Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  WHITE GOLD

  Salt was so valuable in ancient times that when other currencies were scarce, Roman soldiers were paid with salt. Thus it was said that soldiers who did their job well were “worth their salt.”

  THE GREAT MOSQUE AT DJENNÉ

  The same desert caravans that transported salt and gold also carried Islam south across the Sahara.

  In 1240, Djenné’s twenty-sixth ruler, Koy Kunboro, converted to Islam. In a grand gesture of devotion, he demolished his palace and built a mosque on its site. According to local legend, the desert djinns, or spirits, helped him with the construction, carrying baskets of clay from the desert on their heads so the renowned masons of Djenné could work more quickly. Built from sun-dried bricks the size of a Coke can and plastered with a layer of mud, Koy Kunboro’s mosque was a wonder for almost six hundred years.

  In 1819, fundamentalist leader Seku Amadu declared jihad against Djenné, swearing to bring the city back to a purer form of Islam. He captured Djenné after a nineteen-month siege. As a first step in purifying the city, he closed the Great Mosque and built another that was less great in every way. Islamic law forbids a Muslim to destroy a mosque, but mud buildings are fragile. Without regular maintenance, Amadu could count on the annual rains to destroy the building for him, especially after he ordered the gutters blocked. When the French captured Djenné in 1898, the mosque was in ruins.

  In 1907 local masons, still skilled in the traditional art of mud construction, rebuilt the mosque. Today, the Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud building in the world. The city takes no chances on losing its Great Mosque to the rains again. Replastering the building is part of the annual Ramadan celebration, a messy, mud-splashed party that involves the entire community.

  map of west African trade patterns in the 14th century

  In the fourteenth century, Timbuktu in Mali was the commercial center of West Africa. Two-thirds of the world’s gold was traded there. The city was home to fifty thousand people, but its numbers could triple with the arrival of trade caravans from the north. Trade created wealth. Wealth attracted scholars and holy men from all over North Africa and the Middle East, from Cordoba, Marrakech, Baghdad, Alexandria—and Mecca.

  VENICE WAS ORGANIZED FOR trade from its beginnings in the sixth century CE. The city was built in a malarial marshland, resting on nothing but oak pilings set into the mud. It had no fresh water, no surrounding land to support it, no natural resources, no agriculture, and no industry. It existed on the quality of its ships, the skills of its sailors, and the ability of its merchants to move goods from the place where they were produced to any market that would buy them. At a time when most of Europe was ruled by feudal lords who earned their income at war and from their land, the Venetian nobility were merchant princes.

  Technically under Byzantine rule in their early years, the merchants of Venice turned their faces to the East and worked the sea routes that linked Western Christendom to Byzantium and the Muslim lands. Venetian merchants sold the Muslims timber and slaves, literally Slavs from Eastern Europe. With the gold they earned, the Venetians bought silks, jewels, and saints’ relics to sell to Frankish kings, princes of Italian city-states, and luxury-loving bishops. They were in constant trouble for selling war materials to Muslim Egypt—first with their Byzantine overlords and later with the pope in Rome. At one point the entire city of Venice was excommunicated for ignoring papal injunctions against trade with the Muslim “infidels.”

  Venice remained a town of modest size and importance until the eleventh century, when the Crusades catapulted it into prominence. Knights from the north arrived in Venice, prepared to pay for passage to the Holy Lands. Returning crusaders brought home a taste for Muslim luxury. The same ships that carried crusaders back and forth from the Holy Lands brought all the spices of Araby—not to mention glass, silks, soaps, perfumes, paper, and African gold—back to Europe from the bazaars of the Muslim world. By the thirteenth century Venice was the hinge connecting Europe and the East. Its wealth made it the banker of Europe. Every European king was in hock to the merchants and bankers of Venice.

  VENETIAN JUSTICE

  TWO NON-NOBLE CAPTAINS OF THE GUARD POLICE the Venetian banking thoroughfare. Each has a squadron of as many as twelve men who patrol the Rialto day and night. They maintain a constant watch over Venetian ship galleys recently arrived from Egypt, laden with African gold. They also guard the benches (bancos) where the bankers conduct their business.

  Pietro Venier is an employee of the Pruili bank, a large financial enterprise in the Rialto. On his bench he displays his gold coins, as do other bankers.

  Along comes small-time thief Cristofo Enrico. He runs up and sweeps the bowl of coins into a sack before Venier can jump to his feet.

  Losing this much money will cost Venier his job and could mean the end of the Pruili bank. Fortunately for Venier, Enrico is caught still in possession of his sack. The robber is quickly tried and sentenced, and his left hand is amputated. Then Enrico is paraded around the canals of Venice, tied to the mast of a grand barge. As a final message of warning to the watchful masses, Enrico is hung in the Rialto. (Venice’s soaring crime rate is a sign of the city’s success.)

  Bankers like Venier finance the beautification of their city, investing in public art and architecture. Together they create the Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square), the Doge’s Palace, and the Rialto—and bring about a new age of learning and art: the Renaissance.

  The Venetians suffered crisis after crisis in the fourteenth century. Like the rest of Europe, their city was devastated by the plague. More than half of Venice’s population died in barely two years. To make matters worse, the widespread casualties across Europe as a whole hurt Venice in another way. Depopulation meant a drop both in production of and demand for goods. As trade volume decreased, Venice and its ancient sea rival, Genoa, struggled to control the smaller market. The longstanding conflict between the two city-states flared into war in 1350, and again in 1378. For two years, Venice and Genoa were engaged in an all-out war. All trade ceased. The Venetian fleet was ruined. The city’s treasury was emptied. Venice won the final victory at the battle of Chioggia in June 1380, but its economy and its foreign trade had been shattered.

  The city rose again, more spectacular than before. In the years after the war, the Venetians rebuilt their fleets. They also consolidated Venice’s position as the center of East-West trade and reinforced the ranks of the patriciate by ennobling thirty citizen families, all of whom had made major contributions to the war with Genoa. With its ruling oligarchy energized by new blood, Venice experienced a burst of colonial expansion, creating a trading post empire of islands, ports, and fortified bastions strung out along the sea routes to the Levant.

  By the fifteenth century, Venice was the bazaar of Europe.

  HUMAN THUNDER

  In the tenth century CE, Taoist alchemists in China, searching for an elixir of immortality, discovered instead a new and very efficient way to cause explosions using a compound of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal: gunpowder. At first, gunpowder served as an amusement at the emperor’s court—the equivalent of modern fireworks. Four hundred years after its discovery, it began to change the course of history when Jiao Yu fired a lead ball out of a handheld iron tube at three hundred meters a second.

  Once ignited, gunpowder’s three ingredients go through a tremendous chemical transformation. The sulphur acts as an initiator, much like kindling, setting alight the charcoal. Together they produce large quantities of hot, expanding gas. The potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, provides oxygen, accelerating the burning process at such a fast rate that it results in an explosion. The more saltpeter there is in the mix, the bigger the bang.

  When ignited in the open, gunpowder burns with a pop and a burst of flame. Enclose it in a sealed container with a fuse, and the gas creates enough pressure to blow the container apart. The tougher the container, the more violent the explosion; a bomb is essentially a fi
recracker with a harder shell. Pack the powder into a tube with one open end and the power of the gases rushing from the tube will drive it forward, creating a rocket. Add a hard object to the open end and the expanding gases will push that object out, converting chemical energy into mechanical force: the basic principle behind every gun.

  The gun brought radical social change, undermining the role of armored knights and putting power in the hands of ordinary soldiers. In time, the same ancient principles that gave us guns would also give us piston engines and the rockets that would propel us to the moon.

  1355 CE. THE PLAGUE IN CHINA has undermined the hated Mongol hordes, giving the Chinese a chance to defeat them. But the key to China’s victory is not the plague. It is a secret weapon invented by a monk, who, centuries earlier, christened his handiwork huo chi: “human thunder.” The Western world will rename it gunpowder, but it will be the Chinese people who earn the distinction of using it to bring mankind into the era of modern warfare.

  The times in China are troubled. The reigning Yuan emperor’s mind has grown tired and muddled. Peasants have formed revolutionary bands. Bandits and warlords have appeared on all sides, like bees from their hives, assuming false titles of king and tearing the empire apart. Taoist scholar Jiao Yu has long prepared for this day, studying the use of “fire-weapons” in warfare. Now he is ready to share his knowledge with the man he believes to hold the Mandate of Heaven as the next emperor of China: Zhu Yuanzhang.

  When Jiao Yu presented his new fire-weapons to Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant-turned-war leader examined them carefully. Zhu Yuanzhang was familiar with fire-weapons. Chinese armies had used gunpowder weapons since the early eleventh century including perforated metal balls that, when tossed by a catapult, sprayed fire and ignited the structures they hit. The arsenal also included smoke bombs to confuse the enemy and handheld flamethrowers made from bamboo rods that could shoot a six-foot-long tongue of flame, metal splinters, and broken porcelain. They could ignite fire arrows with a handful of gunpowder the size of a pomegranate, sealed to the shaft with pine resin. But this was something different, a three-foot-long tube of cast iron with a wooden stock. If it did what Jiao Yu claimed, it would give Zhu’s armies an edge against the Mongol forces.

  Zhu Yuanzhang ordered General Xu Da to test the weapons. Xu had his soldiers set up a suit of Mongol armor three hundred paces away. Made of overlapping plates of leather, Mongol armor could turn a shot from a powerful composite bow, but it was no match for Jiao’s invention. The stone “bullet” behaved like flying dragons, penetrating several layers of armor before embedding itself in the stone wall.

  Zhu Yuanzhang knew the importance of what he had just seen: “With these fire-weapons I will conquer the whole Empire as easily as turning the palms of my hands upside down!”

  In the hands of these ragtag rebels, a revolutionary new weapon was about to change how we wage war. With the gun, humans would build and overthrow empires, win wars, tame wildernesses, and create new countries.

  HOW A

  GUNPOWDER-PROPELLED

  WEAPON WORKS

  BY THE MIDDLE OF THE FOURteenth century, conqueror dynasties had ruled China for more than a hundred years: the Tangut, the Jin, and finally, the Mongols. With more than half the population dead from the Black Death, the Yuan dynasty, founded by Kublai Khan, began to fall apart. Peasants revolted. Regional warlords seized power. The Mongol forces, torn by internal dissension and diminished by disease, struggled to retain order.

  Zhu Yuanzhang was a peasant who had starved and begged as a boy. His parents often moved to look for work or evade rent collectors; they even had to give away several of their children because they couldn’t afford to feed them. In the 1340s, Zhu’s home region in Anhui province was hit by flood, drought, famine, and then the plague. When he was only sixteen, his father, older brother, and his brother’s wife all died. A neighbor let Zhu bury them in his field, but he had no way to pay for the proper rites for their souls.

  Zhu Yuanzhang

  With no relatives to turn to, he joined a Buddhist monastery to avoid starving, a common practice for the sons of the poor. Like many Buddhist monks, Zhu was sent out to beg for food in emulation of the Buddha. He traveled through China as a wandering mendicant for the next three to four years before returning to the monastery. But the monastery was his refuge for only a short time.

  In 1351, a peasant millenarian sect known as the Red Turbans rose in rebellion and enjoyed considerable success against the Mongol cavalry. In the course of fighting the rebels, the Yuan government troops burned down Zhu Yuanzhang’s monastery. Zhu, then twenty-four, joined the rebels. He rose quickly through the ranks, especially after he married the adopted daughter of one of the commanders.

  With command over twenty to thirty thousand men, Zhu soon attracted a band of capable soldiers of peasant origin, many of whom later became officials in the Ming dynasty, of which Zhu would be the first emperor. Educated men also joined his movement, including some Confucian scholars who suggested he gradually distance himself from the Red Turbans, whose millenarian beliefs did not appeal to the educated elite. As Zhu’s power grew, so did his ambition. In 1367, he sent his troops north against the Yuan capital, located in modern Beijing.

  Zhu’s armies took the Yuan capital in 1368. The emperor, Toghün Temur, did not even wait for the rebel forces to arrive. He and his closest advisers fled to Mongolia a few days before the troops arrived. Zhu razed the Yuan palaces and, together with his wife, now the Empress Ma, declared the establishment of a new dynasty—the Ming. Its name means “brilliant,” and it would last for three hundred years.

  TWO DECADES EARLIER, GOLDSMITH Johannes Gutenberg had seen a thirst for knowledge in Europe and a growing demand for books and the written word. The newly founded universities had created a market for more books than Europe had ever seen. A newly literate middle class was eager for secular literature in the vernacular languages. The growth of commerce required records and documents. The church sold thousands of letters of indulgence each year, each one painstakingly written by a clerical scribe.

  GUTENBERG’S DEBT

  NOVEMBER 6, 1455. Mainz, Germany. Johannes Gutenberg paced the floor of his workshop. A chill wind swept over the Rhine and seeped in the windows, causing the large sheets of printed paper that hung from the ceiling to flutter a little. More sheets, already dry, sat in stacks on a nearby worktable. There were thousands of them, ready to be bound into the Bible that would be his masterwork.

  Gutenberg and Fust with the first printing press, Germany, 1450s.

  He could lose it all. His partner, Johann Fust, was in court at that very moment at the Convent of the Barefoot Friars, pressing charges against Gutenberg for an unpaid debt. Presses, type, molds, inks—and the beautiful printed pages of the Bible, Gutenberg had pledged it all when he borrowed money from Fust to set up the workshop. If Fust would just let him finish his Bible, the profits would allow him to repay the loan. But his partner wasn’t willing to wait. He wanted his money now, and, if not his money, he wanted the workshop.

  The door to the shop burst open, and Gutenberg’s two assistants hurried in with the cold air. He had sent them to court to hear the verdict. As soon as he saw their faces, he knew the news was bad. The judge had ruled in favor of Fust. Gutenberg had lost everything.

  Replica of the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440.

  Except for the block-printed picture book with few words, every book and document made in Europe was printed by hand. Between 600 and 1200 CE, most books made in Europe were copied and illustrated by monks as an act of devotion. Their work was slow, beautiful, and expensive. A fine copy of a Bible took one monastic scribe three years to produce and cost as much as a small house. With the growth of the universities, book production moved out of the monasteries. Booksellers hired nonclerical copyists to produce books on a commercial basis. Scribes organized themselves into guilds in every university town. Manuscripts were prepared and bound in separate
sections so that scribes could divide the labor of copying and several people could read the parts at the same time. Thousands of books were being created, instead of dozens.

  Gutenberg had been convinced that there was a market for still more books if he could produce them quicker and cheaper.

  In 1435, Gutenberg began experimenting with the idea of printing using metal type. For ten years he worked in secret, building his press, creating new metal alloys, casting type, and experimenting with ink. In 1448, he printed a few copies of a popular grammar text, as a demonstration.

  PAPER COMES WEST

  Before Gutenberg could invent printing, he needed paper.

  Fine medieval manuscripts were copied on parchment, which is made from the skin of goats, sheep, or lambs. The material lasted indefinitely, and it could be scraped and reused if needed. But it was expensive, and it took a lot of skins to make a book. An elaborate version of the Bible could take as many as two hundred skins to make.

  Papermaking reached Europe from China by way of the Islamic world. Buddhist missionaries carried the technology west as far as Samarqand, where Muslims first encountered it in the early eighth century at the beginning of the Muslim golden age. They adopted paper as readily as they adopted Hindu numerals and Greek philosophy. By the eleventh century, Muslims were making paper everywhere from Samarqand to Valencia.