A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (19 page)

Balancing between the urban classes and the great landowning classes, the state machine became all-powerful. It sucked in taxes from all classes, rewarded its generals and bureaucrats with vast estates, absorbed the surplus which might otherwise have been used to develop the productive base of society, and eventually drove vast numbers of the peasant producers below the level of subsistence necessary for them to keep toiling, so that total output sank. This in turn restricted the market for the merchants and manufacturers, giving them little incentive to move from reliance on artisan production to some rudimentary factory system. There was a cramping of further technological advance—even printing was not introduced into the Muslim world, although merchants who had been to China knew about it—and the mass of people remained sunk in poverty and superstition. Civilisation was restricted to a relatively thin layer of the population, and it began to wilt as the economic conditions that sustained them deteriorated.

The Islamic empires were repeatedly shaken by revolts—rebellions by those who identified with the murdered revolutionary leader Abu Muslim, rebellions by those who saw one or other descendant of Ali as representing a pure Islam corrupted by the caliphs, rebellions by townspeople, rebellions by peasants, the great 16 year Zanj rebellion of black slaves in the southern salt marshes of Mesopotamia in the 9th century,
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and the Ismaeli rebellion that brought to power the rival caliphate in Egypt.

Yet none of these rebellions was any more capable of showing a way out of the impasse than the revolts of ancient Rome or the peasant revolutions in China. They gave expression to enormous discontent, usually in a religious form. But they did not and could not begin to present a project for reorganising society on a new basis. The means by which the mass of people made a livelihood had not advanced enough for that to be possible.

The Islamic civilisation, like that of the T’ang and Sung periods in China, was important in producing the seeds of further development. But the crushing weight of old superstructures prevented those seeds taking root—until they were transplanted to a primitive region of Eurasia where such a superstructure barely existed.

The European colonists of the 19th and early 20th centuries described Africa as ‘the Dark Continent’. According to them it was without civilisation and without history, its life ‘blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism’, according to a Professor Egerton of Oxford University.
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So strong were their prejudices that the geologist Carl Mauch, one of the first Europeans to visit the site of the 12th century city of Great Zimbabwe, was convinced it could not be of local origin, but must of been built by some non-black people from the north as a copy of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.
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The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1965, ‘There is only the history of the European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness’.
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Yet all the processes which led to the rise of civilisation in Eurasia and the Americas occurred in Africa too, and not just once but several times. Egypt is the most obvious example. Although certain aspects of its civilisation were probably influenced by contact with Mesopotamia, its roots lay in independent developments in southern Egypt, among peoples from the west and south who settled in the Nile Valley.
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The Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Kushite civilisation of Nubia (from the Nile above Aswan), which briefly conquered Egypt early in the first millennium BC, and which developed its own phonetic script. The Romans knew of the Axum civilisation of Ethiopia, which embraced Christianity early on, was in close contact with southern Arabia (some of Mohammed’s early followers fled there to avoid persecution in Mecca) and also developed its own alphabet. Traders from India, the Muslim empires and even China were in contact with cities all along the east African coast south to Mozambique. One of them, Ibn Battuta, described Kilwa in present-day Tanzania in 1331 as ‘one of the most beautiful and well constructed towns in the world’.
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Hasan al-Wazzan (better known by his Italian nickname Leo Africanus), an exiled Moor from Granada, described crossing the Sahara from Morocco to visit some two dozen kingdoms along the River Niger in the early 15th century. He wrote that Tambo (Timbuktu) was a city of many thousands of people, with ‘many magistrates, learned doctors and men of religion’, where ‘there is a big market for manuscript books from the Berber countries, and more profit is made from the sale of books than from any other merchandise’.
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Other civilisations arose in the forests of coastal west Africa, where the city of Benin made an enormous impression on the first Portuguese to visit it, and across a wide belt of central Africa from the kingdom of the Kongo in northern Angola to Buganda in present day Uganda.

The sequence by which each of these civilisations arose is essentially the same as that which occurred in the case of the Eurasian and American civilisations. In particular regions people evolved forms of cultivation which provided them with a sufficient surplus for there to be the beginnings of a polarisation within old communal structures between chiefly lineages and others. Then some of these chiefly lineages crystallised into ruling classes which exploited the rest of society, while among the mass of the population specialised groups of artisans and traders emerged alongside the mass of peasants and herders.

Sometimes these developments received a push from the impact of other civilisations. Egypt clearly influenced Nubia; southern Arabia (where towns already existed in 1000 BC) probably influenced Ethiopia just across the Red Sea; Indian and Arab traders had an impact on the east African coast. But this could only happen because tendencies had already arisen independently, capable of taking advantage of such influence. Traders only visited places such as the east coast because there were already complex societies with something to trade.

The most important changes in the ways the various peoples of Africa made a livelihood occurred completely independently of outside influences. This had to apply to the domestication of plants, if only because the crops grown in the ancient civilisations of Eurasia and the Nile Valley would not grow in the tropical and subtropical climates of most of sub-Saharan Africa. African peoples developed forms of agriculture of their own. It also applied, much later, to the production of iron. Metalsmiths in west Africa learned to smelt iron ores about the same time as knowledge of how to do so was spreading across Eurasia in about 1000 BC. But the techniques they used were rather different, indicating independent development.
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Agriculture and iron together transformed the face of sub-Saharan Africa. The number of Bantu-speaking peoples from west Africa, who first adopted these methods, grew over the centuries, leading them between 2000 BC and AD 500 to displace many of the hunter-gatherers who had originally been predominant in central and southern Africa. Those peoples with a substantial agricultural surplus or well positioned for trade began to undergo the transition to class divisions and town living, usually at some point after AD 500. Trade brought the east coast towns into contact with the other civilisations of the Indian Ocean. The west African towns became part of a network of trade which stretched to the Nile and Egypt on the one hand and through the Sahara to the Maghreb. Such contacts enabled them to shortcut the long process of developing their own script by adopting that of the Arabs—and with it the Islamic religion, which fitted the atmosphere of urban life more than the old ‘pagan’ beliefs.

Indigenous developments had produced, in order, the Egyptian, Nubian and Ethiopian civilisations. By the 15th century other civilisations existed right across the continent, from coast to coast, even if sometimes interspersed with so called ‘primitive’ peoples living in pre-class societies. They were connected to the world system of trade via Islam long before Europeans landed on their coasts (indeed, one explanation of the decline of ancient Zimbabwe lies in an international decline in the price of the gold it exported in the 15th century).
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The peoples of Africa did end up as the victims of the emerging world system—so much so that their civilisations were all but erased from the historical record by a racist ideology that treated them as ‘subhuman’. But the reasons lie in an accident of geography.

Eurasia stretches from west to east. There are vast belts of land which share essentially the same climate and, therefore, are suitable for growing the same sort of crops—wheat, barley and rye grow all the way from Ireland to Beijing, and rice grows from Korea and Japan to the Indian Ocean. There are also few natural barriers preventing the spread of domesticated animal species. Horses, cows, sheep and goats can thrive virtually anywhere, apart from the occasional desert region. So advances in farming could spread relatively rapidly, since they involved people learning from neighbours who farmed under similar conditions. Successive hordes of humans were also able to sweep from one end of the continental mass to the other, sometimes bringing destruction, as with the Huns or Mongols, but also bringing knowledge of new techniques.

By contrast, Africa runs from north to south and has several different climatic belts. Crops which flourish in the Maghreb or in Egypt will not grow easily in the savannah region, while crops which will grow there are useless in the tropical region towards the equator.
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Therefore, local improvements in farming techniques were rarely of more than regional importance until revolutionary new methods of transport enabled them to leap climatic barriers. There was also a huge natural barrier to the southward spread of cattle rearing—the tsetse fly in the central African region. Farming folk with domesticated cows had great difficulty reaching the lands in southern Africa which were ideally suited to cattle. Deep sea navigation was impossible from the west coast until the 15th century, because nowhere in the world had the naval technology to cope with prevailing winds. The east coast was easily accessible, but it was not easy for people to make the journey up into the highlands inland. And the Sahara, cutting the continent in two from the Atlantic to the Nile, was an obstacle to all but the most determined travellers even after the introduction of the domesticated camel in about AD 500.

Backward peoples in Europe—such as the British, the Germans or the Scandinavians—could eventually, even in the Dark Ages, gain knowledge of technical innovations and agricultural improvements from China, India or the Middle East. They could feed off advances made right across the world’s greatest land mass. The civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa had to rely much more on their own resources. They were relatively isolated, in a continent half the size and with about one sixth of the population of Eurasia. It was not an insuperable barrier to the development of society, as the record of successive civilisations shows. But it placed them at a fatal disadvantage when eventually they were confronted by rapacious visitors from the formerly backward region of western Europe, which had been more easily able to borrow and develop technologies from the other end of Asia.

Merchants from the great Islamic cities such as Cairo and Cordoba travelled widely 1,000 years ago.
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Any who made their way to the royal courts of northern Europe must have been shaken by the conditions they found.

The land was divided between warring baronies, often separated from each other by dense woodlands or marshes. Each was a virtually self contained economy, its people depending almost entirely on what was produced on its lands. For the peasants this meant a diet dominated by bread and gruel, and clothing spun and woven in their own homes out of rough wool or flax. It also meant devoting at least two fifths of their energies to unpaid work for the lord, either in the form of labour or goods in kind. As serfs, the peasants did not have the freedom to leave either the land or the lord.

The living standard of the lordly family was much higher, yet it too was restricted to what the peasants could produce. The lords’ castles were crude, built of wood and surrounded by wood and mud palisades, ill protected against the elements. Their clothing, much more abundant than the peasants’, was hardly any smoother on the skin, and the lords were rarely more cultured. They needed expertise in horseriding and the use of weapons to hold their lands against other lords and to punish recalcitrant peasants; they did not need to be able to read and write, and most did not bother to learn. When the lords with larger estates wanted to keep written records, they turned to the small social group which had preserved the knowledge of reading and writing—the thin layer of literate monks and clergy.

There were a few products—salt, iron for plough tips, knives and the lords’ weapons—which came from traders. But these were very different from the wealthy merchant classes of the eastern civilisations, being akin to bagmen or tinkers as they tramped through forest paths and along barely recognisable mud-caked roads.

There were few towns, and ‘entire countries, like England and almost all the Germanic lands, were entirely without towns’.
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The towns that did exist were little more than administrative centres for the bigger barons or religious establishments, and were made up of a few houses clustered around a castle, monastery or large church.

Yet this most backward extremity of the great Eurasian continent was eventually to become the birthplace of a new civilisation which would overwhelm all the rest.

There have been all sorts of explanations for this transformation, ranging from the wondrous, through the absurd, to the obscene. Some ascribe it to the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition, although the Christian side of this certainly did not show any merits during the last years of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages in Europe or the stagnation of Byzantium. Others ascribe it to the climate which allegedly encourages ‘work’ and ‘enterprise’,
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which makes one wonder how the first great civilisations were able to flourish. The obscene attempt to explain it in terms of the alleged ‘racial’ superiority of the Europeans falls at the first hurdle given that they were backward for so long. Another line of thinking ascribes the rise of Europe to ‘contingent’ factors—in other words, it was an accident. There was the fortuitous emergence of a series of great men, according to traditional mainstream history; there was the lucky rise of Calvinism and the ‘Protestant ethic’, according to followers of the German sociologist Max Weber; there was the chance outcome of clashes between peasants and lords in 15th century England which left neither victorious, according to some North American academics.
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The backward go forward

All these accounts miss an obvious point. Europe’s very backwardness encouraged people to adopt new ways of wresting a livelihood from elsewhere. Slowly, over many centuries, they began to apply techniques already known in China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and southern Spain. There was a corresponding slow but cumulative change in the social relations of society as a whole, just as there had been in Sung China or the Abbasid caliphate. But this time it happened without the enormous dead weight of an old imperial superstructure to smother continued advance. The very backwardness of Europe allowed it to leapfrog over the great empires.

Economic and technical advance was not automatic or unhampered. Again and again old structures hindered, obstructed and sometimes crushed new ways. As elsewhere, there were great revolts which were crushed, and movements which promised a new society and ended up reproducing the old. Fertile areas were turned into barren wastes and prosperous cities ended up as desolate ruins. There were horrific and pointless wars, barbaric torture and mass enslavement. Yet in the end a new organisation of production and society emerged very different to anything before in history.

The first changes were in cultivation. Those who lived off the land during the Dark Ages may have been illiterate, superstitious and ignorant of the wider world. But they knew where their livelihood came from and were prepared, slowly, to embrace new methods of cultivation that enabled them more easily to fill their bellies if they got the chance. In the 6th century a new design of plough, ‘the heavy wheeled plough’ capable of coping with heavy but fertile soil, appeared among the Slav people of eastern Europe and spread westwards over the next 300 years.
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With it came new methods of grazing, which used cattle dung to fertilise the land. Together they allowed a peasant family to increase its crop yield by 50 percent in ‘an agrarian pattern which produced more meat, dairy produce, hides and wool than ever before, but at the same time improved the harvest of grain’.
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One economic historian claims, ‘It proved to be the most productive agrarian method, in relation to manpower, that the world had ever seen’.
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There were still more new techniques in the centuries which followed, such as the adoption of the central Asian method of harnessing horses—which allowed them to replace the much slower oxen in ploughing—and the use of beans and other legumes to replenish the soil. According to the noted French historian of the medieval peasantry, Georges Duby, the cumulative effect of these innovations was to double grain yields by the 12th century.
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Such changes took place slowly. Sylvia Thrupp has suggested that ‘the best medieval rates of general economic growth…would come to perhaps half of one percent’.
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Nevertheless, over 300 or 400 years this amounted to a transformation of economic life.

Such advance depended to a very large extent on the ingenuity of the peasant producers. But it also required something else—that the feudal lords allowed a portion of the surplus to go into agricultural improvement rather than looting it all. The barons were crude and rapacious men. They had acquired and held their land by force. Their wealth depended on direct compulsion rather than buying and selling, and they wasted much of it on luxuries and warfare. But they still lived on their estates; they were not a class of absentee owners like those of late republican Rome or the final years of Abbasid power. Even the most stupid could grasp that they would have no more to live on and fight with if they stole so much from the peasants that next year’s crops were not sown. As the German economic historian Kriedte has pointed out, ‘The lord had to preserve the peasant holding at all costs,’ and ‘therefore…to assist peasants in emergencies which arose from harvest failures and other causes’.
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Providing the peasants with improved ploughs meant a bigger surplus for luxury consumption and warfare, and some lords ‘put farming tools made of iron, especially the ploughs, under their protection’.
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Individual feudal lords organised and financed the clearing of new lands throughout the feudal period. They were the driving force in the spread of the first and, for a long time, the most important form of mechanisation, the water mill.

Like other ruling classes, the feudal lords were concerned above all with exploitation. They would use unpaid peasant labour to build a mill, force the peasants to grind their corn in it—and charge them for doing so. But for a certain period of history, their concern with increasing the level of exploiation also led some of them to encourage advances in the means of production.

The feudal ruling class did not consist solely of warrior barons. Many of the great landholdings were in the hands of religious institutions—abbeys and monasteries: ‘In wealth, power and aptitude for command…abbots, bishops and archbishops…were the equals of the great military barons…Immense fortunes were amassed by monastic communities or prelates’.
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On occasions the literacy of monks was used to gain access to writings on technology from Greece and Rome and from the Byzantine and Arabic empires: ‘If one is looking for the earliest mills, water mills or windmills, or for progress in farming techniques, one often sees the religious orders in the vanguard’.
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The full adoption of new techniques involved a change in relations between lords (whether warrior or religious) and cultivators. The great landholders finally had to abandon the wasteful Roman practice of slave labour—a practice that lingered on as late as the 10th century. Then they began to discover advantages in ‘serfdom’, in parcelling out land to peasant households in return for a share of the produce. The serfs had an incentive for working as hard as they could and employing new techniques on their holdings. As total output rose, the lords’ incomes also rose, especially as they used their military might to force previously free peasants into serfdom. What Bois calls ‘the transformation of the year 1000’ spelt the final end of agricultural slavery—and the final establishment of feudal serfdom as a more dynamic mode of production than the old Roman system.
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The importance of what happened in the countryside between about 1000 and 1300 is all too easily underrated by those of us for whom food is something we buy from supermarkets. A doubling of the amount of food produced by each peasant household transformed the possibilities for human life across Europe. Whoever controlled the extra food could exchange it for the goods carried by the travelling traders or produced by the artisans.

Crudely, grain could be changed into silk for the lord’s family, iron for his weapons, furnishing for his castle, wine and spices to complement his meal. It could also be turned into means that would further increase the productivity of the peasant cultivators—wooden ploughs with iron tips, knives, sickles, and, in some cases, horses with bridles, bits and iron shoes.

By supplying such things at regular markets the humble bagman could transform himself into a respectable trader, and the respectable trader into a wealthy merchant. Towns began to revive as craftsmen and traders settled in them, erecting shops and workshops around the castles and churches. Trading networks grew up which tied formerly isolated villages together around expanding towns and influenced the way of life in a wide area.
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To obtain money to buy luxuries and arms, lords would encourage serfs to produce cash crops and substitute money rents for labour services or goods in kind. Some found an extra source of income from the dues they could charge traders for allowing markets on their land.

Life in the towns was very different from life in the countryside. The traders and artisans were free individuals not directly under the power of any lord. There was a German saying, ‘Town air makes you free.’ The urban classes were increasingly loath to accept the prerogatives of the lordly class. Traders and artisans who needed extra labour would welcome serfs who had fled bondage on nearby estates. And as the towns grew in size and wealth they acquired the means to defend their independence and freedom, building walls and arming urban militias.

The civilisation of the 13th century

In time, every aspect of society changed. The classic account of European feudalism by the French historian Marc Bloch goes so far as to speak of a ‘second feudal age’, in which relations between the feudal lords themselves underwent a transformation. Kings became more influential. They were able to formalise their power at the top of hierarchies of feudal lords. By granting various towns internal self government they could use them as a counterweight to the barons. And they tried to set up national networks of courts where their officials rather than the barons administered ‘justice’—although the barons usually managed to remain all-powerful in matters affecting their own estates.

Intellectual life was also tranformed. The traders needed to keep accounts and written records of contracts in a way which the feudal lords of the earlier period had not. They also wanted formal, written laws rather than the ad hoc judgments handed down in the villages by the lords. Some took the effort to learn to read and write, and did so in the local idioms they spoke. Literacy was no longer confined to the monasteries and Latin ceased to be the only written language. Learning moved from the monasteries to new universities established in cities like Paris, Oxford and Prague, and scholars could now earn a livelihood away from the direct control of church authorities by teaching for money. They showed a new interest in the serious study of non-religious works of the Greek and Roman world, travelling to Sicily, Moorish Spain or even Syria to gain access to them through Arabic translations.
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They began to dispute with each other over the merits of Plato and Aristotle, and of the Islamic Aristotelian, Averroës.

Medieval thought is often associated with ‘scholasticism’—disputation for its own sake, based upon hair-splitting references to texts. But the first phase of the new thought was far from scholastic in this sense. It involved using the long forgotten texts to try to generate new ideas. Thus Abelard, who dominated the intellectual life of the University of Paris in the early 12th century, insisted, ‘The man of understanding is he who has the ability to grasp and ponder the hidden causes of things. By hidden causes we mean those from which things originate, and these are to be investigated more by reason than by sensory experience’.
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He was attacked by the mystic St Bernard of Calirvaux for holding ‘himself able by human reason alone to comprehend God altogether’.
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