The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

Cohabitation of the faiths was an important hallmark of early Islamic expansion – and an important part of its success. 38

‘coin wars’, as propaganda blows were traded on pieces of currency. After the Caliph began to issue coins with the legend ‘There is no God but God alone; Muḥammad is the messenger of God’ in the early 690s, Constantinople retaliated. Coins were struck which no longer had the image of the Emperor on the front (the obverse), but put it on the reverse instead. In its place on the obverse was a dramatic new image: Jesus Christ. The intention was to reinforce Christian identity and to demonstrate that the empire enjoyed divine protection. 44

buildings and material culture were being used ‘as a weapon for ideological conflict’ during a volatile period of civil war, a time when the Caliph was taking up arms against the direct descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad himself.

According to John of Damascus, one of the leading commentators of the time, Islam was a Christian heresy rather than a different religion. Muḥammad, he wrote, had come up with his ideas based on his reading of the Old and New

Testaments – and on a conversation with an errant Christian monk.

In a battle that subsequently acquired a near-mythical status as the moment the Islamic surge was halted, Charles Martel led a force that inflicted a crucial defeat. The fate of Christian Europe hung by a thread, later historians argued, and had it not been for the heroism and skill of the defenders, the continent would surely have become Muslim.

ʿAbbāsid revolution: it was the cities of Central Asia that

paved the way for regime change. These were the hotbeds where intellectual arguments were refined and where rebellions were financed. This was where critical decisions were taken in the battle for the soul of Islam.

The advances into Central Asia were greatly facilitated by the chaos that had started to embroil the steppe region at the same time that Persia crumbled. A devastating winter in 627–8 resulted in famine and the death of very large numbers of livestock, and precipitated a major shift in power. In the process of pushing east, the Muslim forces confronted the nomad tribes who had also benefited from the collapse of Persia. In the 730s, a crushing defeat was inflicted on the Türk nomads, whose ramifications were made more severe when Sulu, the dominant figure on the steppes, was murdered following a bad-tempered game of backgammon.56

As the tribal buffer disintegrated, the Muslims swept eastwards slowly but surely, taking

The Uighurs quickly became the pre-eminent force on Islam’s eastern frontier. In doing so, they first incorporated and then replaced the Sogdians as the leading figures in long-distance trade, especially of silk.

Faced with the rivalry of the Muslims, the Uighurs tried to retain their own identity – deciding to convert to Manichaeism, perhaps as middle ground between the Islamic world to the west and China to the east.

routes. 62 With this new wealth flooding into central coffers, heavy investments began to be made in places like Syria, where in the eighth century market squares and shops were built on a grand scale in the cities of Jerash, Scythopolis and Palmyra. 63 Most striking of all, however, was the construction of an enormous new city. It was to become the richest and most populous in the world, and remained so for centuries – even if some estimates made in the tenth century are over-exuberant. Basing his calculations on the number of bathhouses, the number of attendants required to maintain them and the likely distribution of baths to private houses, one author estimated the population of the city to be just under 100 million. 64 It was known as Madīnat al-Salām, or the city of peace. We know it as Baghdad.

There were families like the Barmakids, originally a Buddhist family from Balkh, who gained influence and power in ninth-century Baghdad and energetically championed the translation of a wide range of texts from Sanskrit into Arabic, even setting up a paper mill to help produce copies for wider dissemination. 83

Pharmacopoeia – texts on mixing and creating medicines – listed

there was Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, who established that the world revolves around the sun and rotates on an axis. Or polymaths like Abū ʿAlī Ḥusayn ibn Sīnā, known in the west as Avicenna, who wrote on logic, theology, mathematics, medicine and philosophy, doing so in each case with an awe-inspiring intelligence, lucidity and honesty.

Brilliant women stepped forward too, like the tenth-century poet best known as Rabīʿa Balkhī, in what is now

Afghanistan, and

Once, wrote the historian al-Masʿūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’. 92 Science was defeated by faith.

In Muslim Spain, Visigothic influences were incorporated into an architectural style that could be read by the subject population as a continuation with the immediate past – and therefore neither aggressive nor triumphalist.

The account of checking the wall is so vivid, so convincing that some historians have argued that it refers to a real expedition and to a real wall – perhaps the Jade Gate, marking the entry to China to the west of Dunhuang.

The world was divided in two: a realm of Iran where order and civilisation prevailed; and one of Turan that was chaotic, anarchic and dangerous.

In fact, religious beliefs on the steppes were complex and rarely uniform, with influences from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and paganism jostling and blending to create composite worldviews that are difficult to disentangle. 8 Part of the spread of these shifting, adaptive spiritual views was carried out by a new type of Muslim holy men acting as a form of missionary; these mystics, known as sufis, roamed the steppes, sometimes naked but for a set of animal horns, tending to sick animals and impressing onlookers with their eccentric behaviour and wittering about devotion and piety. They seemed to have played a crucial role in winning converts, fusing the shaman and animist beliefs that were widespread in Central Asia with the tenets of Islam. 9

Skins, pelts and furs therefore served an obvious purpose in an unmonetised economy.

The creation of a ‘fur road’ into the steppe and forest belts to the north was the direct result of the surge in disposable wealth in the centuries following the great conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries.

delegation was therefore dispatched with the aim of converting the Khazars. It was led by Constantine, best known by his Slavonic name Cyril and for the creation of the eponymous alphabet he devised for the Slavs – Cyrillic.

The decision to convert, wrote the khagan, was the result of the great wisdom of one of his predecessors, who had brought delegations representing different faiths to present the case for each. Having pondered how best to establish the facts, the ruler had asked the Christians whether Islam or Judaism was the better faith; when they replied that the former was certainly worse than the latter, he asked the Muslims whether Christianity

or Judaism was preferable. When they lambasted Christianity and also replied that Judaism was the less bad of the two, the Khazar ruler announced that he had reached a conclusion: both had admitted that ‘the religion of the Israelites is better’, he declared, so ‘trusting in the mercies of God and the power of the Almighty, I choose the religion of Israel, that is, the religion of Abraham’. With that, he sent the delegations home, circumcised himself and then ordered his servants, his attendants and all his people to do the same. 46

who took to the great water systems linking the Baltic with the Caspian and Black Seas. These men were known as Rus’, or rhos, perhaps due to their distinctive red hair, or more likely thanks to their prowess with the oar. They were the fathers of Russia. 56

From the start of the ninth century, men from Scandinavia began to come into contact with the steppe world and also with the caliphate of Baghdad. Settlements began to spread along the Oder, the Neva, the Volga and the Dnieper rivers, with new bases springing up as markets in their own right and as trading stations for merchants bringing goods to and from the south. Staraya Ladoga, Rurikovo Gorodische, Beloozero and Novgorod (literally ‘new town’) were new points that extended the great Eurasian trade routes into the furthest reaches of northern Europe. 57

rich coin finds line the great rivers heading north and have been recovered all over northern Russia, Finland, Sweden and above all in Gotland (Sweden’s largest island), which show that the Viking Rus’ made enormous sums from commerce with the Muslims and the fringes of the caliphate of Baghdad.

the Viking Rus’ had ‘no cultivated fields and they live by pillaging’, according to one Arabic writer. 1 It was the local population that bore the brunt. So many were captured that the very name of those taken captive – Slavs – became used for all those who had their freedom taken away: slaves.

It was the sale of slaves that paid for the imports that began to flood into Europe in the ninth century. The spices and drugs that are increasingly visible in the sources as highly desirable luxury objects or as medical necessities were funded by large-scale human trafficking.

Castration was thought to purify and improve the Slavic mind.

All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.

The wealth it accumulated from slave trading and human suffering was to lay the basis for its transformation into one of the crown jewels of the medieval Mediterranean: Venice.

While it stands today as a glorious vision of the past, the spark for Venice’s growth came from its willingness to sell future generations into captivity.

not. 36 Eventually, the slave trade began to dwindle – at least from eastern and central Europe. One reason for this was that the Viking Rus’ shifted their focus from long-distance trafficking to the business of protection rackets.

the end of the tenth century, the Rus’ had become the dominant force on the western steppe, controlling lands that stretched from the Caspian across the north of the Black Sea as far as the Danube.

attention was increasingly focused on the Christian east and on Byzantium. As western Europe’s horizons expanded, there was rising interest in visiting the land where Jesus Christ had lived, died and risen from the dead. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem became a source of understandable kudos.

Exposure to the Holy City also underlined the paucity of the Christian heritage of western Europe –

The call of Constantinople echoed loudly around all of Europe in the eleventh century.

The places that mattered were not in Paris or London, in Germany or Italy – but in the east. Cities that connected to the east were important – like Kherson in the Crimea or Novgorod,

This was precisely the same process that had already seen Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi rise in wealth and power: the key to their growth was business with the east.

fact, the problem was not where to trade or whom to trade with, but how to pay for luxury objects that could be sold on for healthy profit. In the eighth to tenth centuries, the base commodity for sale had been slaves. But as the economies of western and eastern Europe became more robust, galvanised by huge influxes of silver coinage from the Islamic world, towns grew and their populations swelled. And as they did so, the levels of interaction

intensified, which in turn led to the demand for monetisation, that is to say, trade based on coinage – rather than, for example, on furs. As

this transition happened and local societies became more complex and sophisticated, stratification developed and urban middle classes emerged. Money, rather than men, began ...

In a misguided attempt to shore up defences in the east, the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes set out from Constantinople with a large army, meeting with disaster in 1071 at Manzikert where the Byzantine forces were caught by surprise and humiliated. In a famous battle still celebrated today as the moment of the birth of the state of Turkey, the imperial army was surrounded and crushed and the Emperor taken prisoner. The Seljuk ruler, Alp Arslan, made the Byzantine leader lie on the ground and placed his foot on his neck.

As the copious source material shows, most of those who set off for the east were motivated by faith and by reports of horrors and atrocities that had substance to them. But while the Crusade is chiefly remembered as a war of religion, its most important implications were worldly.

On 15 July 1099, Jerusalem fell to the knights of the First Crusade.