The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

It has been suggested, for instance, that the Rāmāyana, the Sanskrit epic poem, owes a debt to the Iliad and to the Odyssey, with the theme of the abduction of Lady Sita by Rāvaa a direct echo of the elopement of Helen with Paris of Troy. Influences and inspiration flowed in the other direction too, with some scholars arguing that the Aeneid was in turn influenced by Indian texts such as the Mahābhārata.

What propelled Rome into a new era was its reorientation towards the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Rome’s success and its glory stemmed from its seizure of Egypt in the first instance, and then from setting its anchor in the east – in Asia.

Indeed, even in the Middle Ages, there were many more Christians in Asia than there were in Europe.50

Even if the traditional story that Chinese prisoners captured at the battle of Talas in 751 introduced paper-making skills to the Islamic world is overly romantic, it is certainly the case that from the later part of the eighth century the availability of paper made the recording, sharing and dissemination of knowledge wider, easier and quicker. The resultant explosion of literature covered all areas of science, mathematics, geography and travel.69

This disdain for science and scholarship baffled Muslim commentators, who had great respect for Ptolemy and Euclid, for Homer and Aristotle. Some had little doubt what was to blame. Once, wrote the historian al-Masūdī, 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. It is almost the precise opposite of the world as we see it today: the fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the east – and certainly not in Europe.

The road to Jerusalem became a road to heaven itself. At the very outset of the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II had stated that those taking the cross and joining the expedition to the Holy City would receive absolution from their sins. This evolved during the course of the campaign, when the idea developed that those who fell in battle against the infidel should be considered to be on a path to salvation. Journeying east was a journey in this life and the way to reach paradise in the next.

No difference with present day Jihadists !

The bloodlust was directly linked to the idea that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion and that the lands of Israel should be held by the Christians of Europe.

The Crusade might be best remembered as a war of religion, but it was also a springboard for accruing serious wealth and power.

For centuries, men had looked east to make their fortunes and realise their ambitions – whether spiritual or material. The sack and capture of the biggest and most important city in Christendom showed that the Europeans would stop at nothing to take what they wanted – and needed – to get closer to the centre of where the world’s wealth and power lay.

It was a pattern repeated time and again: money poured into towns that were rebuilt and re-energised, with particular attention paid to championing the arts, crafts and production. Blanket images of the Mongols as barbaric destroyers are wide of the mark, and represent the misleading legacies of the histories written later which emphasised ruin and devastation above all else. This slanted view of the past provides a notable lesson in how useful it is for leaders who have a view to posterity to patronise historians who write sympathetically of their age of empire – something the Mongols conspicuously failed to do.

Although it is the name of Genghis Khan that is synonymous with the great conquests of Asia and the attacks on lands far beyond, the Mongol leader died in 1227 after the initial phase of empire building in China and Central Asia had been carried out, but before the dramatic attacks on Russia and the Middle East and the invasion that brought Europe to its knees. It was his son Ögödei who oversaw the expansion that massively increased the extent of Mongol lordship, masterminding campaigns that extended into the Korean peninsula, Tibet, Pakistan and northern India – as well as in the west.

Where priests and princes in Europe had failed to reunite popes and patriarchs, the Mongols had succeeded: attacks from the east, and the very real threat that they would be repeated, had brought the church to the point of full reunion.

This now became the Mongol capital, designed to crown the achievements of taking control of the entire region between the Pacific and the Mediterranean. The new metropolis has retained its importance ever since: Beijing.

Sensitive pricing and a deliberate policy of keeping taxes low were symptomatic of the bureaucratic nous of the Mongol Empire, which gets too easily lost beneath the images of violence and wanton destruction. In fact, the Mongols’ success lay not in indiscriminate brutality but in their willingness to compromise and co-operate, thanks to the relentless effort to sustain a system that renewed central control.

Fundamental to European expansion was the stability that the Mongols provided across the whole of Asia. Despite the tensions and rivalries between the different branches of the tribal leadership, the rule of law was fiercely protected when it came to commercial matters.

Venice was the distribution point for European, African and Asian trade par excellence – and had the trappings to show it.79

As the Portuguese knew from their experiences in the Atlantic island groups and West Africa, European settlement was expensive, was not always economically rewarding and was easier said than done: persuading families to leave their loved ones behind was hard enough, but high death rates and testing local conditions made this even more difficult. One solution had been to send orphans and convicts forcibly to places like São Tomé, in conjunction with a system of benefits and incentives, such as the provision of a ‘male or female slave for personal service’, to create a population base on which a sustainable administrative system could be built.

The task now was to reinvent the past. The demise of the old imperial capital presented an unmistakable opportunity for the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to be claimed by new adoptive heirs – something that was done with gusto. In truth, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and England had nothing to do with Athens and the world of the ancient Greeks, and were largely peripheral in the history of Rome from its earliest days to its demise. This was glossed over as artists, writers and architects went to work, borrowing themes, ideas and texts from antiquity to provide a narrative that chose selectively from the past to create a story which over time became not only increasingly plausible but standard. So although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance – a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world.

The rest of Europe now had to adjust to the rising fortunes of Spain and Portugal. News of da Gama’s return home in 1499 was received with a mixture of shock, gloom and hysteria in Venice: one loud voice told all who would listen that the discovery of a sea route to India via southern Africa meant nothing less than the end for the city.18 It was inevitable, said Girolamo Priuli, that Lisbon would take Venice’s crown as the commercial centre of Europe: ‘there is no doubt’, he wrote, ‘that the Hungarians, the Germans, the Flemish and the French, and all the people from across the mountains who used to come to Venice to buy spices with their money, will now turn to Lisbon’. For Priuli, the reasons were obvious. Everyone knew, he stated in his diary, that goods reaching Venice overland went through endless checkpoints where taxes and duties had to be paid; by transporting goods by sea, the Portuguese would be able to offer goods at prices Venice could not hope to compete with. The numbers told the story: Venice was doomed.

Gold and silver taken from the Americas found its way to Asia; it was this redistribution of wealth that enabled the Taj Mahal to be built. Not without irony, one of the glories of India was the result of the suffering of ‘Indians’ on the other side of the world.

The collapse of the European powers opened up the world for others. To cover the shortfalls in agricultural production and to pay for weapons and munitions, the Allies took on huge commitments, commissioning institutions such as J. P. Morgan & Co. to ensure a constant supply of goods and materials.122 The supply of credit resulted in a redistribution of wealth every bit as dramatic as that which followed the discovery of the Americas four centuries earlier: money flowed out of Europe to the United States in a flood of bullion and promissory notes. The war bankrupted the Old World and enriched the New. The attempt to recoup losses from Germany (set at an eye-watering and impossibly high level equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars at today’s prices) was a desperate and futile attempt to prevent the inevitable: the Great War saw the treasuries of the participants ransacked as they tried to destroy each other, destroying themselves in the process.123

Indeed, the decision to change the name of Persia formally to Iran was supposedly the result of Teheran’s diplomats in Berlin impressing on the Shah the importance of the idea of ‘Aryanism’ – and the shared etymological and pseudo-historical heritage that Iran’s new identity could easily reference.49

It was not that Stalin did not believe Hitler would attack, just that he thought he would not dare to do so yet. In fact, the reason why Stalin had personally overseen trade with the Nazi administration had been to keep a close eye on the Germans while the Soviet army was rapidly rebuilt and modernised.

The Cold War often prompts thought of the Berlin Wall and eastern Europe as the principal arena for confrontation between the superpowers. But it was the swathe of territory within the Soviet Union’s underbelly where the real game of Cold War chess was played out.

The US supported around fifty such commanders, paying retainers of $20,000–$100,000 per month depending on results and status. There was a surge of money from Saudi Arabia too in support of the Mujahidin, the result of Saudi sympathy for the rhetoric of Islamic militancy employed by the resistance, and a desire to help persecuted Muslims. Men of Saudi extraction who followed their conscience to fight in Afghanistan were highly regarded. Men like Osama bin Laden – well connected, articulate and personally impressive – were perfectly placed to act as conduits for large sums of money given by Saudi benefactors; inevitably, their access to these resources in turn built them into important figures within the Mujahidin movement itself.113 The significance of this too was only to become apparent later.

Those resisting the Soviet army were also actively courted by Beijing and provided with weapons in volumes that increased steadily in the 1980s. Indeed, when US troops captured Taliban and al-Qaida bases at Tora Bora in 2001, they discovered large stockpiles of Chinese rocket-propelled grenade launchers and multi-barrelled missile launchers, along with mines and rifles that had been sent to Afghanistan two decades earlier. In steps that it too has come to regret, China also encouraged, recruited and trained Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, before helping them make contact with and join the Mujahidin.115 The radicalisation of western China has proved problematic ever since.