7

THE EASTERN AGE

THE EAST TAKES THE LEAD

According to Figure 7.1, 541 ought to be one of the most famous dates in history. In that year (or somewhere around the middle of the sixth century, anyway, allowing for a certain margin of error in the index) the East’s social development score overtook the West’s, ending a fourteen-thousand-year-old pattern and disproving at a stroke any simple long-term lock-in theory of why the West rules. By 700 the East’s score was one-third higher than the West’s, and by 1100 the gap—nearly 40 percent—was bigger than it had been for two and a half thousand years (when the advantage had lain with the West).

Why did the East pull ahead in the sixth century? And why did its social development score rise so high over the next half-millennium while the West’s steadily fell behind? These questions are crucial to explaining why the West now rules, and as we attempt to answer them in this chapter we will encounter quite a cast of heroes and villains, geniuses and bunglers. Behind all the drama, though, we will find the same simple fact that has driven East-West differences throughout the story: geography.

Figure 7.1. The great reversal: the East turns its decline around and for the first time in history pulls ahead of the West

WAR AND RICE

Eastern social development began falling before 100 CE and continued until 400, and by the time it bottomed out it stood lower than it had been for five centuries. States had failed, cities had burned, and migrations—from Inner Asia to northern China, and from northern China to southern—had convulsed the whole core. It was out of these migrations, though, that the Eastern revival began.

In Chapters 4–6 we saw how rising social development transformed geography, uncovering advantages in backwardness and opening highways across the oceans and steppes. Since the third century, though, it had been shown that the relationship also worked in reverse: falling social development transformed geography too. As Roman and Chinese cities shrank, literacy declined, armies weakened, and living standards fell, the cores also contracted geographically, and the differences between these contractions largely explain why Eastern social development recovered so quickly while Western development kept falling into the eighth century.

Figure 7.2. The East bounces back, 400–700. Figure 7.2a shows the states of Western Wei, Eastern Wei, and southern China’s Liang dynasty in 541. The Sui dynasty united all three in 589. Figure 7.2b shows the greatest extent of the Tang Empire, around 700.

We also saw in Chapter 6 that the Eastern core’s old heartland in the Yellow River valley fragmented into warring states after 300 and millions of northerners fled southward. The exodus converted the lands south of the Yangzi from the underdeveloped periphery they had been in Han times into a new frontier. The refugees entered an alien landscape, humid and hot, where their staples of wheat and millet grew poorly but rice flourished. Much of this land was lightly settled, often by people whose customs and languages were very different from those brought by the north Chinese immigrants. Amid the sort of violence and harsh dealing that characterizes most colonial landgrabs, the immigrants’ weight of numbers and tighter organization steadily pushed the earlier occupants back.

Between 280 and 464 the number of people listed as taxpayers south of the Yangzi quintupled, but the migration did not just bring more people to the south. It also brought new techniques. According to an agricultural handbook called The Essential Methods of the Common People, no fewer than thirty-seven varieties of rice were known by the 530s, and transplantation (growing seedlings in special beds for six weeks, then moving them to flooded paddies) had become the norm. This was backbreaking work, but guaranteed high yields. The Essential Methods explains how fertilizers let farmers work fields continuously rather than leaving them fallow, and how watermills—particularly at Buddhist monasteries, which were often built by fast-flowing mountain streams and often had the capital for big investments—made it cheaper to grind grains into flour, mill rice, and press oil from seeds. The result was the gradual development of a new frontier of agricultural opportunities, rather like the one the Romans created when they conquered western Europe in the first century BCE. Gradually, over the course of centuries, the south’s rural backwardness was turned into an advantage.

Cheap transport began to complement cheap food. China’s rivers were still no substitute for the waterways that the Mediterranean had provided Rome, but little by little human ingenuity made up for this. Underwater archaeologists have not yet provided statistics like those for Roman shipwrecks, but written records suggest that vessels were getting bigger and faster. Paddleboats appeared on the Yangzi in the 490s, and from Chengdu to Jiankang rice fed growing cities, where urban markets encouraged cash crops such as tea (first mentioned in surviving records around 270 and becoming a widespread luxury by 500). Grandees, merchants, and monasteries all got rich on rents, shipping, and milling in the Yangzi Valley.

The ruling court in Jiankang, however, did not get rich. In this regard its situation was less like the Roman Empire’s than like eighth-century-BCE Assyria’s, where governors and landowners, not the state, captured the fruits of growing population and trade—until, of course, Tiglath-Pileser turned things around. Southern China, however, never got a Tiglath-Pileser. Once in a while an emperor managed to rein in the aristocracy and even tried to reconquer the north, but these efforts always collapsed in civil war. Between 317 and 589 five successive dynasties ruled (after a fashion) from Jiankang.

The Essential Methods suggests that sophisticated agriculture survived in the north into the 530s, but well before then long-distance trade and even coinage had faded away as mounted robbers plundered widely. At first this breakdown produced even more political chaos than in the south, but gradually new rulers began imposing order on the north. Chief among them were the Xianbei, who came from the fringes of the steppes in Manchuria. Like the Parthians who had overrun Iran six centuries earlier, the Xianbei combined nomad and agrarian traditions, and had for generations fought as an equestrian elite while extracting protection money from peasants.

In the ruins of northern China in the 380s the Xianbei set up their own state, called Northern Wei.* Instead of just robbing the Chinese gentry, they worked out deals with them, preserving at least some of the salaried bureaucrats and taxes of the old high-end states. This gave Northern Wei an edge over the disorderly, brawling mobs that ran north China’s other states; enough of an edge, in fact, for Northern Wei to unite the whole region in 439.

That said, the deals Northern Wei cut with the surviving remnants of the old Chinese aristocracy remained rather ramshackle. Most Xianbei warriors preferred herding flocks to hobnobbing with literati, and even when the riders did settle down they generally built their own castles to avoid having to rub shoulders with Chinese farmers. Their state remained determinedly low-end. So long as they were just fighting other northern robber states that was fine, but when Xianbei horsemen approached the suburbs of Jiankang in 450 they discovered that although they could win battles and steal everything not nailed down, they could not threaten real cities. Only a proper high-end state with ships, siege engines, and supply trains could do that.

Unable to plunder southern China because they lacked a high-end army, and running out of opportunities to plunder northern China because they already ruled it, the kings of Northern Wei were getting seriously short of resources to buy their supporters’ loyalty—a potentially fatal weakness in a low-end state. In the 480s Emperor Xiaowen realized that only one solution remained: to move toward the high end. This he did with a vengeance. He nationalized all land, redistributed it to everyone who would register for taxes and state service, and—to make the Xianbei start thinking and acting like subjects of a high-end state—launched a frontal assault on tradition. Xiaowen banned Xianbei costume, replaced Xianbei with Chinese family names, required all courtiers under thirty to speak Chinese, and moved hundreds of thousands of people to a new city at the hallowed site of Luoyang.

Some Xianbei gave up their ancestral ways and settled into ruling like regular Chinese aristocrats, but others refused. Culture wars escalated into civil wars, and in 534 Northern Wei split into Eastern (modernizing) and Western (traditionalist) states. The traditionalists, clinging to nomadic lifestyles, were able to keep attracting horsemen from the steppes, and soon it looked like their military muscle would overwhelm the revolution Xiaowen had begun. Desperation, however, served as the mother of invention. Where Xiaowen had tried to turn Xianbei warriors into Chinese gentlemen, his successors now did the opposite, giving Chinese soldiers tax breaks, appointing Chinese gentry as generals, and allowing Chinese warriors to take Xianbei names. The peasants and literati learned to fight, and in 577 rolled over the opposition. It had been a long, messy process, but a version of Xiaowen’s vision finally triumphed.

The result was a sharply polarized China. In the north a high-end state (renamed the Sui dynasty after a military coup in 581) with a powerful army sat atop a fragmented, run-down economy; in the south, a fragmented state with weak institutions tried, but largely failed, to tap the wealth of a booming economy.

This sounds utterly dysfunctional, but it was in fact perfect for jump-starting social development. In 589 Wendi, the first Sui emperor, built a fleet, took over the Yangzi Valley, and flung a vast army (perhaps half a million men) at Jiankang. Thanks to the extreme military imbalance between north and south, the city fell within weeks. When they realized that Wendi actually intended to tax them, southern China’s nobles rose up en masse, reportedly disemboweling—even eating—their Sui governors, but they were defeated within the year. Wendi had conquered southern China without grueling wars that devastated its economy, and an eastern revival took off.

WU’S WORLD

By re-creating a single huge empire, the Sui dynasty did two things at once. First, it allowed the strong state based in northern China to tap the south’s new economic frontier; and second, it allowed the south’s economic boom to spread all across China.

This was not always deliberate. When the Sui emperors built the greatest monument of the age, the 1,500-mile-long, 130-foot-wide Grand Canal that linked the Yangzi with northern China, they wanted a superhighway for moving armies around. Within a generation, though, it had become China’s economic artery, carrying rice from the south to feed northern cities. “By cutting through the Taihang Mountains,” seventh-century scholars liked to complain, “Sui inflicted intolerable sufferings on the people”; yet, the scholars conceded, the canal “provided endless benefits to the people … The benefits they provide are enormous indeed!”

The Grand Canal functioned like a man-made Mediterranean Sea, changing Eastern geography by finally giving China the kind of waterway ancient Rome had enjoyed. Cheap southern rice fed a northern urban explosion. “Hundreds of houses, thousands of houses—like a great chessboard,” the poet Bai Juyi wrote of Chang’an, which once more became China’s capital. It sprawled across thirty square miles, “like a huge field planted with rows of cabbages.” A million residents thronged tree-lined boulevards up to five times as wide as New York’s Fifth Avenue. Nor was Chang’an unique; Luoyang was probably half its size, and a dozen other cities had populations of a hundred thousand.

China’s recovery was something of a double-edged sword, though, because the fusion of northern state power and the southern rice frontier cut two ways. On the one hand, a burgeoning bureaucracy organized and policed the urban markets that enriched farmers and merchants, pushing social development upward; on the other, excessive administration put a brake on development by shackling farmers and merchants, regulating every detail of commerce. Officials fixed prices, told people when to buy and sell, and even ruled on how merchants could live (they could not, for instance, ride horses; that was too dignified for mere hucksters).

Civil servants regularly put politics ahead of economics. Instead of allowing people to buy and sell real estate, they preserved Xiaowen’s system, claiming all land for the state and merely loaning it to farmers. This forced peasants to register for taxes and kept powerful landlords in check, but tangled everything in red tape. For many years historians suspected that these land laws told us more about ideology than reality; surely, scholars reasoned, no premodern state could handle so much paperwork.* Yet documents preserved by arid conditions at Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert show that eighth-century managers really did follow these rules.

Farmers, landlords, and speculators of course found ways to evade the regulations, but the civil service steadily swelled to fill out mountains of documentation and went through a revolution of its own. In theory, entrance examinations had made administration the preserve of China’s best and brightest since Han times, but in practice aristocratic families always managed to turn high office into a perk of birth. In the seventh century, however, exam scores really did become the only criterion for success. So long as we assume (as most people did) that composing poetry and quoting classical literature are the best guides to administrative talent, China can fairly be said to have developed the most rational selection processes for state service known to history.*

As the old aristocracy’s grip on high office slowly loosened, administrative appointments became the surest path to wealth and influence for the gentry, and competition to get into the civil service stiffened. In some years fewer than one candidate in a hundred passed the exams, and stories both sad and comical abound of men retaking the tests for decades. Ambitious families hired tutors, much as they do nowadays to get their teenagers through the exams that winnow out applicants to the most-sought-after universities, and the newly invented printing presses churned out thousands of books of practice questions. Some candidates wore “cheat shirts” with model essays written in the lining. Because grades depended so heavily on literary composition, every young man in a hurry became a poet; and with so many fine minds versifying, this became the golden age of Chinese literature.

The exams created unprecedented social mobility within the educated elite, and some historians even speak of the rise of a kind of “protofeminism” as the new openness expanded to gender relations. We should not exaggerate this trend; the advice to women inThe Family Instructions of the Grandfather, one of the commonest surviving eighth-century books, would have shocked no one a thousand years earlier—

A bride serves her husband

Just as she served her father.

Her voice should not be heard

Nor her body or shadow seen.

With her husband’s father and elder brothers

She has no conversation.

On the other hand, new dowry patterns and liberal (compared to Confucian ideas, anyway) Buddhist attitudes toward female abilities gave the wealthiest women scope to ignore grandfather’s instructions. Take Wu Zetian, who, after one kind of service as a Buddhist nun, took up another (aged thirteen) as a concubine in the emperor’s harem, before marrying his son as a junior wife. Wu ran rings around her dizzy, easygoing husband, ruling from behind the bamboo curtain, as the saying went. And when her husband conveniently died in 683, Wu allegedly poisoned the obvious heir, then deposed two of her own sons (one after six weeks, the other after six years). In 690 she pulled back the bamboo curtain to become the only woman who ever sat on China’s throne in her own right.

In some ways Wu was the ultimate protofeminist. She founded a research institute to write a Collection of Biographies of Famous Women and scandalized conservatives by leading a female procession to Mount Tai for China’s most sacred ritual, the Sacrifice to Heaven. Sisterhood had its limits, though—when her husband’s senior wife and favorite concubine became a threat while Wu was maneuvering her way to the top, she (again, allegedly) suffocated her own baby, framed her rivals, then punished them by chopping off their arms and legs and drowning them in a vat of wine.

Wu’s Buddhism was as contradictory as her protofeminism. She was certainly devout, at one point outlawing butchers’ shops and at another personally going beyond Chang’an’s city limits to meet a monk returning from collecting sacred texts in India, yet she flagrantly exploited religion for political ends. In 685 her lover—another monk—“found” a text called the Great Cloud Sutra, predicting the rise of a woman of such merit that she would become the universal ruler. Wu took the title Maitreya (Future Buddha) the Peerless, and legend holds that the face of the beautiful Maitreya Buddha statue at Longmen reflects Wu’s (Figure 7.3).

Wu had an equally complicated relationship with the civil service. She promoted entrance examinations over family connections, yet the Confucian gentleman scholars whose dominance this guaranteed hated their female ruler with a passion, and she returned the sentiment. Wu purged the scholars, who retaliated by writing official histories making her the archetype of what went wrong when women were on top.

But not even they could conceal the splendor of her reign. She commanded a million-strong army and the resources to send it deep into the steppes. More like the Roman army than the Han, it recruited largely within the empire and drew officers from the gentry. It could intimidate internal rivals but elaborate precautions kept its commanders loyal. Any officer who moved even ten men without permission faced a year in prison; any who moved a regiment risked strangulation.

Figure 7.3. The face of Wu Zetian? Legend has it that this monumental statue of the Future Buddha, carved at Longmen around 700, was modeled on the only woman to rule China in her own name.

The army took Chinese rule farther into northeast, Southeast, and central Asia than ever before, even intervening in northern India in 648, and China’s “soft” power reached further still. In the second through fifth centuries, India had eclipsed China as a cultural center of gravity, its missionaries and traders spreading Buddhism far and wide, and the elites of newly forming Southeast Asian states adopted Indian dress and scripts as well as religion. By the seventh century, though, China’s influence was also being felt. A distinctive Indochinese civilization developed in Southeast Asia, Chinese schools of Buddhism shaped thought back in India, and the ruling classes in Korea’s and Japan’s emerging states learned their Buddhism entirely from China. They aped Chinese dress, town planning, law codes, and writing, and buttressed their power by claiming both approval and descent from China’s rulers.

Part of Chinese culture’s appeal was its own openness to foreign ideas and ability to blend them into something new. Many of the most powerful people in Wu’s world could trace their ancestry back to steppe nomads who had migrated into China, and they maintained their ties to the steppe highway linking East and West. Inner Asian dancers and lutes were all the rage in Chang’an, where fashionistas wore Persian dresses with tight-laced bodices, pleated skirts, and yards of veils. True trendsetters would use only East African “devil slaves” as doormen; “If they do not die,” one owner coldly observed, “one can keep them, and after being kept a long time they begin to understand the language of human beings, though they themselves cannot speak it.”

The scions of China’s great houses broke their bones playing polo, the nomads’ game of choice; everyone learned to sit, central-Asian style, on chairs rather than mats; and stylish ladies dallied at the shrines of exotic religions such as Zoroastrianism and Christianity, carried east by the central Asian, Iranian, Indian, and Arab merchants who flocked to Chinese cities. In 2007 a DNA study suggested that one Yu Hong, buried at Taiyuan in northern China in 592, was actually European (though whether he himself migrated all the way from the western to the eastern end of the steppes or whether his ancestors had made the move more slowly remains unclear).

Wu’s world was the product of China’s unification in 589, which imposed a powerful state on the south and opened a vast realm to southern economic development. That explains why Eastern social development rose so rapidly; but it is only half the explanation for why the Eastern and Western scores crossed around 541. For a full answer we also need to know why Western social development kept falling.

THE LAST OF THEIR BREEDS

On the face of it, Western recovery seemed at least as likely as Eastern in the sixth century. In each core a huge ancient empire had broken down, leaving a smaller empire that claimed legitimate rule over the whole region and a cluster of “barbarian” kingdoms that ignored such claims (Figure 7.4). After the calamities of the fifth century, Byzantium had shored up its frontiers and enjoyed relative calm, and by 527, when a new emperor named Justinian ascended the throne, all signs were positive.

Historians often call Justinian the last of the Romans. He governed with furious energy, overhauling administration, strengthening taxes, and rebuilding Constantinople (the magnificent church Hagia Sophia is part of his legacy). He worked like a demon. Some critics insisted that he really was a demon—like some Hollywood vampire, they claimed, he never ate, drank, or slept, although he did have voracious sexual appetites. Some even said they had seen his head separate from his body and fly around on its own as he prowled the corridors at night.

Figure 7.4. The last of their breeds? First Justinian of Byzantium (533–565) and then Khusrau of Persia (603–627) attempt to reunite the Western core; Heraclius of Byzantium strikes back against Khusrau (624–628).

What chiefly drove Justinian, according to gossip, was his wife, Theodora (Figure 7.5), who got even worse press than Wu Zetian. Theodora had been an actress (in antiquity, often a euphemism for prostitute) before marrying Justinian. Rumor had it that her sex drive outdid even his; that she once slept with all the guests at a dinner party and then, when they were exhausted, worked through their thirty servants; and that she used to complain because God had given her only three orifices. Be that as it may, she was very much an empress. When aristocrats opposing Justinian’s taxes tried to use rioting sports fans to overthrow him in 532, for instance, it was Theodora who stopped him from fleeing. “Everyone born must die,” she pointed out, “but I would not live to see the day when men do not call me ‘Your Majesty.’ If you seek safety, husband, that is easy … but I prefer the old saying—purple [the color of kings] makes the best shroud.” Justinian pulled himself together, sent in the army, and never looked back.

Figure 7.5. Worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than Wu? Empress Theodora, as represented on a mosaic at Ravenna in Italy, completed in 547

The very next year Justinian dispatched his general Belisarius to wrest North Africa from the Vandals. Sixty-five years earlier fireships had sent Byzantium’s hopes of retaking Carthage up in smoke, but now it was the Vandals’ turn to collapse. Belisarius swept through North Africa, then crossed to Sicily. There the Goths fell apart too, and Justinian’s general celebrated Christmas 536 in Rome. All was going perfectly. Yet by the time Justinian died in 565 the reconquest had stalled, the empire was bankrupt, and Western social development had fallen below the East’s. What went wrong?

According to Belisarius’ secretary Procopius, who left an account called The Secret History, it was all the fault of women. Procopius provided a convoluted conspiracy theory worthy of Empress Wu’s Confucian civil servants. Belisarius’ wife, Antonina, Procopius said, was Empress Theodora’s best friend and partner in sexual high jinks. To distract Justinian from the all-too-true gossip about Antonina (and herself), Theodora undermined Belisarius in Justinian’s eyes. Convinced that Belisarius was plotting against him, Justinian recalled him—only for the Byzantine army, lost without its general, to be defeated. Justinian sent Belisarius back to save the day; then, paranoid once more, reran the whole foolish cycle (several times).

How much truth Procopius’ story holds is anyone’s guess, but the real explanation for the reconquest’s failure seems to be that despite the similarities between the Eastern and Western cores in the sixth century, the differences mattered more. Strategically, Justinian’s position was almost the opposite of Wendi’s when he united China. In China, all the northern “barbarian” kingdoms formed a single unit by 577, which Wendi used to overcome the rich but weak south. Justinian, by contrast, was trying to conquer a multitude of mostly poor but strong “barbarian” kingdoms from the rich Byzantine Empire. Reuniting the core in a single campaign, like Wendi’s in 589, was impossible.

Justinian also had to deal with Persia. For a century a string of wars with the Huns, conflicts over taxes, and religious upheavals had kept Persia militarily quiet, but the prospect of the Roman Empire rising from the ashes demanded action. In 540 a Persian army broke through Byzantium’s weakened defenses and plundered Syria, forcing Justinian to fight on two fronts (which probably had more to do with Belisarius’ recall from Italy than any of Antonina’s intrigues).

As if this were not enough, an unpleasant new sickness was reported in Egypt in 541. People felt feverish and their groins and armpits swelled. Within a day or so the swellings blackened and sufferers fell into comas and delirium. After another day or two most victims died, raving with pain.

It was the bubonic plague. The sickness reached Constantinople a year later, probably killing a hundred thousand people. The risk of death was so high, Bishop John of Ephesus claimed, that “nobody would go out of doors without a tag bearing his name hung round his neck.”

Constantinopolitans said the plague came from Ethiopia, and most historians agree. The bacillus had probably evolved long before 541 around Africa’s Great Lakes and become endemic among fleas on black rats in Ethiopia’s highlands. Red Sea traders must have carried plenty of Ethiopian rats to Egypt over the years, but because the plague-bearing fleas are only really active when temperatures are between 59 and 68°F, Egypt’s heat created an epidemiological barrier—until, apparently, the late 530s.

What happened then is disputed. Tree rings indicate several years of uncommon cold, and Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon watchers of the skies recorded a great comet. Some historians think its tail created a dust veil, lowering temperatures and letting the plague out of its box. Others think volcanic ash was responsible for lowering temperatures. Others still think dust veils and volcanoes have nothing to do with anything.

Yet when all is said and done, neither comets, nor strategy, nor even loose morals by themselves drove Western social development down in the sixth century. The fundamental contrast between East and West, which determined how the shocks of war and disease affected development, was one of maps, not chaps. Justinian’s economy was ticking along nicely—Egyptian and Syrian farmers were more productive than ever, and merchants still carried grain and olive oil to Constantinople—but the West had nothing like the East’s booming new frontier of rice paddies. When Wendi conquered south China he deployed at least 200,000 troops; at the height of his Italian war, in 551, Justinian could find just 20,000. Wendi’s victories captured south China’s great wealth, but Justinian’s merely won poorer and often war-ravaged lands. Given several generations, a reunited Roman Empire might conceivably have turned the Mediterranean back into a trade superhighway, opened a new economic frontier, and turned social development around; but Justinian did not have that luxury.

Geography doomed Justinian’s heroic, vainglorious reconquest before it even began, and his efforts probably only made that doom worse. His troops turned Italy into a wasteland and the traders who fed them carried rats, fleas, and death around the Mediterranean.* The plague slackened after 546, but the bacillus had taken root, and until about 750 no year passed without an outbreak somewhere. Population fell, perhaps by one-third. As had happened when the Old World Exchange unleashed epidemics four hundred years earlier, mass mortality initially rebounded to some people’s benefit; with fewer workers around, wages rose for those who survived. But that, of course, only made times harder for the rich (in a remarkably unchristian aside, Bishop John of Ephesus complained in 544 that all these deaths had made the cost of laundry services outrageous), and Justinian responded by pegging wages at preplague levels. This apparently accomplished nothing. Land was abandoned, cities shrank, taxes dwindled, and institutions broke down. Soon everyone was worse off.

Over the next two generations Byzantium imploded. Britain and much of Gaul had dropped out of the Western core in the fifth century; war-torn Italy and parts of Spain followed in the sixth; and then the tidal wave of collapse, rolling slowly from northwest to southeast, engulfed the Byzantine heartland, too. Constantinople’s population fell by three quarters, its agriculture, trade, and revenues broke down, and the end looked nigh. By 600 only one man still dreamed of remaking the Western core: King Khusrau II of Persia.

Rome, after all, was not the only Western empire that could be re-created. Back around 500 BCE, when Rome was still a backwater, Persia had united most of the Western core. Now, with Byzantium on its knees, Persia’s time seemed to have come again. In 609 Khusrau broke through the decaying frontier fortresses and the Byzantine army melted away. He took Jerusalem in 614, and with it Christianity’s holiest relics: fragments of the True Cross on which Jesus had been crucified, the Holy Lance that had pierced his side, and the Sacred Sponge that had refreshed him. Another five years brought Khusrau Egypt, and in 626, ninety-nine years after Justinian had come to power, Khusrau’s armies gazed across the Bosporus at Constantinople itself. The Avars, nomadic allies he had recruited from the western steppes, swept through the Balkans and were poised to attack from the other shore.

But Khusrau’s dreams collapsed even faster than Justinian’s. By 628 he was dead and his empire shattered. Ignoring the armies outside Constantinople’s walls, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius had “borrowed” gold and silver from the church and sailed off to the Caucasus, where he used the loot to hire his own nomadic cavalry from the Turkic* tribes on the steppes. Horsemen, he reasoned, were what mattered; and since Byzantium no longer had many, he would rent some. His hired Turks beat off the Persians sent to stop them and devastated Mesopotamia.

This was all it took to send the tidal wave of collapses rolling over Persia, too. The ruling class fell apart. Khusrau’s own son locked him up and starved him, then surrendered the lands Khusrau had conquered, sent back the relics he had captured, and even accepted Christianity. Persia dissolved into civil war, going through eight kings in five years, while Heraclius was hailed as the greatest of all great men. “Immense joy and indescribable happiness seized the entire universe,” gushed one contemporary. “Let us allwith united voice sing the angelic praises,” wrote another: “Glory in the highest to God, and peace on earth, goodwill to mankind.”

The wild swings of fortune in the century after 533 were the death throes of the ancient Western empires. Absent a new economic frontier like China’s, Khusrau could no more turn around Western social development than had Justinian, and the harder each man tried, the worse he made things. The last of the Romans and the last of the Persians hollowed out the Western core with a century of violence, plague, and economic decline. Just a decade after Heraclius rode into Jerusalem in 630 to restore the True Cross to its rightful place, all their triumphs and tragedies had ceased to matter.

THE WORD OF THE PROPHET

Without knowing it, Justinian and Khusrau had been following very ancient pattern books. Their struggles to control the core destabilized it and once again drew in people from the margins. Khusrau brought Avars to Constantinople, Heraclius led Turks into Mesopotamia, and both empires hired Arab tribes to guard their desert frontiers, since that was cheaper than paying their own garrisons. The same thinking that had Germanized Rome’s borderlands and Xiongnuized China’s now Arabized Byzantium’s and Persia’s mutual boundary, and across the sixth century both empires became more and more involved with Arabia. Each built up Arab client kingdoms, Persia absorbed southern Arabia into its empire, and Byzantium’s Ethiopian allies invaded Yemen to balance this. Arabia was being drawn into the core, and Arabs were creating their own kingdoms in the desert, building oasis towns along trade routes, and converting to Christianity.

The great Persian-Byzantine wars convulsed this Arab periphery, and when the empires fell apart, Arab strongmen battled over the ruins. In western Arabia, Mecca and Medina (Figure 7.6) fought through the 620s over trade routes, their war bands fanning out across the desert to find allies and ambush each other’s caravans. Old imperial frontiers meant little in this game, and by the time Medina’s leader took over Mecca in 630, his raiders were already fighting in Palestine. There Arabs loyal to Medina clashed with Arabs loyal to Mecca while other Arabs, paid by Constantinople, fought both groups.

Most of this would have seemed familiar to, say, an Aramaean tribesman operating in these same desert margins back when the Egyptian and Babylonian empires had collapsed after 1200 BCE: it was simply what happened on the frontiers when states broke down. But one thing would not have seemed familiar to the Aramaean. That was Medina’s leader, one Muhammad ibn Abdullah.

Around 610, as Persia was beginning its cataclysmic war on Byzantium, this Muhammad had had a vision. The Archangel Gabriel had appeared and commanded: “Recite!” Muhammad, understandably flustered, had insisted he was no reciter, but twice more Gabriel had commanded him. Then words, unbidden, had come to Muhammad:

Figure 7.6. Jihad: the Arabs almost reunite the Western core, 632–732. The arrows show the major Arab invasion routes.

Recite! In the name of your Lord who created—created man from clots of blood.

Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know.

Muhammad thought madness or demons must have possessed him, but his wife convinced him otherwise. Across the next twenty-two years Gabriel returned again and again, sending Muhammad into shivering, sweating fits and comas and setting God’s words free from the prophet’s reluctant lips. And what words they were: their beauty, tradition says, converted people the instant they heard them. “My heart was softened and I wept,” said ’Umar, one of the most important converts. “Islam entered into me.”

Islam—submission to God’s will—was in many ways a classic second-wave Axial religion. Its founder came from the margins of the elite (he was a minor figure in a nouveau riche trading clan) and the margins of empire; he wrote nothing down (the Koran, or “Recitations,” was assembled only after his death); he believed that God was unknowable; and he built on earlier Axial thought. He preached justice, equality before God, and compassion toward the weak. All this he shared with earlier Axial thinkers. But in another way, he was a whole new creature: an Axial warrior.

Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism, or Christianity, Islam was born on the edge of collapsing empires and came of age amid constant warfare. Islam was not a religion of violence (the Koran is a good deal less bloody than the Hebrew Bible), but Muslims could not stand aloof from fighting. “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you,” Muhammad had said, “but do not attack them first. God does not love the aggressors”—or, as the American Muslim Malcolm X put it in the twentieth century, “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.” Compulsion had no place in spreading religion, but Muslims (“surrenderers” to God) were obliged to defend their faith whenever it was threatened—which, since they were pushing and plundering their way into collapsing empires at the same time as spreading the word, was likely to be quite often.

Thus did Arab migrants find their own advantages of backwardness: the combination of salvation and militarism gave them organization and purpose in a world where both were scarce.

Like many another peripheral people seeking a place in a core, Arabs claimed to have been born to it, as descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael. With their own hands, Muslims claimed, Abraham and Ishmael had built the Ka‘ba, Mecca’s holiest shrine; Islam was in fact Abraham’s original religion, from which Judaism had diverged. The Koran presented Judaism as simply the cousin of Islam; “Who,” it asked, “but a foolish man would renounce the faith of Abraham?” All the prophets, from Abraham to Jesus, were valid (although Jesus was no Messiah), and Muhammad was simply the final prophet, putting the seal on the Lord’s message and fulfilling the promise of Judaism and Christianity. “Our God and your God is one,” Muhammad insisted. There was no necessary conflict between the religions of the book: in fact, the West needed Islam.

Muhammad sent letters to Khusrau and Heraclius explaining all this, but never heard back. No matter; Arabs kept moving into Palestine and Mesopotamia anyway. They came in war bands rather than armies, rarely more than five thousand and probably never more than fifteen thousand strong, hitting and running more than fighting pitched battles; but the few forces that resisted them were rarely much bigger. The empires of the 630s were bankrupt, divided, and incapable of meeting this confusing new threat.

In fact, most people in southwest Asia do not seem to have cared much whether Arab chiefs replaced Byzantine and Persian officials or not. For centuries both empires had persecuted many of their Christian subjects over doctrinal fine print. In the Byzantine Empire, for instance, since 451 the official position had been that Jesus had had two natures, one human and one divine, fused in a single body. Some Egyptian theorists retorted that Jesus had really had just one (purely divine) nature, and by the 630s so many people had died over this question that plenty of One-Nature* Christians in Syria and Egypt positively welcomed the Muslims. Better to have infidel masters to whom the question was meaningless than co-religionists who would unleash holy terror over it.

Just four thousand Muslims invaded Egypt in 639, but Alexandria surrendered without a fight. The mighty Persian Empire, still reeling from a decade of civil wars, collapsed like a house of cards, and the Byzantines retreated into Anatolia, surrendering three-quarters of their empire’s tax base. Across the next fifty years Byzantium’s high-end institutions evaporated. The empire survived only by quickly finding low-end solutions, relying on local notables to raise armies and on soldiers to grow their own food instead of receiving salaries. By 700 barely fifty thousand people lived at Constantinople, plowing up suburbs to grow crops, going without imports, and bartering instead of using coins.

In the space of a century the Arabs swallowed up the wealthiest parts of the Western core. In 674 their armies camped under Constantinople’s walls. Forty years later they stood on the banks of the Indus in Pakistan and crossed into Spain, and in 732 a war band reached Poitiers in central France. The migrations from the deserts into the heartland of empires then slowed. A millennium later Gibbon mused:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal distance would have carried the Saracens [Muslims from North Africa] to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

“From such calamities Christendom was delivered,” Gibbon added, with no little sarcasm. Conventional wisdom in eighteenth-century Britain, like that in seventh-century Constantinople, saw Christianity as the West’s defining value and Islam as its antithesis. The rulers of cores probably always picture those who move in from the fringes as barbarians, but Gibbon understood full well that the Arabs were actually part of the larger second-wave Axial transformation of the Western core that had begun with the triumph of Christianity. We can, in fact, out-Gibbon Gibbon, putting the Arabs into a still-longer tradition going all the way back to the Amorites in Mesopotamia in 2200 BCE, and seeing them as they saw themselves: as people who had already been drawn into the core by its conflicts, and who were now claiming their rightful place at its head. They came not to bury the West but to perfect it; not to thwart Justinian’s and Khusrau’s ambitions, but to fulfill them.

Plenty of political pundits in our own century find it convenient, like Gibbon’s eighteenth-century critics, to imagine Islamic civilization as being outside of and opposed to “Western” civilization (by which they generally mean northwest Europe and its overseas colonies). But that ignores the historical realities. By 700 the Islamic world more or less was the Western core, and Christendom was merely a periphery along its northern edge. The Arabs had brought into one state roughly as much of the Western core as Rome had done.

The Arab conquests took longer than Wendi’s in the East, but because Arab armies were so small and popular resistance generally so limited, they rarely devastated the lands they conquered, and in the eighth century the West’s social development finally stopped falling. Now, perhaps, the largely reunited Western core could bounce back like the Eastern core had done in the sixth century, and the East-West gap would narrow again.

THE CENTERS DO NOT HOLD

But that did not happen, as Figure 7.1 shows very clearly. Although both cores were largely reunited by 700 and enjoyed or suffered rather similar political fortunes between the eighth century and the tenth, Eastern social development continued to rise faster than Western.

Both the reunited cores proved politically rickety. Their rulers had to relearn a lesson well known to the Han and Romans, that empires are governed through fudging and compromise, but neither China’s Sui dynasty nor the Arabs were very good at this. Like the Han dynasty, the Sui had to worry about nomads (now Turks* rather than Xiongnu), but thanks to the growth of the Eastern core they also had to worry about threats from newly formed states. When Koguryo in what is now Korea opened secret negotiations with the Turks to cooperate in raiding China, the Sui emperor decided he had to act. In 612 he sent a vast army against Koguryo, but bad weather, worse logistics, and atrocious leadership brought about its destruction. In 613 he sent another and in 614 a third. And as he was raising a fourth, rebellions against his demands tore his empire apart.

For a while the horsemen of the apocalypse seemed to be breaking loose again. Warlords divided China, Turkic chieftains played them against one another and plundered at will, and famine and disease spread. One epidemic arrived across the steppes and another, sounding nastily like bubonic plague, came by sea. But just as bungling idiocy had been enough to start the crisis, good leadership was enough to end it. One Chinese warlord, the Duke of Tang, talked the major Turkic chieftains into backing him against the other Chinese warlords, and by the time the Turks realized their mistake he had proclaimed himself ruler of a new Tang dynasty. In 630 his son exploited a Turkic civil war to extend Chinese rule farther into the steppes than ever before (Figure 7.2b). State control was restored; population movements, famines, and epidemics died down; and the surge in social development that created Wu’s world got under way in earnest.

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. Without 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.

Figure 7.8. Coming in from the cold: the migrations of the Seljuk Turks (solid arrows) and Vikings/Normans (broken arrows) into the Western core in the eleventh century

We would know precious little about these traders had the Jewish community in Cairo not decided in 1890 to remodel its nine-hundred-year-old synagogue. Like many synagogues, this had a storeroom where worshippers could deposit unwanted documents to avoid risking blasphemy by destroying papers that might have God’s name written on them. Normally storerooms were cleared out periodically, but this one had been allowed to fill up with centuries’ worth of wastepaper. As the remodeling began, old documents started showing up in Cairo’s antiquities markets, and in spring 1896 two English sisters carried a bundle back to Cambridge. There they showed two texts to Solomon Schechter, the University Reader in Talmudics. Initially skeptical, Schechter then had an “Oh my God” moment: one was a Hebrew fragment of the biblical book of Ecclesiasticus, previously known only from Greek translations. The learned doctor descended on Cairo that December and carried off 140,000 documents.

Among them were hundreds of letters to Cairo trading houses, mailed between 1025 and about 1250 from as far afield as Spain and India. The ideological divisions that had formed in the wake of the Arab conquests were crumbling as population growth expanded markets and profits, and clearly meant little to these correspondents, who worried more about the weather, their families, and getting rich than about religion and politics. In this they may have been typical of Mediterranean merchants; though less well documented, commerce was apparently just as international and profitable in Ifriqiya and Sicily, where Muslim Palermo became a boomtown trading with Christian northern Italy.

Even Monte Polizzo, the backcountry Sicilian village where I have been excavating for the last few years, got into the act. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, I went there to study the effects of Phoenician and Greek colonization in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, but when we started digging in 2000 we found a second village above the ancient houses. This second village had been established around 1000 CE, probably by Muslim immigrants from Ifriqiya, and burned down around 1125. When our botanist sifted through the carbonized seeds excavated in its ruins, he discovered—to everyone’s surprise—that one building had been a storeroom full of carefully threshed wheat, with scarcely a weed in it.* This formed a sharp contrast with the seeds we found in the sixth-century-BCE contexts, which were always mixed with plenty of weeds and chaff. That would have made for rather coarse bread, which is what we might expect in a simple farming village where people grew crops for their own tables and did not worry about the occasional unpleasant mouthful. The compulsive winnowing that rid the twelfth-century-CE wheat of all impurities, though, is exactly what we might expect from commercial farmers producing for picky city folk.

The Mediterranean economy was booming indeed if little Monte Polizzo was tied into international networks. But the oldest part of the Muslim core, in southwest Asia, was not doing so well. It was bad enough that since the 860s the Turkic slaves whom Iraqi caliphs had bought for their armies had been launching coups and making themselves sultans, but worse was to come. Since the seventh century Muslim merchants and missionaries had been preaching Muhammad’s good news to the Turkic tribes in the steppes, and in 960 the Karluk clan in what is now Uzbekistan—reputedly some 200,000 families—converted to Islam en masse. It was a triumph for the faith but rapidly turned into a nightmare for the politicians. The Karluks founded their own Karakhanid Empire and another Turkic tribe, the Seljuks, followed their conversion with migration, plundering their way across Iran and taking Baghdad in 1055.* By 1079 they had driven the Byzantines out of most of Anatolia and the Fatimids out of Syria.

Muslim southwest Asia diverged rapidly from the flourishing Islamic Mediterranean. The Seljuk Turks assembled a large empire, but it was even more dysfunctional than the caliphate had been. When its fierce first ruler died in 1092 his sons followed steppe traditions by splitting the empire into nine parts and fighting one another. The decisive arm in their wars was cavalry, so the Seljuk kings gave great estates to warlords who could provide mounted followers. These nomad chiefs, predictably, let administration and trade decay and even stopped minting coins. Cities shrank, irrigation canals silted up, and marginal villages were abandoned. In the hot, dry weather of the Medieval Warm Period farmers had to struggle constantly just to keep their precious fields from reverting to steppe and desert, but Seljuk policies made their job harder still. Many of the conquerors, preferring nomadic to urban lifestyles, welcomed the decline of agriculture, and as the twelfth century wore on, more and more Arabs left their fields and joined the Turks in herding flocks.

Alarmed at the spread of radical Shiite theories in these troubled years, scholars in eastern Iran set up schools to develop and teach a coherent Sunni response, which Seljuk lords promoted vigorously in the twelfth century. Its monuments of scholarship—such as al-Ghazali’s Revivification of the Sciences of Religion, which drew on Greek logic to reconcile Islamic jurisprudence, Sufi mysticism, and Muhammad’s revelation—remain foundations of Sunni thought to this day. So successful was the Sunni Revival, in fact, that some Shiites decided that murdering Sunni leaders was the only practical response. Retreating to the mountains of Iran, they formed a secret society known to its enemies as the Assassins (according to legend, so called because its agents smoked hashish to put them in the right frame of mind for murder).

Assassination could not roll back the Sunni Revival, but neither could an intellectual movement—despite its success—hold together a Seljuk state, and without the kind of political organization that the Fatimid kingdoms provided in North Africa, the Seljuk lands buckled under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The timing was unfortunate, because the same weather that posed such challenges in southwest Asia created opportunities for the unruly raiders, traders, and invaders on the Muslim core’s European fringe. Equally important, warmer weather brought northern Europe longer growing seasons and higher yields, making previously marginal lands potentially profitable. By the time the Medieval Warm Period wound down, farmers had plowed up vast tracts of what had once been forest, felling perhaps half the trees in western Europe.

Like all episodes of expansion since the spread of farming from the Hilly Flanks, two processes combined to bring advanced agricultural techniques from western into eastern Europe. The first was colonization, often led by the church, normally the only well-organized institution on the frontier. “Give these monks a naked moor or a wild wood,” Gerald of Wales wrote, “then let a few years pass and you will find not only beautiful churches, but dwellings of men built around them.” Expansion was the Lord’s work: according to a recruiting drive in 1108, “pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey, and flour … here you will be able both to save your souls [by forcing heathens to convert] and, if you will, to acquire very good land to settle.”

Sometimes the pagans fled; sometimes they submitted, oftentimes ending up little better than slaves. But like hunter-gatherers confronting farmers or Sicilians confronting Greek colonists thousands of years earlier, sometimes they organized and stood their ground. As Frankish and Germanic farmers moved east, cutting down trees and plowing up pastures, some villagers in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and even distant Russia copied their techniques, exploiting the better weather to farm their own lands more intensively. Their chiefs, turning Christian, persuaded or forced them to become tax-paying subjects and fight the colonists (and one another).

The spread of states, churches, and intensive farming across Europe had much in common with the agricultural frontier that had developed south of the Yangzi since the fifth century, but differed in one crucial respect: it did not create major trade flows between the new rural frontier and an older urban core. In the absence of a central European equivalent of China’s Grand Canal there was simply no cheap way to get Polish grain to great cities such as Palermo and Cairo. Western Europe’s towns were closer to the frontiers and were growing, but remained too few and too small to provide adequate markets. Rather than importing food from eastern Europe, these western European towns generally grew by intensifying local production and exploiting new energy sources.

Watermills, already common in the Muslim core, now spread across the Christian fringe. The number of mills in France’s Robec Valley, for instance, quintupled between the tenth century and the thirteenth, and the Domesday Book, a census compiled in 1086, says that England had a remarkable 5,624 mills. Farmers also learned the virtues of horses, which eat more than oxen but can pull plows faster and work longer. The balance slowly tipped in horses’ favor after 1000, when—for reasons I will return to in Chapter 8—Europeans adopted from Muslims metal horseshoes, which reduced friction, and replaced their clumsy, choking, throat-and-girth harnesses with collar harnesses that quadrupled horses’ pulling power. In 1086 just one draft animal in twenty on English barons’ lands was a horse; by 1300 one in five was. With this extra horsepower (not to mention extra manure) farmers could reduce the land they left fallow each year, squeezing more from their properties.

Europe’s farms remained less productive than Egypt’s or China’s but they increasingly had surpluses to sell to towns, and the growing towns took on new roles. Many northwest Europeans were serfs, legally bound to work the land of lords who protected them from raiders (and from other lords). In theory, at least, the lords held their own positions as vassals of kings, repaying the kings by fighting as armored cavalry, and kings owed their positions to the church, which dispensed God’s approval. But lords, kings, and the church all wanted access to the wealth now accumulating in towns, and townsfolk could often negotiate freedom from feudal obligations in return for surrendering a cut of it.

Like low-end rulers going all the way back to Assyria and the Zhou, European kings were effectively running a protection racket, but their version was even messier than those of most of their predecessors. Towns, nobles, monarchs, and churchmen constantly interfered in one another’s affairs, and in the absence of real central authorities, conflict was virtually guaranteed. In 1075, for instance, Pope Gregory VII claimed the right to appoint all bishops in Germany. His goal was to reform the morality of church leaders, but since bishoprics controlled vast slices of Germany’s land, the move also had the pleasing side effect of giving Gregory control over much of Germany’s resource base. The German emperor Henry IV was horrified, and responded by claiming that as defender of the faith he had the right to depose Gregory—“now not pope,” Henry insisted, “but false monk … I, Henry, by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say to you: Descend! Descend!”

Instead of descending, Gregory excommunicated Henry, casting the German emperor outside the Christian faith. In practical terms, that meant Germany’s feudal lords could legally ignore their ruler. Now unable to get anything done in his own land, within a year Henry was reduced to kneeling barefoot in the snow for three days outside an Alpine monastery, begging the pope’s forgiveness. This he got, then went to war with the pope anyway. No one won. Pope Gregory lost everyone’s support after his own mercenaries sacked Rome because he had not paid them; the emperor ended his life on the run from his own son; and the theological dispute was never really resolved.

Eleventh-century Europe was full of such tangled struggles, but little by little, their resolutions gradually made institutions stronger and their spheres of responsibility clearer. Kings increasingly managed to organize, mobilize, and tax people in their territories. One historian has called this process “the formation of a persecuting society”: royal officials persuaded people to see themselves as part of a nation (the English, the French, and so on) defined against what they were not—pariahs such as Jews, homosexuals, lepers, and heretics, who, for the first time, were systematically stripped of protection and terrorized. Increasingly effective states emerged from this unpleasant process.

Other historians speak more happily of an “age of cathedrals,” as awe-inspiring monuments sprouted all over Europe. In France alone, eighty cathedrals, five hundred abbeys, and tens of thousands of parish churches were built between 1180 and 1270. Over 40 million cubic feet of stone were quarried, more than for Egypt’s Great Pyramid.

Scholarship had declined in western Europe along with the Roman Empire and only partially recovered in Charlemagne’s France, but after 1000, teachers began clustering around the new cathedrals, setting up schools rather like those of the independent muftis in the Islamic world. Christians who went to study in Muslim Spain brought home with them translations of Aristotle’s treatises on logic, preserved for centuries by Arab court scholars. All this strengthened Christian intellectual life, helping theologians think about God in the same sophisticated ways as al-Ma’mun’s theorists in ninth-century Baghdad, but it also created new conflicts within the educated elite.

No one illustrates these better than Peter Abelard. A bright young man steeped in the new learning, Abelard showed up in Paris around 1100. Wandering from school to school, he publicly humiliated his pedantic teachers by tripping them up with his Aristotelian logic. Honest but plodding professors saw their careers collapse when twenty-somethings like Abelard used their razor-sharp debating skills to throw convention (and potentially the fates of everyone’s souls) into confusion. Inordinately pleased with himself, Abelard set up his own school and promptly seduced and impregnated one of his pupils, the teenage Héloïse. Her family, dishonored, struck back: “One night when I was sound asleep,” Abelard coyly put it, “they cut off the organs by which I had committed the deed which they abhorred.”

Héloïse and Abelard each withdrew in shame to houses of God, and for twenty years kept up a correspondence, self-justifying on his part, searingly personal on hers. In this enforced retirement Abelard wrote the Sic et Non, “Thus and Not-Thus,” a kind of handbook for applying logic to Christianity’s contradictions; and if Abelard’s name became a byword for the dangers of the new learning, he nonetheless forced Christian theorists to reconcile the authority of scripture with Aristotelian rationalism. By 1270, when Thomas Aquinas perfected this in his On Christian Theology, Christian learning was quite as sophisticated as that of the Sunni Revival.

Other Europeans did the opposite of Abelard: instead of bringing ideas and institutions from the Muslim core to the Christian fringe, they moved themselves into the Muslim core. Merchants of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa competed with those of Cairo and Palermo for the lucrative Mediterranean trade, buying and selling or stealing and fighting. In Spain, migrants from increasingly crowded northwest Europe helped local Christians push the Muslims back, and all around the Mediterranean Normans (or Norsemen) unleashed a storm of pillage and conquest.

The Normans were descendants of Scandinavia’s pagan Vikings, who had flourished as raiders on Europe’s far northwest fringe in the ninth century but in the tenth progressed to grander forms of theft. As the Medieval Warm Period opened up the waters of the North Atlantic they took their longboats to Iceland, Greenland, and even Vinland in North America. They settled heavily in Ireland and Britain, and in northern France their chief, Rollo, turned himself into a proper king (of what is now Normandy) by adopting Christianity in 912.

The Normans remained vague on the faith’s details, sacrificing a hundred captives at Rollo’s funeral in 931, but their violence made them desirable as mercenaries as far away as Constantinople. Hired in 1016 to fight on both sides in the endless wars over southern Italy, Norman bands proceeded to carve out their own state, and pressing on to Sicily in 1061, they pursued an almost genocidal war against its Muslim occupants. If you visit Sicily today you will be hard-pressed to find a single monument from the two centuries of Islamic rule, during which the island was the wonder of the Mediterranean.

The Normans had no particular animus against Islam; they treated fellow Christians just as badly. One Italian writer called them “a savage, barbarous and horrible race of inhuman disposition,” and Anna Comnena, a Byzantine princess, was even more appalled. “Whenever battle and war occur,” she wrote, “there is a baying in [the Normans’] hearts and they cannot be held back. Not only the soldiers but also their leaders fling themselves irresistibly into the enemy ranks.”

Byzantium learned about Normans the hard way. In the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantine strength had revived somewhat as Muslims turned to fighting one another, and in 975 a Byzantine army even came within sight of Jerusalem (it failed to take the holy city but did liberate Jesus’ sandals and John the Baptist’s hair). But within a century the Byzantines became dangerously dependent on Norman mercenaries, whose unreliability (for all their ferocity, they regularly ran away) contributed to a catastrophic defeat at Turkish hands in 1071. Twenty years later, with Constantinople under Turkish siege, the Byzantine emperor wrote to the pope in Rome, apparently hoping for help in hiring more mercenaries. The pope, though, had other ideas. Seeking to strengthen his own position in his struggles with Europe’s kings, he called a summit in 1095 and pitched the idea of an expedition—a crusade—to throw the Turks out of Jerusalem.

There was wild enthusiasm; rather more, in fact, than either the pope or the Byzantines wanted. Tens of thousands of villagers started walking east, plundering central Europe and massacring Jews as they went. Only a few reached Anatolia, where the Turks slaughtered them. None made it to the Holy Land, except as slaves.

Of more practical use were the three armies of French and Norman knights, backed by Genoese merchants, which converged on Jerusalem in 1099. Their timing was impeccable: the Seljuks were too busy fighting one another to offer much resistance, and after heart-stopping feats of bravado the crusaders breached the holy city’s walls. For twelve hours they plundered and killed on a scale that shocked even the Normans among them, burning Jews alive and chopping Muslims into pieces (though at least, a Jewish woman observed, the Christians did not follow the Turkish practice of raping their victims first). Finally, at dusk, the conquerors splashed through ankle-deep gore to thank God at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Yet spectacular though it was, this direct assault on the core never seriously threatened Islam. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was steadily rolled back until in 1187 the Muslims recaptured the city. More crusades followed, most failing dismally; in 1204 the fourth, unable to afford ships, ended up renting itself out as muscle to Venetian financiers and sacking not Jerusalem but Constantinople. Neither the crusading movement nor the Byzantine Empire recovered from this disgrace.

The West was changing shape under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The Muslim lands remained the core, but as social development stagnated in southwest Asia, Islam’s center of gravity shifted toward the Mediterranean, and even within the Mediterranean there were winners and losers. Egypt became the jewel in the Muslim crown; Byzantium, Rome’s last relic, went into terminal decline; and the rude, backward northwest fringe expanded fastest of all.

DARK SATANIC MILLS

Matters could scarcely have been more different in the Eastern core. The Tang Empire had dissolved in 907, but already by 960 China had been reunited. Taizu, the first emperor of the new Song dynasty, was a tough soldier, but saw that the growth of economic and cultural ties between China’s regions across the last few centuries had made much of the elite feel that China should be one empire. Given the right terms, he reckoned, they would join him rather than fight him. When force was required he readily used it, but unlike earlier efforts to unite either core, most states submitted peacefully and most accepted Song rule.

Taizu also understood that army commanders had brought down most previous dynasties, so he simply got rid of them. Inviting the generals who had put him on the throne to a feast, he “dissolved the militarists’ power with a cup of wine,” as the official history put it. Publicly toasting the generals for having reached retirement (which was news to the generals), he dismissed them. Rather surprisingly, Taizu got away with this bloodless coup, and from then on when he mobilized the army he usually led it himself.

Shifting from military to civilian government was a brilliant way to tap into the broad desire for peace and unity. Its one drawback was that China did still have enemies, particularly two seminomadic groups, the Khitans and Tanguts, which had built up empires beyond China’s northern frontier (Figure 7.9). These could not be dissolved with wine, and after losing an army and almost having an emperor captured, the Song fell back on the old policy of buying peace with gifts.

Up to a point, this worked, and neither the Khitans nor the Tanguts overran the Eastern core like the Seljuks did in the West. Its downside was that the Song, like earlier dynasties, were soon bankrupting themselves paying for gifts and garrisons that did not really keep the peace. By the 1040s they were supporting a million-man army and buying thousands of suits of armor and millions of arrowheads each month—not at all what Taizu had intended.

Some generals hoped that wonder weapons could save China from sliding back into the old standoff with the steppes. Daoist alchemists had discovered a crude kind of gunpowder around 850 (ironically while looking for elixirs of eternal life); by 950, paintings show people squirting burning powder on one another from bamboo tubes; and in 1044 a military handbook described a “fire drug,” packed in paper or bamboo and thrown by catapult. Gunpowder’s bark, however, was still worse than its bite, and while it frightened horses it rarely hurt anyone—yet.

Figure 7.9. The antimilitarist empire: the division of China around 1000 among the Song, Khitan, and Tangut states. China’s main coalfields are marked with dots.

In the absence of technological breakthroughs, the Song military simply needed more money. Help came from unlikely directions. One was China’s intellectuals. After An Lushan’s revolt tipped the country into chaos in 755, many scholars had questioned the enthusiasm for all things foreign, which, as they saw it, had given China nothing but Turkic generals and disorder. The whole five-century period since the fall of the Han started to strike many disillusioned gentry as a barbarous interlude that had corrupted Chinese traditions. Chief among the corrosive alien imports, they argued, was Buddhism.

In 819 the learned gentleman Han Yu sent a “Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha” to the emperor to express his horror at the mass hysteria that broke out when a monastery relocated one of the (many) bones said to be the Buddha’s. “Buddhism,” Han insisted, “is no more than a cult of barbarian peoples.” Back in the days when Buddhism had seduced China, he argued, “officials, being of small worth and knowledge, were unable fully to comprehend the ways of the ancient kings and the exigencies of past and present, and so could not implement the wisdom of the emperor and rescue the age from corruption.” Now, however, scholarship was superior. Intellectuals were learning to think, paint, and above all write like the ancients, thereby recapturing antique virtue and saving the nation. “Prose writing must serve as the vehicle for the Way,” urged Han, who designed a new writing style to reproduce the crispness and high moral tone of antiquity.

The backlash against Buddhism was controversial but convenient. Buddhist monasteries had accumulated enormous wealth, and when Emperor Wuzong cracked down on Buddhism in the 840s—defrocking monks, closing monasteries, plundering treasures—fiscal pressures may have moved him more than scholarly fulminations. The official persecution made opinions such as Han’s respectable. Millions of Buddhists remained, but millions more Chinese, filled with doubts about this imported religion, were energized by the possibility that answers to the Buddha’s great questions—What is the real me? How do I fit into the universe?—lay hidden in plain sight in their own Confucian classics.

A “Neo-Confucian” movement swept through the gentry, and in China’s hour of need, with the Khitans and Tanguts pressing in, the empire’s finest minds emulated Confucius by stepping forward to advise the ruler. Forget about rebirth and immortality, they insisted; the here-and-now is everything, and fulfillment comes from action in the world. “The true scholar,” one concluded, “should be the first to worry about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures.”

The Neo-Confucians turned classical studies into a program for perfecting society. Men who had the philological and artistic skills to understand ancient culture properly, they claimed, could use antiquity’s virtue to save the modern world. Ouyang Xiu, for instance, who had stumbled across Han Yu’s writings as a boy, invented his own “ancient prose” style, made a name as a poet, historian, and collector of two-thousand-year-old bronzes, then rose high in the imperial service, championing fiscal and military reforms.

Dozens of equally talented men offered their help to the state, but the most remarkable was Wang Anshi, a leading antiquarian, great prose stylist, and prime minister. Wang’s many enemies (who included Ouyang) called him abrasive and repulsively dirty, and in the end drove him into exile and disgrace, but his radical New Policies—an eleventh-century version of the New Deal and Reaganomics rolled into one—brought some real relief. Wang slashed taxes but raised revenues by making collection fairer. He funded massive public works and stimulated growth with “green shoots loans,” lending capital to farmers and small merchants. He balanced the budget by shifting from expensive professional soldiers toward cheaper militias. When conservative administrators objected, he found new administrators. He put economics, geography, and law on the civil service exams, established new schools to teach them, and raised salaries for those who made it through.

Extraordinary as the Neo-Confucians’ achievements were, though, they paled into insignificance compared with a second development going on at the same time, an economic explosion to rival ancient Rome’s. The Medieval Warm Period was a boon almost everywhere in China: lake sediments, the chemistry of stalagmites, and textual records all suggest that the semiarid north got more rain, just what its farmers wanted, while the wet south got less, which suited that region’s farmers too. China’s population grew to perhaps 100 million by 1100.

By 1100 all thirty-seven of the types of rice mentioned in the sixth-century Essential Methods of the Common People had been replaced by even higher-yielding varieties, and farmers regularly squeezed three crops out of their irrigated and manured fields each year by alternating rice with wheat. An expanding network of roads—often finished in stone within cities and sometimes in brick even in the countryside—made it easier to get crops to harbors, and water transport was improving even more dramatically. Chinese shipwrights copied the best features of Persian, Arab, and Southeast Asian vessels, building large oceangoing junks with watertight compartments, four or even six masts, and crews up to a thousand strong. Shipping costs tumbled and merchants organized for large-scale trade. According to a twelfth-century writer,

The rivers and lakes are linked together so that by means of them one can go everywhere. When a boat leaves its home port, there are no obstacles to its planning a journey of ten thousand li [roughly three thousand miles]. Every year the common people use for trading all the grain that is surplus to their requirements for seed and food. Large merchants gather what the lesser households have. Little boats become the dependents of the greater vessels and engage in joint operations, going back and forth selling grain to clear a solid profit.

Almost as important as the actual boats were shipping brokers, middlemen who bought and warehoused cargoes, made loans, and turned ships around quickly. All this, though, took cash, and as the economy grew the government struggled to mint enough bronze coins. Heroic efforts to find new copper sources (and less-heroic ones to debase coins with lead) pushed output up from 300 million coins in 983 to 1.83 billion in 1007, but demand still outran supply.

Greed and laziness saved the day. In the ninth century, when the tea trade started booming and state supervision of commerce declined, dealers from Sichuan began setting up offices in Chang’an where they could exchange the coins they received for their tea for “flying money,” paper bills of credit. When they returned to Sichuan the dealers could convert these bills back into cash at the company’s head office. Given that a pocketful of flying money was worth forty pocketfuls of bronze coins, the advantages were obvious, and soon merchants were using the bills as cash in their own right. They had invented fiduciary money, tokens whose value depended on trust rather than their metal content. In 1024 the state took the logical next step, printing paper banknotes, and was soon issuing more money in notes than in coin.*

As paper money and credit penetrated the countryside, making buying and selling easier, more peasants grew whatever did best on their land, sold it for cash, then bought whatever they could not produce so easily. A Buddhist monk described stumbling across one of their little markets in a remote village:

The morning sun not yet risen from the lake,

Bramble thickets seem for a moment like gates of pine.

Aged trees steep the precipitous cliffs in gloom;

The apes’ desolate calls float down.

The path turns, and a valley opens

With a village in the distance barely visible.

Along the track, shouting and laughing,

Come farmhands overtaking and overtaken in turn

Off to match wits a few hours at the market.

The lodges and stores are countless as the clouds.

They bring linen fabrics and paper-mulberry paper,

Or drive pullets and sucking-pigs ahead of them.

Brushes and dustpans are piled this way and that—

Too many domestic trifles to list them all.

An elderly man controls the busy trafficking,

And everyone respects his slightest indications.

Meticulously careful, he compares

The yardsticks one by one,

And turns them over slowly in his hands.

Urban markets were of course far grander and could draw on half a continent of suppliers. Southeast Asian traders linked the port of Quanzhou to the Indonesian Spice Islands and the riches of the Indian Ocean, and imports made their way from there to every town in the empire. To pay for them, family workshops turned out silks, porcelain, lacquer, and paper, and the most successful blossomed into factories. Even villagers could buy what had formerly been luxuries, such as books. By the 1040s, millions of relatively cheap books were rolling off wooden printing presses and making their way into even quite modest buyers’ hands. Literacy rates probably rivaled those of Roman Italy a thousand years earlier.

The most momentous changes of all, though, were in textiles and coal, exactly the spheres of activity that would drive the British industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. Eleventh-century textile workers invented a pedal-powered silk-reeling machine, and in 1313 the scholar Wang Zhen’s Treatise on Agriculture described a large hemp-spinning version, adapted to use either animal or waterpower. It was, Wang noted, “several times cheaper than the women it replaces,” and was “used in all parts of north China which manufacture hemp.” So moved was Wang by this wizardry that he interrupted his technical account with bursts of poetry:

It takes a spinner many days to spin a hundred catties,

But with waterpower it may be done with supernatural speed! …

There is one driving belt for wheels both great and small;

When one wheel turns, the others all turn with it!

The rovings are transmitted evenly from the bobbin rollers,

The threads wind by themselves onto the reeling frame!*

Comparing eighteenth-century plans for a French flax-spinning machine with Wang’s fourteenth-century design, the economic historian Mark Elvin felt compelled to conclude that “the resemblance to Wang [Z]hen’s machine is so striking that suspicions of an ultimate Chinese origin for it … are almost irresistible.” Wang’s machine was less efficient than the French one, “but,” Elvin concludes, “if the line of advance which it represented had been followed a little further then medieval China would have had a true industrial revolution in the production of textiles over four hundred years before the West.”

No statistics survive for Song-era textile production and prices, so we cannot easily test this theory, but we do have information on other industries. Tax returns suggest that iron output increased sixfold between 800 and 1078, to about 125,000 tons—almost as much as the whole of Europe would produce in 1700.*

Ironworks clustered around their main market, the million-strong city of Kaifeng, where (among other uses) iron was cast into the countless weapons the army required. Chosen as a capital because it lay conveniently near the Grand Canal, Kaifeng was the city that worked. It lacked the history, tree-lined boulevards, and gracious palaces of earlier capitals and it inspired no great poetry, but in the eleventh century it grew into a crowded, chaotic, and vibrant metropolis. Its raucous bars served wine until dawn,^† fifty theaters each drew audiences of thousands, and shops even encroached on the city’s one great processional avenue. And beyond the walls, foundries burned day and night, dark satanic mills belching fire and smoke, sucking in tens of thousands of trees to smelt ores into iron—so many trees, in fact, that ironmasters bought up and clear-cut entire mountains, driving the price of charcoal beyond the reach of ordinary homeowners. Hundreds of freezing Kaifengers were trampled in fuel riots in 1013.

Kaifeng was apparently entering an ecological bottleneck. There was simply not enough wood in northern China to feed and warm its million bodies and to keep foundries turning out thousands of tons of iron. That left just two options: the people and/or industries could drift away, or someone could innovate and find a new fuel source.

Homo sapiens had always lived by exploiting plants and animals for food, clothes, fuel, and shelter. Over the ages humans had become much more efficient parasites; subjects of the Han and Roman empires in the first centuries CE, for instance, consumed seven or eight times as much energy per person as their Ice Age ancestors had grubbed up fourteen thousand years earlier.* The Han and Romans had also learned to tap winds and waves to move boats, going beyond what plants and animals could do for them, and to apply waterpower to mills. Yet the cold Kaifengers who rioted in 1013 were still basically feeding off other organisms, standing little higher in the Great Chain of Energy than Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

Within a few decades that had begun to change, turning Kaifeng’s ironmasters into unwitting revolutionaries. A thousand years earlier, in the days of the Han dynasty, some Chinese had tinkered with coal and gas, but these energy sources had had few obvious applications. Only now, with the voracious forges competing with hearths and homes for fuel, did industrialists push hard at the door between the ancient organic economy and a new world of fossil fuels. Kaifeng was near two of China’s biggest coal deposits (Figure 7.9), with easy access via the Yellow River, so it did not take genius—just greed, desperation, and trial and error—to work out how to use coal instead of charcoal to smelt iron ore. It also took capital and labor to locate, dig up, and move the coal, which probably explains why businessmen (who had resources) rather than householders (who did not) led the way.

A poem written around 1080 gives a sense of the transformation. The first verse describes a woman so desperate for fuel that she sells her body for firewood; the second, a coal mine coming to the rescue; the third, a great blast furnace; and the fourth, relief that people can now have their cake and eat it: great iron swords can be cast but the forests will survive.

Didn’t you see her,

Last winter, when travelers were stopped by the rain and snow,

And city-dwellers’ bones were torn by the wind?

With a half-bundle of damp firewood, “bearing her bedding at dawn.”*

At twilight she knocked on the gate, but no one wanted her trade.

Who would have thought that in those mountains lay a hidden treasure,

In heaps, like black jewels, ten thousand cartloads of coal.

Flowing grace and favor, unknown to all.

The stinking blast— zhenzhen^†—disperses;

Once a beginning is made, [production] is vast without limit.

Ten thousand men exert themselves, a thousand supervise.

Pitching ore into the roiling liquid makes it even brighter,

Flowing molten jade and gold, its vigorous potency.

In the Southern Mountains, chestnut forests now breathe easy;

In the Northern Mountains, no need to hammer the hard ore.

They will cast you a sword of a hundred refinings,

To chop a great whale of a bandit to mincemeat.

Coal and iron took off together. One well-documented foundry, at Qicunzhen, employed three thousand workers to shovel 35,000 tons of ore and 42,000 tons of coal into furnaces each year, harvesting 14,000 tons of pig iron at the other end. By 1050 so much coal was being mined that householders were using it too, and when the government overhauled poor relief in 1098 coal was the only fuel its officials bothered to mention. Twenty new coal markets opened in Kaifeng between 1102 and 1106.

By then Eastern social development had risen as high as the peak reached in ancient Rome a millennium earlier. The West, split between a Muslim core and a Christian periphery, now lagged far behind, and would not match this level of social development until the eighteenth century, on the eve of Britain’s industrial revolution. Every indication was, in fact, that a Chinese industrial revolution was brewing within Kaifeng’s soot-blackened walls and would turn the huge Eastern lead in social development into Eastern rule. History seemed to be moving down the path that would take Albert to Beijing rather than Looty to Balmoral.