After Tamerlane (6 page)

The double-headed nature of medieval Europe was of profound importance. Historians have often written as though modern Europe descends from the empire of Charlemagne. In fact it was shaped by the impact of immigrant peoples in the European East (like Magyars and Bulgars), cultural imports (like Near Eastern monasticism), and the commercial stimulus of the Islamic Near East with its insatiable appetite for furs and other northern commodities.
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But at the height of Islamic expansion before
AD 1000
it had been the Byzantine Empire (‘Romania') with its great fortified capital that had played the most important part in preserving a Christian Europe and defining its scope. Byzantine sea power helped to fend off the Muslim invasion of Italy (Sicily had fallen in the early 800s) that might otherwise have driven the medieval West beyond the Alps. Byzantine models of centralized, autocratic government, and of military and naval organization, inspired the post-Roman states in the European West.
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The rise of Venice to become the great emporium for the West's trade with the East was closely connected with the Byzantine recovery; culturally, Venice was really an outpost of the great metropolis at Constantinople – as its architecture revealed. By 1400, of course, the Byzantine Empire had crumbled almost to nothing: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was the dramatic finale to a long collapse. The balance of power within Europe had long since shifted to the Latin West. But Byzantine influence endured. Liberating the empire's former (Christian) subjects from Ottoman rule became a European mania. An even more potent legacy was Byzantium's tie with Russia, for whose medieval states it served as a religious and cultural magnet.
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The eastern, landward, Russian, face of European expansion (the ultimate expression of Byzantine imperialism) was to influence Eurasia's history almost as deeply as its western, oceanic, counterpart.

In the Latin West, unlike in Greek Byzantium, continuity with the Roman Empire had been decisively lost. What emerged instead was a distinctive ‘Frankish' culture that drew in part upon Roman imperial precedents transmitted from Byzantium. But the real peculiarity of the
Frankish world was the social and political institution of feudalism. At its simplest, it meant the exchange of labour service for physical protection by a warrior class of nobles and their retinues. It may have derived from the freedom of great landowners to control their localities once imperial government caved in, taxation went with it, and the monetized economy contracted sharply. The age of invasions (by Hungarians, Norsemen and Muslims) that followed the collapse of Charlemagne's short-lived imperium may have strengthened the trend. By
AD
1000 this seigneurial system had hardened into an elaborate structure of obligations and overlordship, and had become a powerful engine for exploiting land and labour to produce military power – in the characteristic form of the mounted knight. The resulting seigneurial units, with their heavy cavalry and their fortified strong-points, became the building blocks for a new round of state-making that began after 1000. This was not accidental. The feudal kingdom, replicated across Central and Northern Europe, was the vehicle for an extended process of conquest and colonization by the Frankish aristocracy and its allies. It was the battering ram against the frontiers of Muslim expansion in Sicily, Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Palestine (the crusader kingdom of Outremer). East of the Elbe, it was consolidated by a tide of peasant migration, and the growth of towns and trade.
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In both Byzantium and the Frankish West, it was the fusion of secular with religious influences that created societies cohesive enough to withstand the aftershocks of imperial breakdown, barbarian invasion and Islamic expansion. In the West, churchmen had been the main repository of political tradition after the fall of Rome. They supplied the literati needed for any large-scale government. To rulers, they offered an invaluable source of divine legitimation and a wider vision of kingly ambition. The Church provided much of the ideological glue needed to bind the new feudal states together: Christianization was the basis of state-formation all over Northern and Eastern Europe after
AD 1000
.
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Everywhere, institutionalized Christianity reinforced the ties of solidarity and obligation. With the priest, the parish and the hierarchy of territorial bishops, religious sanctions could be welded to the political order far more strongly than in China or the Islamic world. The close identification between the authority of Church and
State – the most striking peculiarity of medieval Europe – gave its ruling elites a depth of social control unmatched in other parts of Eurasia. With the gradual development of dynastic states, a process well advanced by the fifteenth century, these sources of social power became even more valuable.

Economic revival underpinned the achievement of social and political cohesion. By the fourteenth century, Europe had reached broad economic and technological parity with China and the Islamic Near East. Between
AD 1000
and
c
. 1350 there was a long phase of economic growth. The population increased. Waste lands were colonized. Technical improvements like the mould-board plough (which opened up heavier lands) and the watermill increased productivity. The expansion of towns as centres of commerce and government reflected the increased sophistication of economic life: the specialization of crafts and trades; the extension of banking and credit; the use of new business techniques in partnership and accounting. A web of commercial connections now bonded together the trade of Northern, Eastern and Baltic Europe with the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean.
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A great ‘double isthmus' ran from northern Italy to the Low Countries: one branch through southern Germany and down the Rhine; the other up the Rhône and across northern France to Flanders. Along these routes, and clustered thickly at each end, were the commercial cities of the medieval West, while the line of the isthmus was itself a reminder that the flywheel of commerce was still the exchange of products from Asia, the Near East and the Mediterranean for those of Northern Europe. It was this that explained the precocious growth of Venice and Genoa and the German port cities stationed north of the Alps.

Economic expansion ground to a halt amid the demographic catastrophe of the mid fourteenth century, when the Eurasian pandemic called the Black Death carried off perhaps 40 per cent of the population. The fifteenth century saw a slow recovery. By that point, certainly, Europe was no longer the backward hinterland of the Islamic Near East. Europeans enjoyed no obvious advantage over the rest of Eurasia, but they were coming to play a much stronger role in Near Eastern trade. More and more they were financing their purchases of Asian luxuries, Iranian silk or Syrian cotton by the sale of their own manufactures (usually cloth), exploiting the urban decline of Egypt
and Syria.
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Genoese and Venetian
fondachi
(trading depots) littered the coastline from North Africa to the Crimea. Meanwhile, to the west, a new maritime frontier had opened. The reconquest of Spain from Muslim rulers by the mid thirteenth century had encouraged the opening of a regular sea route between the Mediterranean and the ports of the English Channel and the North Sea. Lisbon, Seville and later Cadiz became the connecting links between the Atlantic and Mediterranean systems. Long before Columbus, Atlantic Iberia had become a springboard for marine adventure, a school of advanced seamanship, and the likeliest rendezvous between the maritime pioneers and the Genoese merchants and bankers on whose credit they leaned.

By 1400 a new Europe had been made: a loose confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, broadly similar social and political institutions, and a developed inter-regional economy. It was at one level an ingenious fusion of Roman and Frankish culture, while its Byzantine component, submerged politically after
1400,
secured the continued attachment (however tenuous at times) of the Russian lands. But Europe had also been formed by its tense relationship with the Islamic world. Much of what was known in the Latin West about the intellectual life of the classical world was transmitted to it by Muslim scholars in Spain.
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The commercial life of the Muslim world had been far more advanced than that in much of Europe. Prestige goods and luxury wares, as well as silver and gold, flowed west into Europe, not the other way round. Western Europe's recovery from economic implosion would have been much slower without this wealthier neighbour. But these ties of dependence were balanced by the sense of imminent danger from a Muslim invasion (in Southern Europe especially) and by savage resentment against Muslim control of the Christian holy places – the emotional fuel behind the crusades. Re-Christianizing the lands reconquered from Islam had been an uphill task. The threat from without and the pervasive fear of the enemy within (usually Jews or heretics) created an insecure and aggressive, rather than calmly superior, view of cultural outsiders. Hemmed in between Islam, the dark limitless sea, and the forests and tundra of the North, Europeans could not pretend to inhabit a serene ‘Middle Kingdom', surrounded by tributaries and guarded by walls. For all the successes of the Frankish political system, it could make
no headway in South East Europe against the Muslim advance in the fourteenth century. The hope of outflanking Islam by allying with the Mongol ‘world-conquerors' had fizzled out after 1350.

At the centre of the old Eurasian world lay the realm of Islam. In 1400 it extended from Andalusia and Morocco in the west to the plains of North India and the islands of South East Asia, modern Indonesia. Its double heartland lay in the Fertile Crescent that linked the Nile and Euphrates, and on the Iranian plateau. It was in the Near East and Iran that Islam had been established by Muhammad's Arab armies in the seventh century over the ruins of Byzantine and Sassanid rule. By AD 750, most of Central Asia was Muslim. After 1000, Muslim Turks invaded North India, drawn by the ‘gold rush' for Indian treasure
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to create a series of conquest states. By the thirteenth century, Islam had reached Bengal and the trading towns of the Malacca Strait, the launching pad for its advance into the Malay archipelago. The Sudanic lands south of the Sahara were also being Islamized by the eleventh century.

Medieval Europeans were dazzled by the fabulous wealth and intellectual sophistication of the Islamic world. There were good reasons for this. Far more than the ‘colonial' West, the Islamic Near East was the intellectual legatee of the Ancient World and home to an intellectual culture that had all but collapsed in the ‘Dark Ages' of the West. Nor was the wealth and urban tradition of the Near East an accident. Here, where the earliest riverine civilizations had grown up, economic life enjoyed a double stimulus. In the Nile–Euphrates corridor, and scattered across the Iranian uplands, were agricultural regions of exceptional productivity. An agricultural revolution had introduced new crops;
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hydraulic technique overcame the curse of aridity. An agrarian surplus sustained urban elites and their elaborate high culture. In the towns, an artisan class of legendary skill had sprung up to cater for these elites' material demands. But the Near East was also the great commercial crossroads of the world: the land bridge between China, Europe, Africa and India, and the portage for the seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean. Threaded between its mountain ranges and deserts were the caravan routes that brought Chinese goods across Central Asia and Indian goods up from the Persian Gulf: routes that

ended at Syria's inland port cities (Damascus was the greatest), or further west at Bursa and Constantinople. Across the Isthmus of Suez ran another trunk route linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea (where the Romans had maintained a naval squadron), with its onward connection to India.

These great channels of intercontinental trade with their local tributaries formed a stream of wealth tapped by the imperial systems that rose and fell in the seven centuries that followed the conquests of Muhammad. Near Eastern rulers were well aware of its value. For all his reputation as a tyrant of demonic cruelty, Tamerlane understood the point of commercial as well as military strategy. Destroying the trading towns north of the Caspian Sea was meant to enforce his monopoly over the trans-Eurasian trade that passed to its south. Other Near Eastern rulers took care to maintain the chief commercial roads, defend the merchants from tribal or nomadic predation, and build the great caravanserais – large fortified inns – that lowered the ‘protection costs' of long-distance traffic. The ease with which it could be made to yield a revenue commended the golden goose of commerce to all but the most desperate or short-sighted of state-builders.

Tamerlane was the last of the great Mongol-Turkic ‘world-conquerors' who swept into the Middle East from Inner Asia between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries. Their nomad armies, highly organized and fiercely disciplined, were composed of squadrons of mounted archers. They enjoyed the advantage of exceptional mobility and firepower.
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For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target. Each conquest left behind its deposit of migrants and reshaped the political and cultural landscape – like the periodic inundations of a mighty river. Dramatic as they were, these invasions from the East can be seen as part of a more general pattern of Middle East politics. The settled lands between the Nile and the Oxus where states had been made were exposed to disruption from their own desert frontiers, pressing in upon the pockets of the ‘sown' and the towns they sustained. In his great philosophical history, the
Muqadimmah
, Ibn Khaldun explained how the inhabitants of the ‘sown' slowly lost the will to defend
themselves against external depredation, until at last they were fair game for an invading army of nomads, hardened by desert life and the exploits of hunting and war. Ruthless, skilful and united by an
asabiyya
(solidarity) long lost by the people of the ‘sown', they formed a new ruling class until they too succumbed to the corruption of civilized life and were brushed aside in their turn.
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