Part 14 (1/2)
The Arabs brought more than just a pay-to-pray tax system. Muhammad had been a big fan of learning and scholars.h.i.+p, and literacy rates in Arab-dominated areas were quite high for the time. Arab scientists excelled in taking the building blocks of cla.s.sical Greek learning and improving on them, especially in math, astronomy, and medicine.
They also left their imprint on architecture and the arts, with intricate geometric designs, pointed arches, and gilded domes. Because they spread out in all directions at once, Arabs brought together heretofore-unknown types of food to other areas of the world, most significantly sugar, rice, and coffee.
Eventually, infighting among factions and a lack of strong leaders led to the weakening of the Arab empire. By the middle of the tenth century, much of the power of Arab caliphs had transited to military commanders who used the t.i.tle ”sultan.” Many of these were not Arab, but Turk. But they were Muslim, and therefore the political, cultural, and military influence of Islam would continue well into the middle of the next millennium, even as the Arab Empire faded.
IT'S HAMMER TIME Despite their impressive record in terms of empire-expanding, Muslim armies didn't always win. Sometimes this was due to underestimating the enemy. At least that's what happened near Tours, France, in 732.Muslim armies under Emir Abdul Abd-ar-Rahman had just trounced a Frankish force, and were feeling pretty frisky as they got ready to take on another Frankish army, under the command of a guy named Charles. Charles lacked a formal t.i.tle, but was the de facto ruler of much of what is now northern France.Without a real cavalry, Charles had taught his infantry to fight in a phalanx-like formation that resembled a large square. He also carefully picked his place to fight: a wooded area uphill from the enemy, which made it tough for the latter to maneuver on horseback.After six days of feeling out the Frank defenses-which historians figure were probably significantly outnumbered-Abd-ar-Rahman attacked. Bad move. The Arab cavalry could not penetrate the Franks' square; Abd-ar-Rahman was killed, and the Muslim army retreated during the night.One of the significant impacts of the battle was that-coupled with an uprising by the Berbers, former North African allies of the Arabs-it halted Muslim expansion into Europe. The second important effect was that it cemented Charles's hold on the region and paved the way for his son, Pepin the Short, and his grandson, Charlemagne, to follow him.And the coolest result? After the battle, folks began calling the Frankish leader ”Charles Martel,” or ”Charles the Hammer.”
China:
Tang-y and Delicious!
While the Arab Empire basically started from scratch, the two dynasties that ran things in China during most of the Not-So-Dark Ages actually did their best work in reestablis.h.i.+ng governmental and cultural structures that had been lost after the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220.
For more than three centuries after the Hans cashed in their chips, China was pretty much a cl.u.s.ter of petty warring kingdoms and badly run territories. Around 550, however, the Chinese formed a temporary alliance with the Turks and drove out a barbarian group known as the Juan-juan. In 581, a Chinese general named Yang Chien became the emperor Wen Ti, the first of two emperors of the short-lived Sui Dynasty.
The Emperor of the land where Sun rises (nihon/hi iduru) (nihon/hi iduru) sends a letter to the Emperor of the land where Sun sets. How are you doing? sends a letter to the Emperor of the land where Sun sets. How are you doing?-j.a.pan's Prince Shotoku to Yangdi, emperor of China, 607
The two Sui leaders employed-surprise-pretty brutal methods to get things done. They got the country's Grand Ca.n.a.l dug, which was a good thing for the farmers of the Yangtze Valley and consumers elsewhere in China. But the cost was the lives of more than one million people who worked on the project. The Sui also resurrected the notion of a strong centralized government.
But high taxes and forced labor led to a peasant revolt in 618, and the beginning of the Tang Dynasty. For just about the next three centuries, Tang rulers would steer China through a most decidedly un-Dark Age. Roads and ca.n.a.ls effectively linked the country together. The Silk Road was reestablished, bringing China's highly coveted goods, such as silk, porcelain, and spices, to the West in return for gold. The city of Chang'an (now called Xian) was one of the world's most ma.s.sive metropolises.
BUT THEY DON'T TAKE AMERICAN EXPRESS Trade grew so rapidly in Tang China, they had a coin shortage. To make up for it, they used paper money and letters of credit. The letters were called ”flying cash.”
JAYWALKING NOT RECOMMENDED.
Chang'an, city on the plains of the Wei River, southwest of Beijing, was probably the largest in the world in the middle of the eighth century, with more than one million inhabitants in a metropolis that covered thirty square miles.We're talking about a city whose main thoroughfare was as wide as a modern forty-five-lane highway-if we had forty-five-lane highways. There were striking temples and paG.o.das (including the Big Goose PaG.o.da, which is 331 feet high) and a statue of Buddha that was one of the largest in the world.In addition to being a major trade hub, Chang'an was also a spiritual and artistic center. It was so admired that the j.a.panese modeled their own capital of Kyoto after it in 794.
The Tang raised the standards of both the military and the bureaucracy, while allowing commoners a chance to succeed and rise in both areas. The introduction of tea from Southeast Asia helped raised health standards, since boiling the water eliminated a lot of sickness-inducing germs. Artisans devised a kind of three-color glazed porcelain that their European counterparts wouldn't match for several hundred years. And someone invented gunpowder.
POP! CULTURE.
The firecracker's origin is somewhat short on details, and further confused by the invention of gunpowder. Historians believe that as early as the third century, the Chinese were roasting bamboo to enjoy the pop it made when heated. One version of the invention of gunpowder is that an alchemist searching for a formula for eternal life concocted the substance. But the most often-repeated explanation for gunpowder's invention is that a Chinese cook inadvertently mixed up the right proportions of three ingredients-sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal-sometime in the tenth century. All three items would have been found in a Chinese kitchen of the time: the sulfur for intensifying the heat of a cooking fire, the saltpeter as a preservative, and the charcoal as fuel.The idea of confining the powdery substance to a hollowed piece of bamboo is generally credited to a monk named Li Tian, who used them to drive away evil spirits from the city of Liu Yang. Whether it's true or not, the fact is that the city is today one of the world's biggest producers of fireworks.
When it came to matters of the soul, the adaptable Chinese took morality direction from old-school Confucianism and spiritual solace from Buddhism. And the Tang Dynasty's political influence extended far beyond its borders: Korea, what is now Vietnam, and j.a.pan were all heavily swayed in their way of doing things by the Chinese. j.a.pan, in fact, began largely to model its government structures after the Tang model. In fact, Tang China was considered so cool by the rest of the world that large Chinese cities of the time were truly cosmopolitan, sporting communities of expatriate Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Asians, Turks, and other a.s.sorted groups.
Internal power struggles and external sniping by barbarian groups and the Turks, however, gradually led to the disintegration of the Tang Dynasty, which disappeared in 907. What reappeared was another century of governmental and cultural chaos in China.
The Byzantine Empire
(aka the Eastern Half of the Empire Previously Known as Rome)
If the Arabs were inventing themselves and the Chinese reinventing themselves, empire-ically speaking, the Byzantine Empire was basically trying to hang on to and preserve the status quo during this period.
What had originally been the eastern half of the Roman Empire kept a lot of what was good about that ent.i.ty (e.g., a well-organized government structure), while harking back to the Greeks for some stuff (such as a common language).
Centered on its capital of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire was well situated to act as the world's middleman when it came to trade between East and West. The empire's bezant replaced the Roman denarius as the world's most widely accepted currency, and Byzantine merchants took a little taste of the action in goods that flowed through the empire in both directions.
While it had able leaders at the beginning and end of the Not-So-Dark Era (Justinian at the front and Basil II at the end), the Byzantine Empire did occasionally have a bozo in control. Nonetheless, it did okay even during those periods, mostly because the Roman way of doing things still lingered in the bureaucracy.
It also didn't hurt that most of the time farmers doubled as soldiers, which kept down the expense of standing armies, which in turn helped keep taxes low. In addition, the codification of Roman law in 534 by Justinian helped reinforce the legal system and served as a model for Western legal thought for centuries to come.