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by
Ian Morris
Alfred Crosby
“Old World Exchange”
Plagues returned to China five more times between 171 and 185 and ravaged the Roman Empire almost as often in those years.
Indian literature, which mentions no plagues in the second century CE
In the West the worst years were 251–266, when for a while five thousand people died each day in the city of Rome.
In the East the darkest days came between 310 and 322, beginning again in the northwest, where (according to reports) almost everyone died. A doctor who lived through the sickness made it sound like measles or smallpox:
The Old World Exchange had devastating consequences. Cities shrank, trade declined, tax revenues fell, and fields were abandoned. And as if all this were not enough, every source of evidence—peat bogs, lake sediments, ice cores, tree rings, strontium-to-calcium ratios in coral reefs, even the chemistry of algae—suggests that the weather, too, turned against humanity, ending the Roman Warm Period. Average temperatures fell about 2°F between 200 and 500 CE, and since the cooler summers of what climatologists call the Dark Age Cold Period reduced evaporation from the oceans and weakened the
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Guangwu
Cao (thanks largely to an enormous fourteenth-century novel called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) has been remembered chiefly as the monster who destroyed the Han.
Dark Age Cold Period
Smallpox probably made its first appearance in China in 317, the year after Chang’an burned.
“awful revolution,”
Palmyra managed to throw the Persians back, theoretically on Rome’s behalf, but its warrior queen Zenobia (who led her troops in person and regularly attended city assemblies dressed in armor) then turned on Rome too, overrunning Egypt and Anatolia. At the other end of the empire a governor on the Rhine declared an independent “Kingdom of the Gauls,” taking Gaul (modern France), Britain, and Spain with him.
350, a group called the Huns moved west across Kazakhstan, sending dominos tumbling in every direction (Figure 6.7). Just why they inspired such fear is debated. Ancient writers blamed their sheer horribleness; modern scholars more often point to the powerful bows they used. Once again, we can only observe the consequences.
in 429, the Vandals crossed to North Africa. It may seem hard to believe, but what is today the Tunisian Sahara Desert was then Rome’s breadbasket, ten thousand square miles of irrigated fields, exporting half a million tons of grain to Italy each year. Without this food, the city of Rome would starve; without the taxes on it, Rome could not pay its own Germans to fight enemy Germans.
In 476 he wrote to Zeno, the emperor in Constantinople, observing that the world no longer needed two emperors. Zeno’s glory was sufficient for everyone, Odoacer said, and he made a proposal: he would run Italy—loyally, of course—on Zeno’s behalf. Zeno understood full well that Odoacer was really announcing his takeover of Italy, but also knew it was no longer worth arguing about.
Mahayana Buddhism could get extreme. Most Buddhist sects believed that a Maitreya (“Future”) Buddha would one day lead the masses to liberation, but starting in 401 a stream of wilder-eyed Chinese devotees identified themselves as Buddhas and, teaming up with bandits, rebellious peasants, and/or disaffected officials, went on rampages intended to bring salvation to everyone right now. All ended bloodily.
Buddhism’s conquest of China was remarkable. There could have been only a few hundred Buddhists in 65 CE; by the sixth century most Chinese—perhaps 30 million people—were believers.
Jesus, like the Buddha, wrote no sacred texts, and as early as the 50s CE the apostle Paul (who never met Jesus) was struggling to get Christians to agree on a few core points about what Christianity actually was.
ideas—the triumph of priestcraft over politics, revelation over reason—ended the classical world, driving down social development century after century and also narrowing the gap between East and West?
Over the next eighty years the rest of the population turned Christian, aristocrats colonized the church’s leadership, and the church and state between them plundered the empire’s pagan temples—perhaps the biggest redistribution of wealth the world had yet seen.
Century after century, social development slid. Writing, cities, taxes, and bureaucrats lost their value, and as the old certainties stopped making sense, a hundred million people sought salvation from a world gone wrong by giving new twists to ancient wisdom. Like first-wave Axial thought, second-wave ideas were dangerous, challenging the authority of husbands over wives, rich over poor, and kings over subjects, but once again the mighty made their peace with the subversive, redistributing power and wealth in the process. By 500 CE states were weaker and churches stronger, but life went on.
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.
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.
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.
Wendi,
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.
Wu Zetian,
Yu Hong,
Theodora
Belisarius
Procopius,
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.
The plague slackened after 546, but the bacillus had taken root, and until about 750 no year passed without an outbreak somewhere.
Heraclius
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.
four thousand Muslims invaded Egypt in 639, but Alexandria surrendered without a fight.
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.
The Muslims who colonized Sicily even invented classic Western foods such as pasta and ice cream.
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.
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.
In 908 Ifriqiya,* roughly modern Tunisia (Figure 7.8), broke away from the caliphs in Baghdad.
Solomon Schechter,
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.
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.
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
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Peter Abelard.
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.
Anna Comnena,
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
