A History of the World (36 page)

Inside that empire most people were still farmers, growing millet and rice, breeding cattle and fishing. Trade in copper, salt and other goods brought in taxes for the government, and there was a currency of cowrie shells. Ibn Battuta recorded problems with locusts, while wild animals were a perpetual danger – he noted beasts like huge horses which lived in the river – presumably, hippopotami. But Mali is portrayed as a haven. Beyond its borders were cannibals who devoured slave-girls, horrific salt- and copper-mines, and many great dangers. Overall his verdict is positive, but we must take it cautiously. It is impossible to verify the accounts of Muslim travellers and historians, who often plagiarized one another.
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It may be that Ghana did not really ‘fall’ to Mali, nor Mali to the next empire-on-the-block, Songhai. Perhaps each of them simply expanded its population beyond their ability to feed them, then collapsed. It does, however, seem likely that among Mali’s problems was one familiar to royal houses everywhere – the problem of succession. African tradition deployed a council of elders, or sometimes a matriarch, to decide succession. This might seem an advantage over automatic lineage succession, since it excluded the most stupid and weakest contenders. But it also produced feuds, which proved impossible to resolve over the large territory of an empire. Nor, according to another Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, did it always result in good kings. One of Musa’s predecessors ‘was weak-minded and used to shoot arrows at his people and to kill them for sport. So they rose against him and killed him.’
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(This seems fair enough.) After Mansa Musa came a series of usurpers, and rebellions too, so that Mali began to lose territory to the desert Tuaregs and to the Songhai of the River Niger.

Despite their pilgrimages and their grand mosques, the rulers of Mali had never been able to create the kind of united Islamic society the Arabs had forged and had then exported to North Africa and Spain. This was partly because of the powerful hold of native religion in Africa. Nature worship, and animism, still so popular today, were too strongly rooted to be overthrown, particularly outside the main towns. To his great irritation Ibn Battuta found that, even at court, alongside Muslim prayers figured mask dancers and the reciting of tribal stories (which he found tedious). Women still had to appear naked before the king, and all subjects had to sprinkle ash on their heads when they met him,
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none of which was very Muslim. The
Songhai, who came next, were outright animists. According to the Arab chroniclers, they, in turn, were defeated by a Muslim warrior, Muhammad Toure, who was re-establishing aspects of the original Mali empire at much the same time as Christopher Columbus was setting sail for ‘the Indies’.

A long period of feuding and division weakened this empire, too, and it fell in 1590 to a Moroccan army, supplemented by Christian mercenaries under a Spanish captain, who had carried cannon on the backs of camels all the way across the desert. This was a land adventure comparable to any voyage across the Atlantic; and, like the Spanish in America, the Moroccans set up a colony of around twenty thousand settlers.
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Their influence persists today in Malian architecture. But the Moroccans could not occupy this huge swathe of West Africa for very long. Their invasion contributed to mounting political disintegration, during which many far smaller states were vying with each other for supremacy, including some states ruled by peoples of more mysterious origin such as the Hausa – whose language is not West African – and the taller, lighter-skinned, cattle-herding Fulani. Again as in the Americas, invasion triggered further disruptions and convulsions among local nations. By then, a complicated profusion of mini-states had evolved – and plenty of European ocean-going ships were prowling the coast.

This takes us leaping ahead towards the history of the European trade in African slaves. But it is important to remember how large and vigorous the slave trade was in Africa long before the Portuguese and their fellow Christians arrived. The Arab writers already quoted took slavery for granted, and bought their own slaves as they needed them while they travelled. Black Africans were taken north to perform menial jobs for the Muslim world, then imported later in large numbers as agricultural labourers when sugar cultivation began, in plantations in Morocco and Iraq. When Mansa Musa returned from his famous pilgrimage, one historian points out, there was ‘a great demand of the Mali people for Turkish, Ethiopian and other slave-girls, and also for eunuchs and Turkish slave-boys. The slave trade thus went in both directions.’
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Slaves were taken in raids, in countless small wars, and sold on. The Atlantic slave trade could not have happened without a strong previous tradition of slavery, as much part of Muslim history as the slave ships are of Christian history.

Though Ghana, Mali, the Songhai and the Zimbabwean kingdoms are the most remembered of the pre-colonial African societies, there were other kingdoms that have left no written record. They have often left superb art behind them, hinting at rich cultures, now forgotten. The Ife culture of today’s Nigeria dates back to the 700s, when it emerged out of the earlier Nok culture, which had produced stunning pottery sculptures. The Ife, a Yoruba people, are most celebrated for their sculpted bronze heads; they in turn were replaced by the Benin empire, which survived from the 1100s until the very end of the nineteenth century. During what Europeans call the Renaissance, superb brass panels were being created for the court of the Oba, the king of Benin. Of a workmanship that the great Italian and German craftsmen would have envied, these carved scenes were made from brass imported from Europe in return for the inevitable gold and ivory.

The court of Benin allowed carved ivory scenes to be sent abroad, but kept their greatest brass treasures at home. When hundreds of these reached the outside world after a British military takeover of Benin in 1897, Europeans and Americans struggled to take in their skill and beauty. The then curator of the British Museum wrote that, at first sight, ‘we were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous’.
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But anyone who looks at the tiny quantities of wood-carving from African societies that have survived from before the age of European colonization can see that the skill and flair were not confined to the parts of West Africa where these empires rose and fell.

Around the year 1400, there existed powerful African states on both sides of the continent, as well as in Christian Ethiopia; plus a multitude of smaller kingdoms where agriculture and trade were less well developed. It was clearly a land of migrations, wars and politics long before outsiders arrived. The more challenging African climate is part of the reason that city-based civilizations did not make more headway, and the bad luck of possessing gold, ivory and a slaving tradition made Africa dangerously tempting for Muslim and Christian adventurers in possession of better metallurgy and sailing-ships. Yet had Europeans not learned how to protect themselves against Africa’s formidable diseases so that they could invade it, and divide it up, then a different Africa would surely have evolved, one more closely tailored
to that continent’s own traditions and history. Mansa Musa might have been just one of many well known leaders, an African Charlemagne or a Henry VIII, rather than a fleeting glimpse of a lost tomorrow caught briefly in a passing mirror.

Genghis

A slight boy with reddish hair, almost naked and clutching a bow, was inching his way on his belly towards a small deer. He slipped out an arrow with a curious hole in its point and sent it flying. The cunningly designed arrow made a distinctive whine, causing the deer to look up, startled – at exactly the right moment to take the arrowhead through its throat. The boy, a fatherless and banished nomad, was living in the forest with his mother. Fearless and brutal, he was also exceptionally clever, with a talent for seeing into others’ minds. He would soon kill one of his half-brothers in an argument about hunting. Though this happened in one of the most remote corners of the inhabited earth, a place of never-ending green plains, no buildings, and a vast sky, this boy would shake and reshape half the world. His name was Temujin. He would be known as Genghis Khan.

It is rare enough to be able to link, with one individual, history-shaping events across more than a single country. It is unique to be able to do it across such a range of countries as Genghis’s career would touch. But without this fatherless boy who grew up living wild, it is most unlikely that the Mongol explosion would have happened with quite the force and direction it did. We know a surprising amount about Genghis’s origins because, just a year after his death, the first Mongolian book – using a language his illiterate nomads had adopted and adapted – was written about his rise. It is called
The Secret History of the Mongols
and was composed, it says, ‘at the time of the Great Assembly [which happened in Central Mongolia in 1228] in the Year of the Rat and the Month of the Roebuck, when the palaces were being set up at Seven Hills’.
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‘Pastoralism’ is the historians’ dull word for the undull life of herders and nomads who for thousands of years moved through the vast green and brown oceans of the steppes and plains. These people lived in those large parts of the earth that were neither mountain nor
desert, but not suitable for agriculture either. They were more than hunter-gatherers, though they did hunt and they did gather; they stand to one side of the easy, straight-line version of human development that moves from hunter-gathering to agriculture and thus to towns.

The people of the Asian steppes were the first, some six thousand years ago, to tame horses, initially so that they could eat them. (Across the other great steppe-like territory, the plains of America, where horses originated, they had been hunted to extinction early in the human story; so that nothing quite like the Asian herder culture developed among native Americans.) By about four thousand years ago the Asian steppe people were riding horses. This allowed them to move huge distances with their other animals, sheep, goats, cows, camels and yaks, to exploit the grasslands, carrying their homes – wood-and-felt tents – with them on carts. They never stopped anywhere long enough to become farmers, so they built no villages of stone or wood, and they never made a town. In many ways they have stepped lightly across the earth’s surface, leaving behind very little compared with the rest of mankind.

Apart from the Mongols’ own book, written history has given nomads a bad reputation. This is unsurprising: history was recorded by settled people, who feared nomads – and often rightly so. Whenever overpopulation or hunger on the steppe grasslands provoked a migration, these highly mobile people would end up raiding or invading the settled world.

The most famous early examples are the Huns, who by defeating Germanic tribes began ‘the great migration’ that destroyed the Western Roman Empire. By the time the Huns came riding in, they were feared as a bestial ‘other’, the antithesis of all that human settlement and civilization had achieved. Writing in the 550s, a Gothic chronicler called Jordanes said the Huns had been formed by the sexual union of witches and unclean spirits, who ‘begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps . . . a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech . . . they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’. In China, where the attacks came from the Xiongnu, who may have been the same people as the Huns, they felt the same way, calling them wolves, flocks of marauding birds and ‘furious slaves’.

But the nomadic invaders might leave behind more than carcasses and burning crops. In 2003 researchers published a paper in the
American Journal of Human Genetics
suggesting that the genetic material of a single male from around nine hundred years ago was shared by one in two hundred of all men alive, some sixteen million men scattered across Eurasia.
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It is hardly unknown for powerful rulers to leave behind a substantial genetic spoor; examples can be found from Ireland to Africa. This, however, was on a different scale. The researchers concluded that the likeliest explanation was that the super-successful progenitor was Genghis Khan. The clusters of Y-chromosome markers fitted too well with the timing and spread of his Mongol empire to suggest any other explanation. The great invader took women from his vanquished foes wherever he went, never mind his legitimate children and the children of his concubines. However remarkable this may be, it is only one expression of the potency of this illiterate child of the steppes.

The Mongols, having swept up the other nomadic tribes of the area, would rule China as the Yuan dynasty. They would annihilate some of the most advanced Muslim cities and societies of central Asia. They would subdue the Rus, taking almost every major town and reducing its princes to tax-paying subordinates. They would enter Europe as far as Hungary, smashing Germany’s Teutonic knights and reaching the outskirts of Vienna, spreading waves of panic and terror that have reverberated down through time. In just twenty-five years Genghis Khan conquered more of the earth’s surface than the Romans managed in four centuries, creating (however briefly) the biggest land empire in history. China would never be the same again, influenced as it was by the reign of the great Kublai Khan, whose first capital of Shangdu (spelt by the poet Coleridge as ‘Xanadu’) so captivated Marco Polo. Kublai then moved to what would become Beijing and completely recast it, becoming the first emperor to rule China from that city.
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Later, the Mongols, or Mughals, would turn south into India too.

The Chinese eventually absorbed their new Mongol rulers, and the Yuan dynasty did not last very long by Chinese standards, though they reunified China. But the Mongol arrival in Russia had a huge effect on that country’s development – its words, its names, its clothing, its food, its tax system and its propensity to throw up ‘Asiatic’ rulers. Among
Mongol-descended Russians were the novelist Turgenev, the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Among the nomad tribes of the ‘Golden Horde’ were the Kalmyks. Lenin was a Kalmyk, as his Mongolian-shaped face shows.
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In India, the great Babur, the first Mughal emperor, was descended from Genghis Khan; so without Genghis, no great Mughal flowering, no Taj Mahal, and no Pakistan.