638, “Every peso coin minted in Potosí has cost the life of ten Indians.” In another parallel with Russia, the Habsburgs came to look on their conquest of the wild periphery chiefly as a way to finance wars to build a land empire in Europe. “Potosí lives in order to serve the imposing aspirations of Spain,” one visitor wrote. “It serves to chastise the Turk, humble the Moor, make Flanders tremble, and terrify England.”
