The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Other contemporaries at Paris, Siger of Brabant, for example, argued that philosophy and faith could not be reconciled, that in fact they contradicted one another and so, if this were the case, ‘the realm of reason and science must be in some sense outside the sphere of theology’ (italics added). An important break had been made.

  In his recent account, Stark – building on Whitehead, Lopez, Cipolla, Lindberg and others – insists that the three elements discussed above – Christian ideals and accumulated layers of Christian thought, many small political units and, within them, diverse, well-matched interest groups – ‘occurred nowhere else in the world, and created a political and intellectual freedom that were the necessary preconditions for the development of the modern world’.32

  THE ZONE OF TURBULENCE AGAIN

  This is not the whole picture. There is no shortage of scholars who argue that, by the eleventh, and even more by the twelfth century, many disparate parts of the Old World were already integrated into a system of exchange from which all apparently benefited equally. In region after region across Eurasia, for example, there was by that time an efflorescence of cultural and artistic achievement: Sung celadon ware in China, turquoise-glazed bowls in Persia, furniture inlaid with gold and silver in Mamluk Egypt, cathedral building in west Europe, the great Hindu temple complexes in India. On this version, Europe until this point was the least developed region of the Old World and perhaps had the most to gain from the new links being forged.33

  Moreover, between AD 1250 and 1350 an international trade economy was developing that stretched all the way from north-western Europe to China. The main goods traded were cloth – silk, wool, linen and cotton – and spices grown mainly in the east, from India onwards, and which were used to flavour the meat diet of the cultures further west, in a world without refrigeration. Trade was facilitated by the fact that, although people spoke many tongues, in fact Arabic covered a wide area, thanks to Islam’s religious conquests from the seventh century on, as did Greek and the vernaculars of Latin and Mandarin Chinese (although Arabic didn’t travel as far as Islam did, in Indonesia, for example). The currencies were not the same everywhere: silver was valued in Europe, gold in the Middle East, copper in China, but this was not insuperable either.

  At this point, if any country had the lead it was, according to Janet Abu-Lughod, for example, China, whose level of metallurgy in the twelfth century would not be equalled in Europe until the sixteenth, nor its paper-making and printing technology, which were several centuries ahead of those in Europe. Still more to the point, she says, the invention of paper money and credit took place first not in the monasteries of Europe but in China, where the introduction of paper bills in the ninth century, credit, the pooling of capital and the distribution of risk began and spread, first to the Arab world, then to the Mediterranean, then to western Europe.34

  Scholars such as Abu-Lughod argue therefore that Europe did not so much pull ahead by the mechanisms outlined by Stark – rather, they say, the East dropped behind, and it did so for three reasons. The first was the progressive fragmentation of the overland trade routes across the Eurasia steppes. In the first millennium AD, the pastoral nomads of the steppes had continued the pattern of their forebears in the first millennium BC, with repeated forays and attacks on the more settled civilisations and peoples who rimmed the great grasslands. During the previous millennium in fact there had been repeated incursions of this kind. The Huns under Attila (fifth century) had sped overland as far as Germany at the collapse of the Roman empire. Later, the Seljuks, another Turkic tribe, had pressed westward and by the twelfth century controlled virtually all of Iraq, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt, while yet another group, the Khwarzim Turks (also twelfth century onwards), held Transoxiana. As Abu-Lughod puts it, echoing other scholars, ‘[This] inhospitable terrain was the place of origin for a long succession of groups that left it to plunder richer lands. From earliest times, nomadic groups poured out of this marginally productive zone, seeking better grazing land, more space, or a chance to appropriate through “primitive” accumulation the surplus generated in the more fertile oases and trading towns.’35

  From the ninth century on, at least in theory, there were three routes connecting Europe with Asia, all of which passed through the Near East ‘land bridge’ and which, by the second half of the fourteenth century, lay largely in ruins, as we shall see. The northern route went from Constantinople across the landmass of central Asia; the central route connected the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean via Baghdad, Basra and the Persian Gulf; and the southerly route linked the Alexandria-Cairo-Red Sea complex with the Arabian Sea and then the Indian Ocean.

  But it was not really until the thirteenth-century advance of the Mongols, under the leadership of the self-styled ‘world conqueror’, Genghis Khan (‘the very mighty lord’), that the northern route was consolidated. Despite the fact that, at the time, overland transport was about twenty times more expensive than sea travel, Genghis Khan and his pastoral nomads for a time guaranteed the safety of travellers on the northern overland routes.*

  As has already been noted (chapter 16), pastoral nomadism is limited as a lifestyle choice, especially as the relatively infertile steppes dried out. The tolls exacted for the protection of east-west caravans suited the shape of the Mongol empire (see map 2). Despite the expense of overland travel, they soon understood that the security they provided allowed merchants at the least to calculate their costs more or less accurately and, moreover, these overland routes were not subject, as sea travel was, to the monsoon in the Indian Ocean and whose strongly seasonal nature could keep ships in harbour at the wrong time of the year for up to six months, adding unconscionably to the length (and therefore the cost) of journeys. The northern route was also much shorter from inland China.

  And so, in the thirteenth century the Mongols opened up for a time a route across central Asia that broke this domination of the more southerly routes. The steppes were even now a barren, empty, harsh landscape, in which travellers had to take with them provisions for, say, twenty-five days’ travel at a time, the whole journey taking, roughly speaking, 275 days to go from Tana, on the north side of the Black Sea Basin, to Peking in, say, seven long-haul stages. In spite of these problems, however, Muslim and Jewish traders still crossed the vast area of the steppes in great caravans, while the unification of the enormous region under the Mongols actually reduced the number of tribute gatherers along the way, and made for greater safety.36

  To begin with, western Europe was ignorant of this area and system; nor were the Chinese any better informed – cotton, according to the Han Chinese, ‘was made from hair combed from certain “water sheep” ’. Stories of fantastic peoples, without mouths, or with faces between their shoulders, passed both ways. This was offset, gradually, by papal envoys, seeking converts, and the famous exploits of the Polos, who were given safe conduct through Mongol lands. This so-called Pax Mongolica gradually brought about a flourishing of Mediterranean-Mongol trade, the primary item of which was silk, which now reached Champagne via Genoa. Overall, the unification of much of central Asia under the Mongols put Europe and China in direct contact for the first time in a thousand years but the unintended consequence of this unification, as we shall see, was a pandemic that set back the development of a world system by as much as 150 years.37

  When Genghis died, in 1227, his territory was divided among several successors and these factions – predictably perhaps – were soon at war with each other. Not even the calm established by Kublai Khan later in the thirteenth century (under whose safe conduct the Polos crossed all of Eastern Asia) could overcome the fighting. Arab Asia survived the Crusades more or less intact and even the capture of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, but it fell to Tamerlane around 1400, and the steppe route was again sundered. So the northern steppe route between East and West flourished and faded, flourished and faded, and finally fragmented. This obviously hindered and helped trade alternately, though a quite different c
onsequence was yet to come.

  The second factor which sapped the development of the East was the withdrawal of China. Chinese history on the eve of the conquest of the Americas is paradoxical. China had traditionally preferred the interior, Asian route to the west but, when the pastoral nomads threatened (this is why the Great Wall was originally built), they turned to the sea. In the early fifteenth century, a large fleet of 62 ships set out to visit the ports of the Indian Ocean and a second voyage, of 48 ships, was mounted in 1408, visiting Champa, Malacca and Ceylon. Five other missions followed between 1412 and 1430, reaching Borneo, the African coast, the Persian Gulf and, according to some, a few, the Americas in 1421. But then these visits ended, the Ming withdrew their fleet and terminated their relations with foreign powers. The Chinese by this time were far more technologically sophisticated than were the Europeans and her abrupt withdrawal, according to some authorities, had a decisive effect on the fact that the East now dropped behind the West.

  There are two explanations given for this sudden and dramatic reversal. One view stresses the significance of the Confucian ideology, which demeaned worldly striving and commercial/industrial gain. The other view stresses that the Chinese elite was divided into a bureaucratic Mandarin class, which controlled the state apparatus but did not engage in (and in fact looked down on) trading and business, while the merchant class – because of this division – had no access to power. Whatever the reason for China’s withdrawal, that withdrawal surely mattered.

  WOOL AND THE PLAGUE

  The third factor was the plague, between 1348 and 1351, and which affected Asia far worse than Europe, ‘changing the terms of exchange because of differential demographic losses’.38 According to William McNeill, by the start of the Christian era there were ‘four divergent civilized disease pools’ in the Old World – China, India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – each of which consisted of some 50– 60 million people and had reached a relative equilibrium with its environment, including endemic diseases. The relative separation of these areas from one another (and the delay in travel occasioned by the seasonal monsoons) prevented the transfer from one system to the next of ‘strange’ (exotic) diseases to which the populations had not built up resistance. Between AD 200 and 800, there were outbreaks of measles, smallpox and bubonic plague that afflicted China and Europe in particular because, being at the end of the transport chain, those areas had least experience of these diseases and had built up less immunity. (According to some historians, it was plague in Rome that allowed the Barbarians to attack.)39 But gradually the Old World adjusted, according to McNeill.

  Then, following the great success of the Mongols in stabilising and opening up the steppes to trade and travel, a new route was established for infectious diseases to travel by. Now, despite the expense of overland travel, a communication network capable of travelling one hundred miles a day for days on end on horseback across the grasslands created what McNeill called an epidemiological human web that ‘in all probability’ carried wild rodents of the steppelands to the Volga and the Crimea, bringing with them bubonic plague. ‘Not only did the Mongols have little resistance to the disease, but their mounts [horses, camels and pack-asses] offered a safe harbor for the rapid transport of infected fleas to the burrows of underground rodent colonies in their northern grasslands. There the bacillus could survive even the ravages of winter.’ It seems that in 1331 the plague travelled from China to the Crimea, where the Black Death broke out in 1346 among the armies of a Mongol prince who laid siege to the trading town of Caffa. This compelled his withdrawal but not before he had entered Caffa itself, from where the plague spread by ship through the Black Sea and Mediterranean.40

  This was crucial because, as an inspection of the map will confirm, each of the East-West routes had to traverse the relatively narrow land bridge between the northern tips of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and the Black Sea: Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Syria. The cities of the land bridge were particularly badly affected because, being surrounded by deserts, their inhabitants could not escape. In Cairo, it has been estimated, the death rate in 1348 and 1349 was 10,000 a day. This was despite the fact that the pre-Islamic Arabs had an early idea of contagion because of the spread of mange among camels. They knew how to counter the disease, by separating the animals, and that it was not just divine activity.41

  Nor was this all. Not only were the traditional routes from East to West being ravaged by plague, so too were the great European rivers of the Danube, Rhine and Rhône, their communities all decimated. The effects of this were two-fold. First, there was pressure on the ports of the western Mediterranean to explore alternative routes to the East. Second, the spread and pattern of the plague (worse in Asia and the Middle East) helped account for the rise of northern Europe.

  A rival theory still indicts domesticated mammals. On this account, plague was actually anthrax murrain, a cattle disease caused by forest clearing, which reduced the amount of venison available and provoked instead an enormous increase in cattle ranching, in congested conditions. At least ten cattle herds belonging to medieval abbeys or priories in Britain are known to have been contaminated with anthrax murrain in the decade before the Black Death.42

  The personal consequences of the Black Death were horrific. By the time the plague lifted in Europe three years after it had arrived in 1347, a third of the population – about 30 million people – had succumbed. But the economic and social consequences were more complex and less devastating than they might have been. To begin with, there was a labour shortage and wages rose. The labour shortage was so sharp, however, that, as the price of helping out their ‘superiors’, many serfs became free tenants. And, as tenants, they had greater motivation, with the result that food production dropped less than food demand. This was deflationary and made living on the land less and less attractive, so that there was a net migration to the cities, even though the plague had been worse there. In these new circumstances, prosperity returned more quickly than it might otherwise have done and here the woollen industry in particular benefited.

  ‘It was woollen cloth that first brought capitalism to north Europe.’ Wool was tougher, cheaper and more reliable than flax, which could only be grown then in the regions from the eastern Mediterranean to India, badly affected by plague. Sheep were more adaptable and lived for many years, and were less susceptible to flooding, drought or cold. Flanders and Britain, as we have seen, became known for manufacturing the finest woollens in the world, which generated more income than any other goods made in Europe. Cloth manufacture was favoured there because the low, waterlogged land was unsuitable for growing grain, and good-quality English fleeces were not far away to make up for any shortages. ‘This industry accounted for the rise, successively, of Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Amsterdam, with Mediterranean wine, spices and silks, to be exchanged for woollens.’43

  Then there is the fact that the routes between the Mediterranean ports and the Low Countries took ships out into the Atlantic – the open sea – a sailing and navigational experience that was helped enormously by the technological improvements and innovations stimulated by the Crusades and which would prove even more useful in the years ahead.

  More tentative is the link between the plague and the Renaissance. The Black Death hit many of the great cities of north Italy hard and this is the charged background for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1350–1353) about the flight of the fashionable Florentines into the safer countryside, where they hope to continue their glittering lives. One might have expected the plague to provoke soul-searching rather than Boccaccio’s more earthy and earthly stories, but perhaps widespread death, as Norman Cantor says, weakened traditional faith and set off a quest for a more naturalistic understanding of nature.44

  However that may be, in the millennium and a half since Jesus, Christian ideology had contributed disproportionately to the rise of Europe, to its thinking, its economy, its innovation in all directions and, at the same time, right across Eurasia
, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and not for the first time, horses and sheep, domesticated mammals, proved important – vital, in both good and bad ways – to the defining events that constituted the history of the Old World.

  •23•

  THE FEATHERED SERPENT, THE FIFTH SUN AND THE FOUR SUYUS

  When the Spanish first arrived on mainland America, as opposed to the islands of the Caribbean, there were two civilisations that were prominent – even dominant – in the New World. These were the Aztecs in what is now Mexico, and the Incas in Peru. Both were flourishing at the time – each had elaborate capital cities, organised religion with ritual calendars and associated artworks. Both societies were rigidly divided into social classes and each had successful methods of food production. But there was more to the Aztec and the Inca than met the eye.

  The Aztecs were reached first, in 1519, thirteen years before the Incas. When the Spaniards crossed the ring of mountains which surrounded Tenochtitlán and descended into the Valley of Mexico, and beheld the astonishing cities which formed the core of the Aztec empire, with its network of shallow lakes surrounded by active volcanoes, they could scarcely believe their eyes. So elaborate were these cities, and of such a size, that some of Cortés’ soldiers could not be sure whether what was before them was real or an hallucination. But what the Conquistadores discovered soon enough was that, despite being themselves capable of a very practical and calculating brutality, the Mexica, as the Aztecs were also known, ‘presided over a city of pyramids and sacred temples that reeked with the blood of human sacrifice’. This also took some getting used to. ‘The dismal drum sounded again,’ wrote Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ disaffected aides in his A True History of the Conquest of New Spain. ‘[It was] accompanied by conches, horns, and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and we saw [the captives] being dragged up to the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and then they made them dance with a sort of fan . . . Then after they had danced the [priests] laid them on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces . . .’1