A Brief History of Government
The first civilization began in the city states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico, and other places where small communities spawned kingdoms. We can trace the history of this culture in the wars fought between kingdoms and between nomadic barbarians and the settled communities. China and India brought forth political dynasties that had little contact with the outside world except when nomadic groups threatened them from the Asian steppe (or when a “civilized” conqueror such as Alexander the Great invaded northern India). The empires formed in Mexico and Peru were also largely self-confined. The Middle East is another story. Here political dynasties arose in Mesopotamia, Turkey, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Italy which fought other kingdoms for control of the civilized world. The story of this civilization is the story of the rise and fall of kingdoms striving to become an empire which controls a territory containing many different peoples.
Government is the institution which survives from this period. The history of government is largely one of warfare although certain other functions also emerged. The laws of Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi were noteworthy achievements. The extensive system of roads that connected distant parts of the Persian and Roman empires allowed a central government to control far-flung territories. The first Chinese emperor Shih Hwang-ti standardized the Chinese script, replaced the hereditary nobility with appointed officials, and began work on the Great Wall. But a recognized mark of achievement was how large a territory the empire might conquer and maintain. At its height in the 2nd century A.D., there were four political empires which controlled a broad swath of land from China’s Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast of Gaul and Spain. These were the Han Chinese, Kushan, Parthian, and Roman empires. Their societies were under totalitarian rule.
In China this pattern has continued into modern times. In recurring dynasties, the type of government created in the 3rd century B.C. lasted for two millennia. Even though the Ching dynasty ended in 1911, centralized government following the imperial model has been resurrected by the communists. In Europe, on the other hand, no one succeeded in reviving the Roman empire. This empire was split into two parts when Constantine I established a second capital at Constantinople to govern Rome’s eastern territories while the city of Rome remained the capital of territories in the west. Separate lineages of emperors ruled in each place. The last ruler of the west Roman empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 B.C., marking what we in the west call “the fall of the Roman empire”.
Many causes have been ascribed to this “fall”, including the corrosive influence of Christianity and the moral corruption of the Roman people. Considering that the western empire was overthrown by barbarian invaders, a more likely explanation is that the eastern border had become too porous. Germanic peoples had begun to migrate into Roman territories lured by the empire’s wealth and culture and even staff the imperial armies. After the Roman government fell, Gothic, Frankish, and other barbarian kings ruled the western part of Europe. Their domains became the territories of the European nation states. Several political leaders including Charlemagne, Emperor Frederick II, Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, and, more lately, Napoleon and Hitler have tried to reunite the lands once ruled by ancient Rome, but none have succeeded for more than a short time.
In the eastern part of the empire, however, the Roman state continued for almost a thousand years beyond the demise of the western empire. This so-called “Byzantine” Roman empire, ruled from Constantinople, fought the Sasanian Persians, Islamic Arabs, Norman French, Saljuq Turks, and Ottoman Turks, among others, to maintain its sovereignty before Constantinople was besieged and taken by the Ottomans in 1454 A.D. Its cultural identity was related to orthodox Christianity as much as to the Roman state. The metropolitan of Constantinople was the spiritual leader of orthodox Christians. After that great city fell to the Moslems, ecclesiastical power shifted to Moscow.
Prince Vladimir of Kiev became a Christian in 989 A.D. Slavic peoples then converted en masse to the orthodox faith. The grand dukes of Moscow annexed the Ukraine and other lands to create the Russian empire. This Christian empire thereby became a continuation of the Byzantine empire and the Roman empire before that. Its model of empire involved a partnership between church and state, with the church in a subordinate position. The Russian czar (or “Caesar”) ruled a largely totalitarian state which, like that in China, was readily adapted to communist rule.
By this time world history had passed into the second epoch of civilization whose distinguishing institution was religion. We have seen that the Byzantine empire involved a partnership between church and state. In the west, the church continued to exist after the Roman state fell. The bishop of Rome, or Pope, became the spiritual leader of Christians living in the territories once ruled from that city. Barbarian kings converted to Christianity. The church gave its blessing to their rule. Charlemagne, who almost succeeded in reviving the political empire, had himself crowned “Holy Roman Emperor” by the Pope.
Medieval Christian society was ruled by a partnership between the temporal and ecclesiastical authorities. The Pope was the chief ecclesiastical official. The Holy Roman Emperor and lesser princes held temporal power. This was not an empire of the same kind as the pre-Christian Roman Empire. It was one where religion shared the governing power and, indeed, was considered to be a superior power to secular government.
The Islamic religion had also managed to bring a large territory under its control. The ruling caliphs, successors to Mohammed, combined religious and political authority. But, again, the religious was preferred to the secular. The purpose of empire was to convert persons to the Moslem faith and to govern society according to laws and regulations which Mohammed himself had prescribed. The caliphates in Damascus and Baghdad had authority over the entire realm of Islam.
A later Moorish regime was established in Spain. Turkish peoples and others from the Eurasian steppe later created Islamic empires. There were Buwayhid Iranians, Saljuq Turks in Anatolia, Aghlabid Arabs in Tunisia, and Fatimids and Mamluks in Egypt. In a later incarnation of Islamic empire, three great empires extended across from Turkey into south Asia: the Ottoman Turks, Persian Safavis, and Moguls of India. These were not revivals of the type of political empire found in those lands in the 2nd century A.D. but empires infused with religion.
As we enter the third epoch of world history, the institution of government experienced still more changes. In western Europe, the Protestant Reformation took place. Power shifted away from the papacy to the European princes who were able to choose the religion of their subjects. For instance, Henry VIII founded the church of England, a Protestant denomination, after the Pope refused permission to divorce his wife and remarry. Emperor Charles V (grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella) seemed to have most of Europe under his control but, caught in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, he was unable to build a permanent empire. Pope Alexander VI’s division of American territories between Spain and Portugal proved ineffective in the face of Dutch, French, and English colonization.
How was government affected by these events? The Reformation taught that the Bible, not the Roman church, was the source of religious truth and authority. Every man was authorized to read the Bible and interpret it for himself. So the individual was religiously empowered; it was a step leading to democracy. Another important trend was the rise of Parliamentary government, especially in England. Parliaments, originally assembled to help the king collect taxes, took power away from kings. The idea that the people should pick their leaders replaced the principle that royal power was divinely sanctioned.
One 17th century revolution, the Puritan, and two 18th century revolutions, the American and French, were milestones toward the establishment of democratic government. The successful example of democracy in America helped to promote democratic governments in Europe and the rest of the world. In the aftermath of World War I, three major European dynasties fell and were replaced by democracies (if you count the Bolshevist government in Russia as a democracy.) The European “revolutions” gave a shock to government, two epochs after this institution had been created. The idea of beheading a divinely appointed monarch was especially shocking. One might look for a similar event affecting the other institutions somewhere down the line.
In the third epoch of history, we find the European nation state as the basic model of government. Democratic governments were replacing hereditary monarchies. Independent nations arose in South and Central America in the early 19th century. A multitude of new nations arose in Africa and Asia as the European nations divested themselves of their former colonies. An important element in the history of the first civilization came to an end when the military threat from nomadic barbarians was extinguished. Manchu China and Czarist Russia, equipped with firearms, had encircled their homeland by the mid 17th century.
Wars were now fought to advance economic objectives - gain new territories, access to markets, or control of natural resources - rather than to promote a religion. These wars tended to more disciplined and restrained than the religious ones had been. Communism, a new economic “religion” exhibiting certain features of Christianity, later took control of Russia, China, and other nations and, for a time, seemed poised for further conquest. But history took a different turn.
Industrialization now became the key to a nation’s military strength. As religion had been in the second epoch of history, so the influence of commerce was felt upon politics and government in the third epoch. Access to oil was critical. Education was also important as an educated citizenry was thought essential to a successful democracy.
A Brief History of Religion
For much of the first epoch of history, religion had taken the form of civic religion following earlier cults of nature worship. The Mesopotamian city-states worshiped their local gods in the shape of a clay statue housed in the temple. The Greeks and Roman continued to observe rituals in honor of the gods. Pallas Athena, patroness of Athens, was worshiped in the Parthenon. The Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus, leader of Rome’s civic religion. He himself was also worshipped as a god. It was the requirement of emperor worship which most bothered Christians living in Rome.
The second civilization was not based upon this kind of religion but upon another kind ultimately derived from philosophy. A wave of new thinking swept through civilizations of the Old World during the first millennium B.C. associated with such philosophers and spiritual leaders as Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jeremiah, and Pythagoras. From their teachings came new philosophies and religions. Some philosophers, such as Confucius, Zoroaster, and Plato, brought a moral critique to government. Their approach was to try to reform government as advisors to the king. Others challenged government as outsiders. Jeremiah, for instance, predicted that Jerusalem would fall to the Babylonians; he was jailed for expressing that belief. Socrates was convicted of impiety with respect to the civic religion of Athens and put to death. Jesus was crucified on order of Pontius Pilate, Roman proconsul in Judaea. Choosing between royal power and truth, Buddha renounced the throne of a Nepalese principality to pursue truth.
History records that, after their deaths, the followers of Jesus and Buddha formed ideological communities devoted to perpetuating and fulfilling the ideas of their departed leader. Buddhism inclined more toward monastic communities; Christianity, toward the ecclesiastical structure of the church. The core of these communities were persons who, like philosophers, had given up worldly occupations and married life to pursue a particular set of ideas. Buddha taught the path to Enlightenment. Jesus preached the coming Kingdom of God. Both concepts are roughly related to what we would call “Heaven”, a spiritual realm for good persons after death. Followers of those religions were renouncing the evil world of physical pleasures and power politics. Yet they also had to operate in that world. Their institutional fortunes were made when powerful monarchs sponsored their religion. The Indian emperor Asoka sponsored Buddhism. The Roman emperor Constantine sponsored Christianity. The religious ideologies then became state religions, armed with resources of the state.
A third world religion, Islam, came about in the early 7th century A.D. when the archangel Gabriel dictated God’s words to the prophet Mohammed. Mohammed was a merchant who had been exposed to other Judaic religions when he led caravans to Syria. The message he brought was of a single God, Allah, who was the same God as that of the Christians and Jews. He was considered the latest in a series of prophets which also included Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, delivering God’s most complete message. Mohammed spent years trying to convert citizens of Mecca to his religion. His fortune was made when he was invited to govern the city of Medina. He performed this task admirably and soon was at the head of an army which conquered Mecca and the rest of the Arabian peninsula. After Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D., his successors continued on the path of conquest. They took advantage of the fact that the East Roman empire and Sasanian Persian empire had exhausted each other in centuries-long warfare. The armies of Islam had conquered much of south-central Asia and north Africa by the end of the 7th century.
World religion provided a moral structure for society during the second epoch of world history. Although we place its beginning in the mid first millennium B.C. (when the great philosophers and prophets lived), its period of dominance began in the mid first millennium A.D. when the religions acquired worldly power. In the case of Christianity, it lasted until the Renaissance a thousand years later; in the case of Islam, perhaps a few hundred years after that. The pattern of organization varied.
In western Europe, the church became a freestanding institution after the Roman government fell. By its presumed power to bestow the blessings of God upon royal dynasties and individuals, it was able to develop a power-sharing arrangement with the barbarian kings who held worldly power. Christianity remained the state religion of the surviving Byzantine empire. In the Sasanian empire, Zoroastrianism was likewise the state religion. The royal family of Persia were hereditary priests of a pre-Zoroastrian cult that had been incorporated into the Zoroastrian religion. The caliphs who ruled Islamic countries combined religious and political authority as successors to Mohammed. In contrast, Buddhism was largely confined to monastic organization. Confucianism, a moral philosophy, played the part of a state religion in the imperial dynasties of China. Chinese Buddhism appealed to people in a less worldly way.
Government never disappeared in the second civilization. We say that this epoch is religious because religion assumed the dominant position in the partnership between religion and government. Political rulers could choose to put their subjects to the sword, but the church could grant or withhold eternal life. The latter power was the more awesome of the two. Pope Innocent III, who ruled at the apex of papal power, advanced the theory of the “two lights” arguing that as “the moon derives her light from the sun and is superior to the sun ... in the same way ... royal power derives its dignity from pontifical authority.”
A famous passage in Matthew quotes Jesus: “You are Peter, the Rock; and on this rock I will build my church ... I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” St. Peter was the first bishop of Rome. His successors in that office, the Popes, presumably inherited the power given to Peter. The Roman church exercised its power by administering the sacraments which were thought necessary to salvation. The church could withhold sacraments from persons, including kings, who had offended it. Martin Luther later denied that the church hierarchy had such power. He argued that a person could be saved by belief in Jesus as Lord and saviour. Orthodox Christianity had a different theology. Its leaders were also Christian bishops, peers of the Bishop of Rome but inferior to him with respect to the lineage from Peter.
Medieval Europe was ruled by a two power structure consisting of secular authorities and the church. Some coins had the picture of the Pope on one side; that of the Holy Roman Emperor, on the other. Justice was administered both by ecclesiastical and secular courts. Christianity dominated the society’s belief system. The Christian theology as developed by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others mixed classical Greek philosophy (mainly, Aristotle and Plato) with the teachings of the Apostle Paul and the sayings of Jesus. Gothic cathedrals were built for Christian worship. The lives of Jesus and the saints were commemorated in public holidays. Music and the arts were adapted to religious ends.
In the 11th century A.D. two ominous events took place within Christendom. First, Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius, patriarch of the Orthodox church. Second, Urban II issued an appeal for European Christians to liberate Jerusalem from the Moslem authorities. The western church thus severed relations with the eastern church and waged war against Islam. Knights of the First Crusade did capture Jerusalem in 1099 A.D. after a battle killing 70,000 civilians. A Second Crusade, begun fifty years later after the fall of Edessa to the Turks, ended in dismal failure. There was a Third Crusade after Saladin recaptured Jerusalem which captured some territory but the Holy City remained in Moslem hands; and then a Fourth, which was diverted from its purpose; and then a Fifth, aimed at Egypt; and then a Sixth, in which the Pope excommunicated Emperor Frederick II because he did not attack the Moslems quickly enough; and so on, for a total of nine crusades, not counting the ill-fated “Children’s Crusade, which covered the better part of three centuries. At the end, the Holy Land remained in Moslem hands.
Such adventures undermined the moral credibility of the church. Frederick II openly mocked the Pope urging his fellow princes to seize church property. Another event which hurt the Papacy was the “Great Schism”, in which there were rival popes in Rome and Avignon, France. This was damaging to an institution whose legitimacy rested upon a clear line of descent from St. Peter. Then, too, the Roman church was forever borrowing money to finance wars and other projects. The public was becoming disgusted with corrupt priests and the need to raise increasing sums of money. The Renaissance popes practiced nepotism and lived in palaces adorned with costly art. Pope Alexander VI had children. The last straw was a papal indulgence announced by Julius II to raise the money to rebuild St. Peter’s Church. When a Dominican friar came to Germany to announce a new papal dispensation, Martin Luther raised a protest. He posted his “95 Theses” on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, and the Protestant Reformation began.
The Protestants were austere reformers who discouraged religious imagery. They focused instead on the words of the Bible. They placed emphasis upon translating the Bible from Latin and Greek into contemporary languages. if Christians could read the Bible themselves, they would not need priests to tell them what was required for salvation. “Scripture alone” was the Protestant source of religious authority and truth. “Justification by faith” was the sole means of salvation. But because each individual could interpret the Bible for himself, the Protestant movement spawned a variety of interpretations. Besides Lutherans, there were Calvinists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and groups farther out such as Quakers, Mennonites, and Zwinglians.
The Saxon elector Frederick III gave Luther sanctuary in his castle at Wartburg. Protected by German princes, Luther burned a copy of a papal bull in a bonfire threatening to excommunicate him if he did not recant. European princes picked sides between supporting Luther’s cause and remaining loyal to the Roman church. This led to the Thirty Year”s War which pit Protestant against Catholic and much of Europe against the Hapsburg dynasty. Meanwhile, the two sides waged theological wars in books and pamphlets. Toynbee points out that European intellectuals became interested in the natural sciences about this time. Tired of theological disputes that led only to more strife, they wanted to address “questions concerning natural phenomena that could be discussed dispassionately and could be answered conclusively by observation or by experiment.” In 1660, the Royal Society was founded in England with those objectives in mind.
The Renaissance had anti-Christian overtones. Intellectuals were encountering the pagan classics and finding them superior to what Christianity had to offer. The term “dark ages” was first used then. Men were determined to see things as they were, not as church officials told them must be believed. The science of Aristotle began to be questioned. A new spirit of empiricism filled the culture. In the 17th century, men came to regard comets as a natural phenomenon rather than a warning from God of impending doom. Belief in witchcraft subsided. In the 18th century, French intellectuals became passionate about ridding the world of “authority, intolerance, and superstition.” The “Enlightenment” was a time of intense skepticism about religion. In the 19th Century, the theories of Charles Darwin posed a new challenge to explanations offered by the church. Was plant and animal life created as a result of evolution through natural selection or had God created the separate species? Was man indeed descended from apes?
While the conquering Spaniards converted the peoples of south and central America to Catholicism, European immigrants to North America brought with them a variety of religions. Many settled in America to escape religious persecution. Puritans, Quakers, and others found sanctuary there. And so the political culture of the United States has favored religious tolerance. Jesuit missionaries also went to the Far East and initially had some success in making Christianity acceptable to the traditions of these people. However, the church hierarchy denounced their innovations. As a result, the Chinese imperial government suppressed the Christian religion. A Japanese shogun went so far as to require people to register with a Buddhist temple to prove they were not Christian. Asian peoples came to recognize the superiority of western technology, especially with respect to weaponry. They wanted some exposure to western culture to acquire the technology but were careful not to accept the whole package. To accept Christianity, these people felt, would mean the loss of their own cultural identity.
A Brief History of Business and Education
The commercial impetus behind the Renaissance, voyages of discovery to America and other far-flung places, mining of silver and gold in the New World, and the beginnings of American Indian and African slavery pushed human culture in a new direction. Ferdinand and Isabella were fanatical Christians who expelled the Moors from the Iberian peninsula in the same year that Columbus sailed to America. Christianity seemed poised for further conquests when St. Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus and Jesuit missionaries converted indigenous peoples of America to its faith. But the Spanish and Portuguese lost out to the commercially minded Dutch who, in turn, lost out to the English. Colonization for commercial purposes seemed to interest these people more than religion. It turned out that owning silver mines in America did not guarantee Spanish prosperity but only produced currency inflation and operating costs that forced the state into bankruptcy. Neither did French mercantilism fare much better. It was not until 1776 that Adam Smith produced a suitable explanation for the wealth of nations.
At the time of Columbus’ voyages to America, European trade was focused on the Far East where spices and silks could be purchased. This changed in the early 18th century. A Scottish financier named John Law, who had convinced the French Duke of Orleans to support him in establishing a bank similar to the Bank of England, merged this bank with a stock company organized for the purpose of promoting land sales in Louisiana. The idea was to encourage Europeans to settle on those lands, acquire African slaves, and grow coffee, sugar, and tobacco on plantations, which could then be marketed in Europe. The price of stock in Law’s “Mississippi Company” rose to great heights and then collapsed in December 1720. Law fled the country. However, the two years when his company operated had given Europeans a taste for the pleasurable commodities which might be grown in the American tropics. The bulk of trade shifted from the Pacific and Indian oceans to the Atlantic. Later in the century, a three-cornered trade took place between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Europe sent manufactured goods to Africa in exchange for human slaves, who were then sent to the Americas to work on sugar plantations to produce the rum which Europeans so enjoyed.
The third epoch of history was a time when European nation-states fought each other for colonial possessions. Thanks to the voyages of discovery, Spain and Portugal held an early lead in the competition. Although their colonial possessions in South and Central America held firm, the Iberian powers were unable to keep the English and French out of American trade. Attempts to crack down on this gave rise to increased piracy. Enjoying naval superiority, the Dutch seized Portuguese possessions in Indonesia during the 17th century. As the English colonized the southeastern seaboard of North America, the French established control of Canada and the interior waterways of this continent, including the Great Lakes. These two nations fought for control of North America in what we Americans call “the French and Indian war”.
The English and French also fought for control of India. The Mogul dynasty had granted certain trade privileges to the English. The East India Company, chartered by England, became the defacto rulers of India when it took over the administration of certain provincial governments in north India on behalf of the Mogul empire and made its administrators rich. Actually, the East India Company made most of its money from tea acquired from China. It forced opium on the Chinese in exchange for the tea. England had to go to war with China in the 1830s to preserve trade access.
An important commercial event was James Watt’s invention of a steam engine which was installed in an English cotton mill in 1785. Besides furnishing factories with power, the steam engine led to the invention of the locomotive and steam boat. England meanwhile acquired a system of canals and iron bridges. The Industrial Revolution gave England a further advantage in trade. It was able to produce cheap cloth using the cotton acquired from America. Industrialization spread to Germany, France, and other European nations as well as to the United States. Agriculture was also being mechanized, putting cheap American grain on the market. During the 19th century, trade competition intensified. So did the competition for colonies in Africa. It was a prelude to war.
Agriculture remained the backbone of economies in the 19th century. In mid century, half of American workers remained on the farm. Railroads carried grain from the Midwest and western beef to eastern markets. Steel was used in the railroads and for bridges, building construction, and other purposes. Electricity sent through telegraph lines improved communication. The U.S. civil war destroyed the old plantation system in the south. Petroleum discoveries in western Pennsylvania, exploited by John D. Rockefeller, led to the creation of the Standard Oil Company whose product came to fuel automobiles, boats, and airplanes. Chemical manufacturers produced artificial dyes for clothing, aspirin, and plastics. The farm population dropped as the efficiency of agricultural production improved. There was an increase in the proportion of workers engaged in manufacturing. Henry Ford’s Model T made automobiles affordable to the average American family.
The exploitation of factory labor gave rise to labor unions which bargained collectively with the factory owners. An early object was to reduce working hours to eight hours a day. From this and related efforts came the international socialist movement, led by Karl Marx. The two leading industrial nations in the 19th century, England and Germany, became political adversaries. Their rivalry culminated in World War I, the most destructive war to date in human history. Ironically, the German Kaiser and the English monarch were grandson and son, respectively, of England’s Queen Victoria. The Russian czar had also married into her family. Yet, the outcome of the war was that three royal dynasties in Europe came to an end. Russia became under the control of Karl Marx’s ideological heirs.
The 20th century also saw a Second World War which again was fought between Germany and England. Germany found allies in Italy and Japan. England gained support from the United States and the Soviet Union. The Axis powers were defeated after inflicting much devastation on peoples in Europe and Asia. The Allied victory proved to importance of weapons technology and industrial capacity to winning a modern war. It took the dropping of two atomic bombs to produce Japan’s surrender. After this victory, the United States and Soviet Union engaged in a “Cold War” lasting more than forty years. This was also a contest between the economic ideologies of free-market capitalism and Marxist communism. The communist government of the Soviet Union ended in the early 1990s and the Soviet Union itself was dissolved into separate republics. Communist governments remain in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Yet, the Chinese in particular have established close business relations with international capitalists.
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The third epoch of world history has, however, a second key institution: secular education. This civilization began five or six hundred years ago in Europe during the Renaissance. There were then two centers of culture: northern Italy and Flanders (Belgium). Both were intensely commercial places which supported a thriving artistic culture. They were centers of maritime trade where notable scholars and painters lived. There was, in other words, a connection between commerce and culture.
The city-states of Florence and Venice were centers of the Renaissance culture in northern Italy. In 1082 A.D., Venice had received a charter from the Byzantine empire granting its merchants freedom of transit and exemption from taxes in territories west of the Bosporus. With such access, its merchants specialized in goods such as silk, spices, and Damascus blades imported from the east This city cut a deal with knights of the Third Crusade in which Venetian boats would ferry the knights across the sea to Egypt in exchange for temporary service. It used this resource to conquer the Dalmatian coast and sack Constantinople. Fra Luca Pacioli published a book in 1494 on the Venetian art of double-entry accounting. Marco Polo was a Venetian engaged in Asian trade.
Florence, in the interior, became a center of weaving and dyeing cloth when the Order of Humble Brethren relocated there from Tyre, bringing with them secrets of oriental cloth preparation. As Florentine cloth gained a reputation for high quality, it became a center of cloth manufacturing using wool from northern Europe. A system of international credit was required for this trade. Florentine bankers, who managed accounts of the Roman church, worked out a system for purchasing wool in England with monies collected there for the church. In addition to banking, Florentine merchants became experts in controlling costs in manufacturing.
Thus these two cities, controlled by commercial oligarchs, became known for their wealth. There was meanwhile a cultural awakening, or reawakening, as the works of classical Greek and Roman culture became known. Italy was, of course, the heartland of the Roman empire. Ancient Greek texts were reintroduced when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks and Greek-speaking scholars fled to the west. After a millennium of Christian culture, western intellectuals could look at the rediscovered works of pagan antiquity and decide that they were culturally superior.
The Italian poet Petrarch was the archetype of a humanist scholar. To him and his comrades we owe the tradition of looking at ancient texts from the standpoint of their original spirit and intent. We owe to them the art of textual criticism. Petrarch regarded classical authors as if they were his personal acquaintances. He put himself in their shoes and carried on imaginary conversations with them. He became an expert in the works of classical antiquity thought to be superior to the contemporary culture. The rich merchants of Venice and Florence engaged humanist scholars to educate their children. They became patrons of the arts. They spent money to purchase and copy ancient manuscripts. A connection was established between wealth and cultural polish which has remained to this day.
The first European universities were aligned with the church. The University of Paris stressed theological training along with studies in medicine, law, and the liberal arts. The number of universities in western Europe doubled between 1350 and 1500. The Reformation stimulated both religious and secular education. The Protestants believed that each man should learn to read the Bible. That gave a boost both to literacy skills and translation of the Bible from Latin into popular tongues. Such translation required skill in analyzing texts. Dante’s writing of the Divine Comedy in his native Tuscan rather than Latin encouraged others likewise to write in their contemporary languages. A tradition of national literatures was born. Printing fostered dissemination of this literature. Such developments undermined the solidarity of Christian culture in Europe. Toynbee writes: “The ecclesiastical Respublica Christiana was replaced to some extent by a literary and scientific ‘Republic of Letters.’ Its founding father had been Erasmus but Bayle endowed it, in 1684, with a periodical, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres.” This was the start of literary and scientific journals. Printed newspapers came later.
Both Protestants and Catholics saw education as an opportunity to mold young people in the faith. The Jesuits became known for their rigorous religious training. But the Protestants, too, paid special attention to schools. Indoctrination in religion was the spiritual equivalent of military training. European princes, mistrusting popular education, wanted schools to train clever young people to be of service to society. According to H.G. Wells: “Universities became “part of the recognized machinery of aristocracy ... A pompous and unintelligent classical pretentiousness dominated them ... The only knowledge recognized was an uncritical textual knowledge of a selection of Latin and Greek classics.”
After its defeat by Napoleon, Prussia reorganized its schools. The gymnasium became a center to educate elites. Applied science was added to the curriculum. Soon German training in science began to pay dividends in improved technology. Germany became a leader in chemicals. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, after he married Queen Victoria, warned the British of their educational deficiencies. German competition was used to scare his adopted nation into improving education much as, in the 20th century, Sputnik was used to promote scientific education in the United States. The English did improve their system of public education. Even so, the English “public schools” and prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge remained havens for the upper class. American colleges took their cues from Britain.
In that regard, an important step in the development of western education was the decision by William Farish, in 1791, to put grades on papers written by students at Cambridge University in England. Grading made it possible to evaluate students quantitatively and that, in turn, facilitated the hierarchical stratification of graduates from the schools. Educational stratification led to eligibility for particular careers; and placement in careers laid a foundation for socioeconomic rankings within the general society. And so, the testing process has become as significant a part of secular education as the processes of teaching and learning. It gives individuals a place in society. This is the modern measure of success.
A SHORT HISTORY OF
CIVILIZATION II
A Change in Religion
The second civilization, introduced by alphabetic writing, began with a change in the nature of religious worship which took place in the 1st millennium B.C. Primitive religions, one may recall, typically include rituals intended to increase the fertility of agriculture. They acknowledge and feed a community’s ancestral spirits. They may involve animal or even human sacrifice as a means of pleasing the gods. These religions are polytheistic, reflecting the diverse elements of nature. They are instituted in cults of particular gods or goddesses which function under the supervision of hereditary priests possessing the knowledge to perform the rituals correctly. These priests also exercise political power. Later, the nature gods become associated with the collective identity of tribes, city-states, and kingdoms. The gods and goddesses become patrons of particular peoples. Their totemic characters are adapted to express these people’s communal identity. The different deities are arranged in hierarchies mirroring tribal or national relationships within a political empire. The emperors are considered to be divine figures or be uniquely endowed with divine authority and power.
All this changed with the wave of philosophical thinking that swept through societies of the Old World during the lst millennium B.C. Hereditary priesthoods gave way to a more democratic and meritocratic method of selecting religious leaders. Sacrificial rituals mattered less than maintaining ethical conduct. An open-ended brotherhood of believers replaced stratified castes. Ideas began to play a dominant role in religion. Divine spirit, once confined to particular places or persons, became a universal presence. And so it was possible for anyone who consented or believed to adopt the religion, regardless of nation. Like law, the principles underlying the religion could be applied anywhere. These principles could be expressed in creeds. Learned doctors could ponder and dispute the finer points of God’s truth. Those who bucked the general consensus of belief could be branded heretics. The inner attitude or direction of heart would become the criterion of correct religion, not expertise in performing a ritual. In the West, correct religion also involved worship of the right God, who was right because he was the only real God. Religious worship changed with the concept of monotheism.
The Monotheism of Ikhnaton and Moses
It may be that the first “prophet” of this new religion was the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who reigned between 1367 and 1350 B.C. He was first major historical figure to advance a program of monotheistic religion. A century before Moses, Ikhnaton proclaimed that the religion of Amun-Re, his ancestral religion, was false and there was only one God, Aton, god of the sun, who ruled over all the earth. Aton gave life to all living creatures. Ikhnaton wrote poems of praise to Aton but forbade visual images to be made. He moved the capital north from Thebes to Akhetaton (“City of the Horizon of Aton”) and ordered monuments to be defaced in which the name of Amun was inscribed. While antagonizing Amun-Re’s powerful priests, Ikhnaton also neglected affairs of state. The Hittites invaded Egypt’s Asian dependencies and tribute stopped. The imperial treasury became empty. When Ikhnaton died, the priests of Amun-Re regained control and the old religion was restored by his successor Tutankhamen.
Moses, who lived in Egypt in the 13th century B.C., was Pharaoh’s adopted son. He would likely have been aware of Ikhnaton’s religious crusade. Whether or not Jewish monotheism derives from that source, Moses firmly embraced the concept of One God. The First Commandment states: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt ... You shall have no other god to set against me.” None of the Ten Commandments had to do with performing rituals. All were concerned with right conduct and belief. Moses transformed the Hebrew tribe from being one of a common nomadic type to being a nation which lived in accordance with God’s law. He forced this society to conform to a particular set of ideals. Though not explicitly philosophical, his instructions delivered in God’s name were ethical precepts like those of philosophers. Moses railed against the Hebrews for fashioning a golden calf as an object of worship. His God, Jehovah or Yahweh, was an invisible or spiritual being rather than a “graven image”. It required a certain intellectual discipline to worship a god whom one could not see and whose existence, from a common perspective, might therefore be in doubt.
The God of the Hebrews, known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was identified as the God who had delivered his people from captivity in Egypt. This God had demonstrated earthly power in overcoming the will of Pharaoh. Powerful rulers like Pharaoh were thus coming under the yoke of a new kind of God, believed to be universal and omnipotent. A threat to monotheistic religion was the marriage of Hebrew kings to foreign women who brought other gods into the royal household. After Solomon’s death, the Hebrews took to worshiping Canaanite fertility gods such as Baal and Anath to seek increased agricultural productivity. A religious faction arose, led by the prophets Elijah and Elisha, which claimed that Yahweh alone should be worshiped. For the Hebrews to worship other gods was like being unfaithful in a marriage. A rebellion broke out in the northern part of Israel in 840 B.C. against the infidelity of the royal household. It spread to the priesthood of the Temple at Jerusalem. However, the Yahweh-alone party was unable to impose its views upon the nation. A group of religious writers, including Amos and Hosea, began to interpret God’s will in light of current events. A picture of God emerged as being jealous yet merciful and desirous of justice for the poor.
After Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., the Yahweh cult served to rally nationalistic sentiments in the yet unconquered southern kingdom of Judaea. Around 630, an unknown person in Jerusalem wrote a new set of laws and divine instructions, building upon older traditions, which was “found” by the high priest in the Temple at Jerusalem a decade later and judged to be authentic by King Josiah. These writings form chapters in the book of Deuteronomy. They take an uncompromising stand against worshiping Gods other than Yahweh. The Deuteronomy texts, embraced by the Yahweh faction, strengthened legalistic tendencies within Judaism. A later crisis occurred with Jerusalem’s capture by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. This event raised doubts that Yahweh was all-powerful and real if this God would let his own people become subjected to foreign empires. However, the Yahweh-alone party, through the prophets, argued that God had devised this painful experience to punish the Hebrews for their previous apostasy and teach them a moral lesson. After the lesson was learned, God would restore the nation of Israel to its previous glory. Then it would be seen that God had sent his people into captivity for the purpose of revealing himself to other nations. Yahweh would be revealed as God of Jews and Gentiles alike, a truly universal God.
In the meanwhile, because Deuteronomy restricted sacrificial rites to the Temple in Jerusalem, Jewish exiles living in Babylon were denied this means of practicing their religion in traditional ways. A type of nonsacrificial worship centered in such activities as praying, singing hymns of praise, and reading the Law was developed in its place. The core of Jewish religion lay in refusing to worship Gods other than Yahweh and in observing the purity laws. The Yahweh faction produced a body of historical writings to support its interpretation of divine will. These, along with works of the prophets, were compiled in books of the Old Testament. The final version was not completed until the end of the 5th century B.C.
Zoroastrian Influence
When the Persian emperor Cyrus II in 538 B.C. issued a decree allowing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild Solomon’s temple, it seemed to confirm the theory that Yahweh was a universal God. Cyrus, the most powerful monarch in the world, had been compelled to do this God’s bidding. In fact, the time spent in Babylon and Persia had been beneficial for Judaism as a religion. It had transformed the religion of a once provincial people into a religion with advanced cosmological features. This was largely the work of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster (628-551 B.C.). His teaching, Zoroastrianism, was the state religion of Persia. Because the Persian government treated Semitic peoples in a benign manner, the Hebrews were receptive to Persian cultural influences. So postexilic Judaism included many elements that can be traced to Zoroastrian teachings.
Zoroaster was an original thinker who lived in a society that was in transition between agricultural and nomadic ways of life. The industriousness, honesty, and trust implicit in the agricultural life were qualities which he identified with goodness. In contrast, the nomads who raided settled communities and stole their livestock were identified with evil. Conflict between good and evil was the central feature in Zoroaster’s religious philosophy. Ahura-Mazda, the supreme god, led the forces of good. Lower gods, daevas or whom one might call fallen angels, comprised the forces of evil led by Ahriman. The world was a battleground between these two camps. Animals such as dogs and oxen, which helped man, were good, while such creatures as snakes, scorpions, and toads were evil. Zoroaster taught that blood sacrifices should be abolished while such virtues as humility, cleanliness, and compassion should be cultivated in daily life. Yet, human beings were to show unrelenting hostility towards those persons, creatures, or beings aligned with the forces of evil. A battle was raging continually both within the cosmos and the human heart. In the end, good would triumph over evil to win an everlasting victory. Before then, evil would be seen gaining the upper hand. A redeemer figure would snatch the victory from Ahriman just when he appeared to be winning.
The Jewish prophetic writers who lived after the Babylonian exile wove Zoroastrian elements into their scenario of future events related to God’s restoration of the Hebrew nation. The idea of national restoration began to be replaced by that of a supernatural kingdom which God would establish on earth. As in the Zoroastrian scheme, the forces of good and evil first would do battle to control the world. There would be a period of tribulation in which the righteous would suffer greatly. Then, God would intervene at the last moment to ensure victory for the good. A captain of evil, Satan, would take part in these events. A Messiah, elevated from the ranks of humanity, would appear as God’s agent at the moment of victory. He would be delegated the task of judging human souls and either allowing or denying them entrance to God’s perfect kingdom. The idea that the souls of departed persons might be resurrected for the Last Judgment comes from the Zoroastrian cosmology. So do concepts relating to angels and the hierarchy of heavenly beings. The stark duality between evil and good, darkness and light, is, however, Zoroaster’s main contribution to religious thinking. God had created the material world to give it over to Satan, trap him in a finite structure, and then destroy him. Man’s duty was to assist in that process.
Jews under Foreign Rule
In the tolerant atmosphere of Persian society, Jewish intellectuals readily absorbed these religious ideas. Then, suddenly, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire. The ensuing Greek culture was alien to Semitic peoples. Adherents of the traditional Judaic religion were thrust back into a hostile environment. In 167 B.C., Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes IV, an ardent hellenizer, desecrated the Temple at Jerusalem. A priest named Mattathias, together with his five sons, launched a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Seleucid empire. One of those sons, Judas Maccabaeus, led the rebel armies to a series of speedy victories against the Syrian Greek dynasty. He captured Jerusalem and restored Jewish worship in the Temple. The Maccabee family, as the Hasmonaean dynasty, ruled Judaea for about a century. At last the Jews had their own nation. Judaism became a missionary religion which forced male converts to become circumcised. However, the Hasmonaean rulers in ruling their worldly empire also became more hellenized. In 63 B.C. the Roman general Pompey intervened in a civil war and captured Jerusalem. Rome then ruled Judaea through proconsuls while the Herodic dynasty, hellenized Jews allied with Rome, ruled the northern part of Palestine, including Galilee.
As first the Greek Seleucid and then Roman power asserted itself in Judaea, themes of national redemption enunciated at the time of the Exile took on new urgency. Messianic fervor ran high in hope that the House of David might be restored. The prophetic writings, anticipating the end of the world order, continued in a more intense and fantastic form. A tension existed between this spiritualized religion and Jewish political militancy. Jewish society in the 1st century B.C. was split into several factions, based upon their attitude toward foreign occupation. The Pharisees were extreme anti-Hellenists. Known as the “Party of the Righteous”, they had endured much persecution in their attempt to keep Jewish religion free of foreign influence. The Sadducees were upper-class Jews belonging to the Temple establishment who did not accept religious innovations such as belief in the Messiah. A political faction known as Zealots favored armed resistance. The Zealots did mount a guerrilla offensive against Rome, but it was brutally crushed by Titus’ armies in 70 A.D. The last of this faction died in a mass suicide at the Masada fortress. Jerusalem was utterly destroyed. Sixty years later, another group challenged Roman rule following Simon Bar Kokba, believed to be the Messiah. It, too, was defeated.
In the debacle of 66-70 A.D., more than a million Jews may have died of starvation and other causes. Another one hundred thousand were taken to Rome as slaves. The leader of Jerusalem’s Pharisees, Johanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of the city in a coffin. He later received permission from Emperor Vespasian to settle in Jamnia and establish an academy of Jewish studies there. Now that the temples in Jerusalem and Egypt had been destroyed or closed, this institution became the center of Jewish religious authority. There Judaism was reorganized around worship in synagogues. Its practice focused upon study of the Torah and observance of laws and rituals. The canon of sacred literature was determined. After Jewish uprisings in Cyprus, Egypt, and Palestine during the first half of the 2nd century A.D., the Roman government considered banning Judaism. Instead, a commission investigated Jewish law and suggested changes. Rabbi Judah the Prince published a code of laws, known as the Mishnah, which spread through the Graeco-Roman world. The Palestinian patriarch Hillel II published procedures for regulating the Jewish calendar in 359. After Christianity became the Roman religion, Jews experienced a period of increasing hostility. Theodosius II abolished the Jewish patriarchate in 425. The East Roman emperor Justinian proscribed rabbinic law and exegesis.
Conditions improved for the Jewish population in western Europe and Persia during the 8th century. The new Frankish and Arab rulers tolerated them as minority peoples within their large, heterogeneous empires. Christian kings often granted charters to their Jewish subjects guaranteeing their right to exist as a self-governing community in exchange for collection of special taxes. In the Ukraine, a Turkic dynasty established the Khazar empire with an army drawn from Iranian Moslems. Rejecting both Christianity and Islam, its rulers converted to Judaism in 750 and made this the state religion. The Khazar empire played an important role in commercial contacts between east and west until Prince Sviatoslav of Kiev conquered it in 970. Jews also thrived in the cosmopolitan culture that developed in Baghdad under the Abbasid dynasty. In the 10th century, the Moorish city of Cordoba became a similar cultural magnet for Jews. The Berber Almohade dynasty that swept across North Africa and Spain in the 12th century brought an end to this culture. Meanwhile, the Christian crusaders’ calls to rid Europe of “Christ-killers” gave vent to anti-Jewish campaigns, leading to the formation of ghettos. In once tolerant Spain, the Jewish population in 1492 was ordered to convert to Christianity or leave the country.
Early Christianity
Jesus, who was a rabbi, self-consciously assumed the role of Messiah that had been created in Jewish prophetic scripture. He began his religious career by submitting to baptism by John the Baptist, a ritual designed to remove sin and bring salvation in the Final Days. Jesus preached a simple message: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” The apocalyptic scenario would unfold momentarily. In this scenario, the Messiah was a divinely appointed figure who would bring human history to an end and introduce God’s kingdom on earth. The three-year period of Jesus’ active ministry was devoted to preparing his followers for the Kingdom and fulfilling the scriptural conditions by which its arrival might take place. According to the Gospels, Jesus separated himself from the anti-Hellenic spirit of contemporary Jewish religion. He criticized the Pharisees, the most zealous anti-Hellenists, while he counseled cooperation with the Roman authorities in such matters as paying taxes. Railing against Jerusalem as a city notorious for killing prophets, Jesus himself broke specific religious laws. In some respects, his critique of Pharisaic legalism resembles Plato’s idealistic philosophy in its focus upon essential truths.
Yet, Jesus, a descendant of King David through Joseph, was a character positioned squarely within the Jewish religious tradition. His earthly role was defined by scriptural references to the Messiah, which were linked to expectations of the coming of God’s kingdom. Jesus was crucified before any such event took place. When, two days later, followers discovered that his dead body was missing from the tomb, this was taken as a sign that Jesus had been resurrected from death by God’s power and was therefore in a state like that of the supernatural Messiah. Heartened by the news of his resurrection, Jesus’ circle of disciples launched a spirited missionary movement to spread the good news. One not originally in this circle, the Apostle Paul, devised a new interpretation of Messianic events. Paul wrote that, in dying innocently upon the Cross, Jesus had atoned for the sins of others. His self-sacrifice would pay the price of admission to God’s kingdom for all believers, however sinful they might be. Yet, the early Christian community also awaited Jesus’ return to earth. The earlier Messianic expectations were transferred to Jesus’ Second Coming, when his glory and power would become visible. The book of Revelation, written by St. John the Divine near the end of the 1st century A.D., provided a mystical view, from a Christian perspective, of events in the Final Days.
Paul rationalized the failure of God’s kingdom to arrive promptly by suggesting that, starting with Jesus’ resurrection, the world was in the process of transformation from a temporal to spiritual state. As with the dawning of a new day, the change was not initially evident. Slowly the degree of spirituality would increase in the world and then, at some point, people would see plainly that God’s kingdom had come. Every once in awhile, as at Pentecost, one could see an outpouring of divine spirit, but mostly it was imprisoned within the material world. In language reminiscent of Plato, Paul urged Christians to fix their “eyes ... not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen; for what is seen passes away; what is unseen is eternal.” He urged Christians to cultivate chastity so as to liberate themselves from bondage to the flesh. The inquiring spirit of the age also focused upon the person of Jesus. The Gospel of John begins with the idea of Logos, or God’s word. Jesus was believed to personify this word. In a philosophically intense society, Christians began then to question what kind of person, or God, Jesus was. Was Jesus a man with a physical body or was he a god, who was pure spirit? Or, perhaps, Jesus was both?
In places like Alexandria, with large Jewish and Greek populations, such questions were often on people’s minds. Diverse religions and systems of philosophy coexisted and freely mixed to form new theological hybrids. Philo, the Jewish Platonist, conceived of Logos as a mediating agent between the eternal and the temporal. Given the heavily philosophical disposition of this culture, it was likely that many arguments would take place concerning religion and many different conclusions would be reached, some of which would be considered heresies. The heretical position associated with Gnostic Christianity showed the influence of Neoplatonism. The Gnostics denied Jesus’ human nature and the historical record presented in the Bible. God only seemed to be involved in human affairs, and Jesus only seemed to be a man. Arian Christians, on the other hand, doubted Jesus’ divinity. Jesus the Son was subordinate to the Father, who was the one and only God. Marcon, an advocate of pure love, saw the Law of Moses as an evil influence. The Welsh heretic, Pelagius, believed sin was a result of misdirected free will. Montanus claimed to be the Paraclete or Spirit of Truth promised in John. Expecting the end of the world, the Montanists practiced speaking in tongues.
In 325 A.D., Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea to resolve questions raised by the teachings of Arius. The Arian point of view, then dominant, was opposed by Athanasius, a church deacon from Alexandria. A key question was whether Jesus’ nature was “like” God’s, the Arian position, or “the same as” God’s. The Council decided to condemn Arius and his supporters and, instead, adopt the formulation of the Trinity. The Nicene Creed stated that Jesus was “the Son of God .. begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” The Council of Ephesus, convened in 431 A.D., condemned the teachings of Nestorius, who opposed the designation of Mary as “Mother of God” and upheld Christ’s dual nature as man and god. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon condemned the Monophysite heresy which held that Christ had a single divine nature. Such questions were important for political as well as religious reasons. Several of the Germanic tribes whose kings had converted to Christianity embraced the Arian version of the faith. The Franks, on the other hand, won the Pope’s backing by supporting the orthodox version expressed in the Nicene creed. Elsewhere, Christians holding heretical views comprised important religious communities.
Nestorius, then Patriarch of Constantinople, called the wrath of the Christian community upon himself by attacking the idea that the Virgin Mary could give birth to a divine son. After the Council of Ephesus condemned his teaching, the Christian community at Antioch became deeply divided. Many of Nestorius’ followers emigrated to Iraq in the Sasanian empire where Nestorianism became the dominant faith of the Persian Christian church. Rebuffed in Europe, this doctrine became a missionary religion which spread to India, China, and Central Asia. According to Marco Polo, Nestorian chapels lined the trade routes between Baghdad and Peking.
Monophysite Christianity arose in reaction to Nestorianism. That faith was strong in Syria, Egypt, Armenia, and Abyssinia. Monophysitism is derived from the teachings of Eutyches. When Jacob Baradaeus became Bishop of Edessa in the mid 5th century, he organized the Jacobite church to serve Syrian Monophysites. The Coptic church was its counterpart in Egypt. The East Roman emperor declared the Council of Chalcedon invalid in 476, but later emperors vacillated. The excommunication and persecution of Monophysite Christians alienated members of this religious community from the Roman empire, paving the way for the Moslems’ quick and easy military victory in Syria and Egypt.
Development of the Western Church
The monastic life had its origin in the rejection of worldliness which some believed was infecting the Christian church after it became Rome’s state religion. It reflects the spirit of Neoplatonism and Gnostic Christianity with their dark ruminations concerning body and mind. Considering that Asoka had sent Buddhist missionaries to Egypt in the 3rd century B.C., the idea of monastic communities might also have come from India. St. Anthony, an Egyptian hermit, pioneered this type of Christian life. In 285 A.D., he withdrew to the desert wilderness to live in solitude where he was tempted by womanly apparitions, demons, and desires of the flesh, and attacked by wild beasts. His brave example attracted imitators, and a number of other hermits settled around him. After ignoring them for twenty years, he emerged from his solitude long enough to organize these people into a monastic community. The “anchorite” monks who followed St. Anthony were given to extravagant feats of self-deprivation. St. Simeon Stylites, for instance, sat for thirty-five years atop a stone pillar. Asceticism eventually gave way to religious communities which, isolated from the world, allowed individuals to grow in a holy state. In the 6th century, St. Benedict founded a monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy, which stressed a life of service to God. Irish monasteries were centers of evangelical advance.
By developing attractive models of Christian personality, these monks helped the church to win human hearts long after the age of Roman martyrdom had passed. Christianity was also advanced by church doctors and theologians, who, combating heresies, posed answers to tough moral questions. It was advanced by brave and able administrators such as St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who refused communion to emperors when their policies went against the interests of the church. Such efforts succeeded in enlisting the power of the state to suppress rival religions. Pope Leo I was instrumental in establishing the Roman church as a power separate from the Byzantine empire and ecclesiastical authority separate from secular authority. After Europe was invaded by barbarian tribes, the Christian church represented the cultural legacy of the fallen empire. It persuaded the barbarians that only through baptism could they join civilized society. In the beginning, the church evangelized areas that had fallen within the boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, its missionaries went beyond those limits to extend God’s spiritual empire to heathen lands. St. Patrick converted Ireland to the Christian faith, and Irish missions were then sent to northern England. An English missionary, St. Boniface, who was martyred in Holland, established the first German see in the 8th century.
As the Hebrew prophets had once turned Jerusalem’s fall to spiritual advantage, so, when Rome fell, Christianity profited from the writings of St. Augustine. The greatest Christian theologian since Paul, Augustine had once been a Manichee and a Neoplatonist. His Confessions told of riotous living as a young man in Carthage. He had converted to Christianity through the influence of St. Ambrose and his mother, St. Monica. From his later theological writings came the orthodox teaching of salvation by grace and the doctrine of original sin. Augustine wrote The City of God during the barbarian devastations of Italy and North Africa explaining why, after Rome had abandoned pagan gods and embraced Christianity, this great city fell. In answer, Augustine drew a distinction between worldly cities such as Rome and the “City of God”, which could never be destroyed. This City of God was a spiritual community, created through divine love, which was eternally unchanged. It stood in contrast to earthly cities, built from selfish desires and pride, which inevitably would pass away. So, as Rome’s secular empire crumbled, humanity clung to that which was safe from corruption and decay.
Perhaps the church’s ablest administrator was Pope Gregory the Great, who is credited with rebuilding the Roman church in a dark hour. Born to nobility, Gregory instead chose the hard life of a monk and later ascended the ladder of ecclesiastical offices. As Pope, he strengthened church discipline, reorganized the properties of the church, sent missionaries far and wide, negotiated with the Lombard kings for Rome’s political independence, and kept in check the rival claims of Byzantine bishops. A notable accomplishment was his role in converting England to the Catholic faith. In 597 A.D., Gregory recruited a Benedictine monk named Augustine for a mission to the British isles. Augustine and a retinue of forty monks were received cordially by King Etherbert and given land at Canterbury to build a church. His timely arrival in Britain helped stop the spread of Irish Christian civilization which might have challenged Catholicism for leadership of Western Christianity. An agreement reached at the Synod of Whitby in 664 A.D. regarding the method of calculating the date of Easter and the shaving of monks’ heads tipped the scales decisively in favor of Rome.
Power of the Roman Church
Technically, the Pope was Bishop of Rome, leader of Christians in that city. He later assumed leadership of the entire church due to the apostolic origins of that position. The church at Jerusalem had initially assumed the leadership role. Jesus’ brother James was its leader. Rome replaced Jerusalem as the center of Christianity because the apostles Peter and Paul had moved to that city and been martyred there. The Roman church became a kind of spiritual government whose authority rested upon a continuous line of succession back to Peter, who was the first bishop of Rome. A famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus: “You are Peter, the Rock; and on this rock I will build my church ... I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; what you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in heaven, and what you allow on earth shall be allowed in heaven.” In medieval art, St. Peter was frequently shown with a set of keys in his hands, which were the keys to Heaven. In the Biblical quotation, Jesus was entrusting to Peter and, by implication, to Peter’s ecclesiastical successors the power to decide who would be permitted to enter Heaven.
When Christianity became the state religion of Rome, the Church received an additional boost to its authority. During the Dark Ages, the prestige of the fallen state passed to it as Rome’s legitimate heir. The Roman church was the remnant of a glorious empire that was no more. Popes used their prestige and authority in alliance with worldly rulers to create a dual system of governance. A universal church, whose spiritual jurisdiction covered the western half of the fallen empire, was paired with a multitude of secular states that were formed by the barbarian peoples involved in Rome’s collapse. The idea of reconstructing that empire was to become an enduring theme of European political history. The Frankish dynasty, supporters of the Roman church, acquired secular power in much of western Europe during the 8th century. It seemed that imperial rule might be revived when, in 800 A.D., Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. However, the secular government became divided again when Charlemagne died and, later, his three grandsons inherited the kingdom. The power in medieval society was shared by two institutions, church and state. The church looked after people’s spiritual needs and secular governments provided physical security.
While church and state worked cooperatively, there was also a power struggle. The head of the Roman church, the Pope, struggled to gain an advantage over secular governments by exercising its powers of recognition and, more forcefully, by excommunicating disobedient rulers. History records the contrite appearance of Emperor Henry IV before the pope after Gregory VII excommunicated him in 1076. If the Church wished to punish a king, it could deny the sacraments to the king and his subjects, thus denying them entrance to Heaven. Kings and emperors, on the other hand, fought the Church through use of their earthly power. A particular point of contention was the struggle between Popes and European monarchs over the right to “invest” (appoint) local church officials. The Concordat of Worms resolved this question in the Pope’s favor but kings were allowed to supervise church elections. The administration of justice was divided between ecclesiastical and secular courts, each having certain powers and scope of authority. Pope Boniface VIII called ecclesiastical and secular governments the “two swords” of the church. Symbolizing the dual power structure, coins of the period often exhibited the Pope’s likeness on one side and the Holy Roman Emperor’s on the other.
On a personal level, the Roman church exercised its authority through the sacraments. These were rituals conducted by priests which were thought necessary for salvation. Seven sacraments were believed most important: baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony. Church doctrine asserted that sacraments were the means by which God transmitted his grace to humanity. Grace meant undeserved forgiveness of sins. The institution of the sacraments was based on the principle that all men were sinners in need of forgiveness who were unable to obtain this by their own powers. The Eucharist, which was patterned after Jesus’ last supper with the Disciples, was the greatest of the sacraments. The early Christian community especially cherished this ceremonial meal because it was believed that Jesus would return during its celebration. In the 9th century, A.D., a Benedictine monk named Radbertus wrote a treatise arguing that the bread eaten during celebration of the Mass was the flesh of Jesus and the wine which was drunk was his blood. Another monk suggested that these two substances were only symbols of Christ’s body and blood. The literal interpretation, more in tune with the spirit of the medieval church, was accepted at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
The Church claimed competent authority to decide theological questions through its firm connection to Jesus and the Apostles. The historical record of God’s word presented in the Bible became a criterion of truth. At the same time, the Roman church put much emphasis upon traditional church teachings. Such doctrines, being inspired by the Holy Spirit, were considered to have equal authority with the sacred scriptures. “The Church has never erred and will never err to all eternity,” a papal declaration of the 11th century maintained. An earlier declaration held that “the Popes, like Jesus, are conceived by their mothers through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit ... All powers in Heaven, as well as on earth, are given to them.” With such attitudes, it is not surprising that leaders of the Roman church instituted the Inquisition and burned heretics at the stake. Disbelief, in the form of rational inquiry, began to creep into the culture despite the Church’s best efforts to enforce its monopoly of faith. Given the importance of papal links to St. Peter, the Great Schism of 1378-1417, in which two rival popes each claimed authority, produced a severe crisis of confidence in the Papacy.
Perhaps the best evidence that the Roman church was becoming a worldly empire lay in its advocacy and use of military force. The church itself controlled certain territories in northern and central Italy. In 756, Pippin III gave the Pope temporal control of certain lands conquered from the Lombards as a reward for his support in recognizing Carolingian claims to the Frankish throne. The Papal States were drawn into a long struggle with Holy Roman Emperors and local powers to control this and other territories. However, the Church was also responsible for launching and maintaining the Crusades which were directed against the Islamic rulers of Palestine between the 11th and 13th centuries. Responding to complaints from Peter the Hermit and others that the Turks were harassing Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, Pope Urban II issued an appeal in 1095 for European Christians to recapture the Holy City from the Moslems. A huge army led by Godfrey of Bouillon was assembled in Constantinople to carry out this mission. “Deus volt” - God wills it - was their battle cry. The Christian crusaders did capture Jerusalem in 1099 after a battle in which 70,000 civilians were massacred, and set a French king upon the throne in that city. The First Crusade was followed by eight others, progressively less successful. In the end, Moslems retained control of that region.
Orthodox Christianity
The East Roman empire, which had survived the barbarian onslaught of the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., was continuously associated with the See of Constantinople. A church council held in 381 A.D. had declared that it ranked second after the See of Rome. The church council convened in Chalcedon in 451 A.D. gave Constantinople spiritual authority over western Turkey and the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula. In this realm, political rulers tended to dominate the religious institutions, following the principle which Justinian laid down in the 6th century: “Nothing should happen in the Church against the command or will of the Emperor.” The church became like a department of government in charge of religious ceremonies. The Metropolitan of Constantinople could make no claim similar to the Roman Pontiff’s of having authority that ran back to the Apostles. He merely exercised geographical jurisdiction. His scope of authority followed the lines of imperial power. Consequently, the center of power in the eastern church drifted toward Moscow after Constantinople fell to the Turks in the 15th century.
Orthodox Christianity put less emphasis upon the authority and structure of the church, the sacraments, priestly celibacy, and other worldly aspects of religion than the western Church, and more on theological questions. The Eastern church did not accept the solution of Chalcedon regarding Christ’s being: one “in two natures .. without change, without division...” It did not accept the filioque clause in the Nicene creed: that the Holy Spirit had proceeded “from the Father and the Son.” Orthodox theology tended to stress a single nature, accepting the divinity of Christ at the price of neglecting his humanity. An issue peculiar to the Orthodox church was the controversy concerning iconoclasm. Visual representations of divine subjects, long tolerated in the Christian church, went against the grain of Judaic religion. Hoping to increase support among his Jewish and Moslem subjects, Emperor Leo III in 726 launched a personal crusade against the use of icons in the church. He demanded that the icons be destroyed and removed church officials who resisted. Leo’s iconoclastic program met with stiff resistance, especially in the monasteries.
John of Damascus argued that icons helped religious understanding. “When we set up an image of Christ in any place,” he wrote, “we appeal to the senses. An image is, after all, a reminder; it is to the illiterate what a book is to the literate; and what the word is to the hearing, the image is to the sight.” Leo remained unconvinced by such arguments. He continued with the idol-smashing campaign despite strong opposition and a growing rift with the western church. His son, Constantine V, was an even more ardent iconoclast. The Synod of Hiera in 753 A.D. formally supported the emperor’s position. Three decades later, Constantine’s grandson, Constantine VI, became emperor but was too young to rule so his mother, Irene, assumed power. When it became apparent that the young emperor too favored the iconoclastic program, Empress Irene took steps to block this. She convened a general council of the church to repeal previous decisions. To thwart opposition within her own family, she had the young emperor, her son, blinded and deposed. The use of religious images was again permitted. A revival of the iconoclastic campaign took place during the reign of Leo V. It was again stifled through the intervention of another icon-loving empress and regent, Theodora. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, banning three-dimensional images but tacitly permitting two-dimensional ones.
The furor concerning icons was one of several issues which drove a wedge between the eastern and western branches of Christianity. While the worldly power of the eastern patriarchs was limited by the Byzantine state, the head of the western church was becoming steadily more powerful. As the Roman pontiff claimed primacy within the church on the basis of his succession from Peter, so the Metropolitan of Constantinople claimed authority based on his relationship to the surviving Roman state. In that regard, the Pope’s coronation of Charlemagne as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire posed a direct challenge to the claims of the Byzantine Empire and its captive church. The issue of Photianism, an eastern declaration of independence from Rome, became the immediate cause of a rupture between the two branches of the church. Theologically, they were divided by the fact that the eastern church did not accept the “filioque clause”. The Great Schism officially took place in July 1054 A.D. when Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius, an eastern patriarch. After Frankish crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 A.D., reconciliation between the two domains of Christendom became all but impossible. The Byzantine emperor did accept Rome’s spiritual authority in the 15th century, but it was too late the save the empire from conquest by the Ottoman Turks.
The salvation of the Byzantine church was its outreach to Slavic peoples. In the 9th century, the Patriarch of Constantinople sent a pair of scholarly brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, on a mission to neighboring peoples. They went first to Khazaria, but its rulers decided instead to convert to Judaism. Next the brothers received an invitation to the Slavic principality of Great Moravia (Czechoslovakia and Hungary). Constantine, also known as Cyril, brought with him the Glagolitic alphabet which he had invented for Slavs living in Greece. The brothers adapted this script to the local idiom and established a mission. Although they were driven out of Moravia through pressure from Frankish German priests, some of the remaining Orthodox clergy made their way to Bulgaria, carrying the Glagolitic script. Bulgaria had converted to the Eastern Orthodox faith in 863. Its ruler, Khan Boris-Michael, received the Moravian refugee clergy with the idea that their Slavonic-language script would enable Bulgaria to develop its own national church and remain politically independent of Constantinople or Rome. In 885, Bulgarians simplified the Glagolitic script, naming it “Cyrillic” after Cyril. It was this script primarily which brought Slavic peoples such as the Russians into the Orthodox fold.
Bulgarian peasants reacted to their nation’s adoption of Orthodox Christianity by embracing a religious creed known as Bogomilism, which an Orthodox priest, Bogomil, had devised between 927 and 954. This was an anticlerical doctrine adapted from Paulician Christianity, a Thracian heresy. Bogomilism held that the world had been created by Satan, who was God’s older son, and that Jesus, God’s younger son, was sent to earth to overthrow Satan and rescue mankind. Another version put good and evil on a parity. While rejecting Christianity, the Bogomils practiced celibacy and asceticism perhaps to distinguish themselves from the loose habits of the Orthodox clergy. Bogomil missionaries spread this religion to other parts of the Balkan peninsula, especially Bosnia, where the ruling family embraced it as an alternative to the Hungarian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox faiths. The French Albigenses belonged to the same movement. The Bogomil heresy was fiercely suppressed and died out with the expansion of Islam in the Balkan region.
Eastern Europe was a battleground between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths at the close of the 1st millennium A.D. Poland and Bohemia broke with Slavic peoples elsewhere in affiliating with the Roman church. To forestall Teutonic encroachment upon Polish territory, Duke Mieszko I (960-992) placed his realm under the Pope’s direct protection and control. The Polish Piast dynasty subsequently conquered territories as far east as Kiev and blocked the Teutonic German advance along the Baltic sea. Russia’s conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity coincides with the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 987. The prince made his selection of religions from among several competing types after receiving the hand of Emperor Basil II’s sister, Anna, in marriage. Vladimir ordered his subjects to be baptized en masse. Missionaries from Bulgaria brought the Old Church Slavonic liturgy and the Cyrillic alphabet to Kiev. The Mongols conquered the Ukraine in the 13th century and held it for over two centuries. When Mongol power subsided, the Dukes of Moscow began annexing territories in what later became the Russian state. After Ivan III married the last Byzantine emperor’s niece and took the title of “Czar”, Moscow became the new center of the Orthodox faith. The Patriarch of Constantinople was given civil authority over Christians living in the Ottoman empire.
The Later Persian Religions
The religion of Zoroaster supported the first (Achaemenian) Persian dynasty. Like most other philosophical religions, Zoroastrianism had to be softened by personal features to make it suitable for devotional worship. Although Zoroaster was a monotheist, a later version of his religion turned the separate aspects of Ahura-Mazda into goddesses. The Magi were hereditary priests of this religion. Christians know them as the three wise men who, following the Star of Bethlehem, brought gifts to the infant Jesus. The Arsacid dynasty which ruled the Parthian empire for more than four centuries personally embraced Magian Zoroastrianism but was tolerant of other religions. The Sasanid family, which supplanted the Arsacids in 221 A.D., were priests of the pre-Zoroastrian water goddess, Anahita, whose cult had been incorporated into the Zoroastrian religion. Its rulers were therefore more zealous in promoting that religion.
In 240 A.D., a Persian prophet named Mani began preaching that he was a reincarnation of the Holy Spirit. A self-styled successor to Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus, he had received the final and most complete revelation of God. Emperor Shahpuhr I gave Mani permission to preach his new religion throughout the empire. Missionaries spread Manichaeism, as well, to Egypt, Central Asia, and the Roman empire. Like Zoroastrianism, its theology centered upon the opposition of evil and good, darkness and light. Man needed to be redeemed from his material nature through Christ’s divine light. After Shahpuhr died, priests of the Zoroastrian state religion persuaded Emperor Vahram I to arrest Mani and put him to death. Like Jesus, however, this prophet’s death and subsequent persecution of his followers had a stimulating effect upon the religion. In north Africa, the future St. Augustine was briefly a Manichee. The Manichaean faith became the national religion of the Uighur Turks living west of China. It also influenced the Paulician, Bogomil, and other Christian heresies.
Since Christianity was the Roman state religion after Theodosius I’s ban on pagan religions in 391 A.D., Sasanian emperors tended to view Christians living in Persia as a potential fifth column. Likewise, Roman emperors mistrusted Zoroastrians. In 297, Diocletian denounced Egyptian converts to Manichaeism as Persian sympathizers even though Persian emperors had put Mani to death and persecuted his followers. After the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorian Christianity in 431, Roman Nestorians moved across the border to Nisibis in Persia where they were welcomed as refugees. Their persecution in Rome cleared them of suspicion. However, in 440, Emperor Yazdigerd II ordered all his subjects to convert to Zoroastrianism. This provoked a rebellion in Christian Armenia, which was crushed. The Persian military defeat by the Ephthalite Huns in 484 forced the Sasanian government to back down and tolerate non-Iranian Christians.
The same disaster produced a social crisis that was accompanied by a religious movement led by Mazdak, head of the Drist-Den Manichaean sect. It was a communist movement formed in response to the economic inequality of Persian society. Emperor Kavadh I became a convert and put through its program of reform. The Persian nobility and Zoroastrian clergy together opposed the Mazdakites. Ultimately, the emperor himself disavowed them at the urging of his son and heir, Khrusro I, who later crushed this movement. In 572, Khrusro I began a war with the East Roman empire, which lasted until 590. Another war between the Christian Roman and Zoroastrian Persian empires broke out in 604. It was not settled until 628. The Arabs attacked both empires simultaneously five years later. Exhausted from its Roman wars, the Persian empire was extinguished. The Sasanid capital of Ctesiphon fell in 637.
Most Zoroastrians in Persia readily accepted Moslem rule. A few fled to northwestern India where they were granted asylum on condition that they refrain from proselytizing. They became known as the Parsee sect, numbering today less than a million persons. Another group fled westward to China through a part of Turkestan which Khrusro I had annexed to the Persian empire. A Sasanid prince reached Ch’ang-an, the Chinese capital, as a refugee in 674. All three of Persia’s principal religions - Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity - penetrated China from the west during the early T’ang period. Manichaeism, being the Uighur Turk’s national religion, made perhaps the greatest inroads. However, Kirghiz nomads defeated the Uighurs in 840. In 841-845, the Chinese government conducted a crackdown against foreign religions at the instigation of Taoist clergy. While the Buddhists suffered mainly economic losses, this campaign of xenophobic persecution was fatal to the Persian religions established in China.
The Religion of Islam
Religious and political conflict beset Arabian peoples in the beginning part of the 7th century, A.D. The last war between the East Roman and Sasanian Persian empires took place between 604 and 628, A.D. Arabs served as mercenary soldiers for both sides. In the process, they acquired valuable experience in making war and the latest military equipment. These Arabs were immersed in religious controversies as Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Manichees struggled for dominance. A large number of Jews lived on the Arabian peninsula in cities such as Yathrib (Medina) and Khaybar. Yemen in the south was first a Christian kingdom and then a state controlled by the Persian empire. In the 3rd century, A.D., Mani had claimed to be a prophet in the lineage of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus who put a “seal” on prophecy. Later the same idea was taken up with greater effect by Mohammed, founder of the Islamic religion.
Islam means self-surrender or submission to God. God, whose name is Allah, is the same as the Jewish or Christian God according to Moslem teachings. However, these earlier religions had become corrupted so that a new prophet had been commissioned to deliver a revelation that would set humanity straight. The prophet Mohammed lived in the city of Mecca which was situated on the trade route between Yemen and Syria in western Arabia. He conducted caravans between Mecca and Damascus for his wife, Khadijah, who was a wealthy widow. While in Syria and Palestine, Mohammed had been exposed to the Jewish and Christian religions. He became ashamed of the polytheistic religion of the Arabs which seemed primitive in comparison with them. In 611 A.D., at the age of forty, Mohammed had a vision in a cave near Mecca in which the Archangel Gabriel commanded him to transmit a new revelation of God to the people of Mecca. This was a message of monotheism confirming earlier Judaic teachings. Gabriel’s lengthy dictations to Mohammed were compiled in a collection of Arabic-language writings known as the Koran. Mohammed’s religion imposed strict personal disciplines such as a prohibition against drinking alcohol or eating pork and religious duties that included daily prayers, annual fasting, and pilgrimages to Mecca. It also forbade usury and abuse of the poor.
For twelve years, Mohammed tried to persuade fellow residents of Mecca to adopt this new religion, but his efforts met with limited success. Although a Quraysh tribesman, he was not part of the inner circle that controlled the city. Also, Islam’s monotheistic principles conflicted with the polytheistic cult of the Ka’bah, a large black stone whose annual festival was economically important to Mecca. Mohammed’s fortunes suddenly changed when, in 622 A.D., he received an invitation to head the government of Medina, a neighboring city torn by political rifts. Mohammed proved to be an able administrator. His theocratic government in Medina united the quarreling factions and grew militarily strong. Its armies waged aggressive war first against Mecca and then other Arabian cities. A factor aiding in their success may have been that Mohammed allowed his followers to attack caravans and plunder defeated enemies. The rich Jews of Medina, who refused to convert to Islam despite its acceptance of a single God, were a particular target. By the time of Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D., his Islamic empire controlled most of the Arabian peninsula.
After the prophet’s death, local Arabs revolted. The cities of Mecca and Medina, controlled by the newly converted Quraysh clan, opposed them as Islamic loyalists. Mohammed’s temporal successor or “caliph”, Abu Bakr, persuaded the other Arabs to end their revolt and join forces in conducting military raids against the East Roman and Sasanian Persian empires whose armies were exhausted from more than two decades of war. Their roads intact, the Moslem armies rapidly overran the domain of the Persian empire. They pushed the East Roman empire back into an area north of the Taurus mountains in Turkey. Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt fell to the Moslems by 641 A.D. The Sasanian empire was extinguished by 651 A.D. During the next half century, Islamic forces took Armenia and Georgia. They conquered all the East Roman territories in northwest Africa and the Visigothic kingdoms in Spain and southwest France. In the East, they captured the Ephthalite Huns’ possessions in Uzbekistan and Transoxania (south and east of the Aral Sea), as well as lands adjoining the Indus River. However, the Moslems failed on two occasions to take Constantinople. Their push northward through France was checked at the battle of Tours in 732 A.D.
Contrary to an opinion expressed in Europe, this was not a campaign to force conversions to the Islamic faith. Membership in other religions was tolerated so long as their people submitted to the Islamic government and paid a surtax. These people had their own self-governing communities, civil codes, and religious leaders. Arab military commanders served as governors of the conquered territories. Lacking a literate corps of administrators, they wisely left civil administration in the hands of their hellenized Christian and Persian subjects. Nestorian, Monophysite, and other persecuted Christian sects generally welcomed the change in governments. Many voluntarily converted to Islam because it was financially advantageous to do so. The Arab conquerors wore their religion as a badge of national pride. The Umayyad dynasty, which Mu’awiyah founded at Damascus in 661, established Arab Moslems as a privileged class. Exempted from paying poll taxes, they also received regular payments from the state treasury. When Caliph Umar II (717-20) abolished the poll tax for non-Arab Moslems, it precipitated a financial crisis. Caliph Hisham’s subsequent substitution of a land tax upon non-Arabs to replenish the treasury caused much dissatisfaction. The Umayyad rulers were replaced by the Abbasid dynasty in the Arab Civil War of 747-750 A.D.
Theoretically, the Abbasid insurrection was about legitimacy of succession. Their claimant to the caliphate was descended from Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, whereas the Umayyad rulers traced their lineage back to a Qurayshite tribesman unrelated to the Prophet. After Abu Bakr’s death in 634, Umar was elected caliph. A wise and effective ruler, he was assassinated by a Persian slave in 644. The next caliph, Uthman, was less capable. He was assassinated in 656. Ali became the next caliph. Opposed by Aisha, Mohammed’s widow, and some of the Prophet’s companions, he was assassinated in 661. Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, was elected to succeed him. However, Mu’awiyah, governor of Syria, was recognized as caliph in Damascus. Mu’awiyah persuaded Hasan to give up the caliphate in exchange for a royal pension and a harem in Medina. This arrangement held until Mu’awiyah’s death in 680. Then Ali’s younger son, Husayn, set forth from Medina with a group of supporters to claim the caliph’s position. Mu’awiyah’s son and successor, Yazid, sent a small army which intercepted Husayn at Karbala. When Husayn refused to return to Medina, Yazid’s forces slaughtered him and his supporters. They brought the head of Husayn, Mohammed’s grandson, back to Yazid in Damascus.
This shocking event led to a schism within the Islamic community. The Shi’ite Moslems, predominant in Persia, regarded the Umayyad dynasty as usurpers of the caliphate. They supported the rival claims of Ali’s descendants on the basis of their blood line running back to Mohammed. For them, Husayn’s murder in 680 came to symbolize the abuse suffered by non-Arab minorities under Umayyad rule. Sunni Moslems, on the other hand, represented the Umayyad loyalists. They were the mainstream group during the period of Arab ascendancy. Abbas, a Shi’ite descendant of Mohammed’s uncle, became caliph after the upheaval of 747-50, founding the Abbasid dynasty. Abbas’ successor, Mansur, moved the capital of the empire from Damascus to Baghdad. There Persians gained political and cultural ascendancy. Meanwhile, an Umayyad refugee, Abd ar-Rahman, escaped to the Iberian peninsula where he founded a Sunni state. Now there were two caliphates - one Shi’ite and one Sunni - and the political unity of Islam was lost. The succession to the caliphate has thus become a greater source of controversy within Islam than questions of philosophical belief. Heresy plays a smaller part in the Islamic than Christian religion. Perhaps that is because, in contrast with Jesus, who preached about another world, Mohammed left specific instructions about many earthly things.
Islamic religion, like others in the Judaic tradition, includes belief in the Last Judgment and in Heaven and Hell. Persons who remain faithful to the religion, especially those who died fighting for it, will be accepted into paradise while infidels will spend an eternity in Hell. Islam attaches much importance to interpretations of law. The Koran, which includes many of Mohammed’s spiritual teachings and administrative rulings, is a principal source of this law. In addition, scholars have assembled collections of stories about Mohammed and sayings attributed to him. Mohammed once said: “My community will never agree in an error.” That statement has given sanction to legal interpretations not found in the Prophet’s teachings which have become accepted within Islamic society. This culture is tolerant of doctrinal differences. Within the Sunni tradition, there are four different schools of Islamic law which are considered equally valid. A community is free to pick whichever it prefers. Theological questions are decided by a consensus of learned opinion. The caliph is strictly a political authority. Ibn Taymiyya taught that any state governed in accordance with Islamic law belongs to Islam, whether or not it has a caliph.
The centuries which followed the founding of the Abbasid dynasty in 750 A.D. brought a flowering of Islamic culture. Baghdad in the 9th century A.D. was a cosmopolitan city, exciting both commercial and intellectual activity. While the Arabs had lost official privileges, their language acquired a rich literature as many poems were written in Arabic and works from other cultures were translated into it. New translations of Greek philosophical writings became available during this period. The Islamic religion developed a theology competitive with that of other religions. Mutazilite scholars debated such questions as predestination, free will, and justification by faith. The doctrine of a “created” Koran as embodiment of God’s word was analogous to Christ’s role in Arian Christianity. One type of religious thinking tended to be legalistic. A second represented the rationalism of theologians like the Mutazilites. A third, which stood in stark contrast with the other two, sought direct experience of God. Persian Shi’ites in the late 10th century formed a fraternity of Sufi mystics who practiced their religion through poetry, ecstatic chanting, and dance.
Islamic Empires
The Abbasid revolution of 750 A.D. ushered in a period of confusing political events. In 756, a refugee from the House of Umayyad established a new dynasty on the Iberian peninsula where Sunnis comprised a majority of the population. However, this regime was under intense pressure from Frankish Christians to give up territory. Three new Moslem states ruled by Shi’ite separatists were formed in Algeria between 757 and 786 A.D. Morocco became an independent state in 788 under the Alid (House of Ali) king Idris I. In 800, a Sunni state which recognized the suzerainty of the Abbasid dynasty was established in Tunisia by Aghlabid Arabs. Isma’ili (Seven-Imam) Shi’ites denying the Abbasid’s legitimacy overthrew this regime a century later. In Iran, where the Abbasid revolution had originated, several insurrections took place after the second caliph, Mansur, put to death in 754 the man who had instigated the rebellion against the Umayyad dynasty. Though fractured, Islam’s political empire was continuing to expand. In 751 A.D., Abbasid armies defeated Chinese forces in a battle at Samarkand. Umayyad Moslems evicted from Iberia captured Crete from the East Roman empire in 826 A.D. The Aghlabids from Tunisia conquered most of Sicily. Qarluq Turks, who later occupied the Tarim basin, were converted to the Sunni sect in 960.
The 10th and 11th centuries A.D. were times of tribulation for the Islamic world. Its rulers fought with the East Roman empire and later with western crusaders for possession of Sicily, Syria, and Palestine. Nomadic tribes including Turks, Arabs, and Berbers overran large areas of the empire. In 945 A.D., Buwayhid rulers of a Moslem state in western Iran overthrew the Abbasid dynasty. That put Iranians and Berbers of the Tunisian Fatimid dynasty in control of much of the Islamic world, excluding Spain. Qarluq and Ghuzz Turks, including a band loyal to the House of Saljuq, entered Asia Minor. In 1055 A.D., Saljuq Turks, embracing the Sunni faith, replaced the Buwayhid Shi’ites on the throne in Baghdad. These Turkish Moslems chose to retain the Persian administrators. Saljuq Turks in Anatolia established the Sultanate of Rum in 1057. The Saljuq allowed other Turkish tribes to enter Armenia. En route, they devastated Iran. Arab nomads trekking west through north Africa ruined the olive fields which had dated from Carthaginian times. During this turbulent period, the Islamic religion acquired a softer, personal side thanks to an Iranian scholar, Ghazzali, who introduced mysticism into the Sunni tradition. His Restoration of the Science of Religion is Islam’s best-known theological work.
Under fierce attack from western Christians, Islamic rulers held most of their territory during the 12th and 13th centuries A.D. A Turkish officer of the Saljuq empire drove the Frankish crusaders out of their Syrian strongholds and established a new kingdom in Egypt. Salah-ad-Din (Saladin), a Kurdish officer in its employ, later set up his own kingdom. Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Franks in 1187. He later repelled avenging Christian armies of the Third Crusade. Saladin’s dynasty was inherited by a consortium of Turkish military slaves, the Mamluks. A more serious threat than the Christian crusaders was the attack on Islamic territories by the Mongol hordes beginning with Genghis Khan’s devastation of Khwarizm in 1220-21. The Abbasid caliph Nasir created a new chivalric order, the futuwwah, to meet this military threat. Moslem kingdoms in Turkey and Iraq fell to the Mongols. The Abassid caliphate was liquidated in 1258 A.D. However, the Golden Horde was unable to conquer Syria or Egypt because of Mamluk opposition. Defying earlier expectations that the Mongols and western Christians might form a grand alliance, the rulers of three Mongol successor states in the western part of the empire later became Moslems.
Nestorian and Monophysite Christians living in Asia Minor, once in the majority, converted to Islam in large numbers during the 14th century. Afterwards, only a small part of the population continued to profess the Christian faith. On the other hand, Moslems were steadily being expelled from the Iberian peninsula as Christian kings advanced. Political adversity did not prevent a great flowering of Moorish culture before its empire disappeared. The last Islamic stronghold at Granada fell to the Christian monarchy of Aragon and Castile in 1492 A.D. The religion of Islam began to make inroads into the African population south of the Sahara desert. In Mamluk Egypt, Coptic Christians were a dwindling part of the population. Arabs infiltrating into Nubia from Egypt gradually converted its people from Monophysite Christianity. The Abyssinian kingdom, south of Nubia, remained Monophysite Christian until the 16th century A.D. Islam also achieved peaceful conversions in Malaya and Indonesia, coexisting with the Buddhist and Hindu religions. Some conversions took place in western China.
Turkish nomads from central Asia had been drawn into the sedentary population of Asia Minor during the 11th century when Saljuq Turks captured the Abbasid empire. Between 1261 and 1300 A.D., other, more warlike Turkish people who had been subjects of the Mongols occupied most of present-day Turkey while the East Roman empire was retaking Constantinople from the western Christians and neglecting its Asian provinces. When Mongol rule was extinguished in 1335 A.D., there was a competition among the Turkish tribes to establish a successor state in the area. Waging war in the spirit of jihad, the Ottomans won that contest by capturing several key cities during the first half of the 14th century. They increased their power by recruiting other Turks for their armies and using Christians to perform economic functions. In the late 14th century, a new barbarian scourge appeared in the person of Tamerlane, self-styled successor to Genghis Khan. He led Moslem armies from Transoxania on a rampage through India, Russia, and the Middle East. Tamerlane’s horde temporarily seized the Ottoman possessions in Asia. Once this threat had subsided and the Asian lands were reconquered, a new revolt against Ottoman rule broke out in Bulgaria, organized by a Sunni mystic. Another took place in Asia Minor a century later. The Ottoman Turks suppressed both rebellions.
The second rebellion, which occurred between 1511 and 1513 A.D., involved Shi’ite sympathizers of Shah Isma’il, founder of the Persian Safavi empire. This empire grew rapidly between 1500 and 1513, reaching its northeastern limit in territories inhabited by Uzbek nomads and its western limit in the Ottoman empire. In a land once predominantly Sunni, Shah Isma’il required his Iranian subjects to adopt the Shi’ite religion. The Safavi army was comprised of Qizilbash soldiers in red headgear who had once lived under Ottoman rule. A spirited group, they belonged to a Sufi religious order of which the Shah was the spiritual head. The Ottoman Turks defeated the Safavi forces at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 and later seized Iraq. After Shah Abbas I recovered Baghdad from the Turks in 1623, he built a beautiful new capital at Isfahan. Another Safavi emperor, Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal at Agra in India. This empire was overthrown by Afghan nomads occupying Isfahan in 1722. However, it was resurrected after a short time by Nadir Quli, a Turkish soldier who invaded India. Ruling as Shah of the Afshar dynasty, he was assassinated by officers of his own guard in 1747. An Afghan successor state then took possession of Persia and India.
A third Islamic empire, the Mogul, was created in India when a descendant of Tamerlane, Babur, invaded northern India from Afghanistan. Babur defeated the sultan of Delhi at the battle of Paripat in 1526. He seized the cities of Agra and Delhi and soon controlled much of northern India. However, Babur’s son, Humayun, lost this territory to the Bengali Afghan emperor Sher Shah Sur. The Mogul dynasty was established on a more solid footing when Humayun reconquered the kingdom of Delhi in 1555. Humayun’s son, Akbar, expanded the empire to include Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and lands in India as far south as the Godavari river. His royal court became a center of learning and the arts. Since Akbar’s domain included a largely Hindu population, his regime depended on them heavily for military and administrative support. Concerned about the Hindus’ loyalty to a Moslem state, Akbar hosted a series of religious dialogues between representatives of the Moslem, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Roman Catholic Christian faiths, seeking common ground. In 1582, he announced the creation of a new monotheistic religion called the Din-i-Ilahi, of which he, Akbar, was the prophet. This venture provoked a rebellion in Moslem circles and never caught on.
At the start of the 17th century, the Islamic world was divided into three great empires: the Ottoman empire in Turkey, the Safavi empire in Iran, and the Timurid Mogul empire in India. The Ottoman dynasty, which began in the 14th century, was extinguished in the Versailles peace treaty ending World War I. This Sunni Moslem empire, which had conquered both Mamluk Egypt and the East Roman empire, included most of the territory bordering the eastern Mediterranean and Black seas as well as in north Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Hungary, and the Balkan peninsula. Its capital was Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. The Ottoman rulers followed a policy of excluding their free-born Moslem subjects from top military and administrative positions. Their army was staffed by specially selected slaves called “janizaries”, who typically were Christians abducted as boys from peasant families. As a result, Greek Christians held the reins of government in this Islamic state. Ottoman power was threatened at sea when Portuguese vessels seized their trading ports along the Indian ocean during the 16th century A.D. Czar Ivan IV cut off the empire’s contact with Uzbek Moslems by annexing Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s. Currency decline brought on by the Spaniards’ silver-mining operations in the Americas produced an economic crisis.
The Moslem empires in Persia and India expired during the 18th century. After Nadir Quli’s death in 1747, the Afghan Zand dynasty founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani took control of Persia while battling the Hindu Marathas in India. A eunuch, Aga Mohammed Khan, overthrew this regime in 1794 and established the Kajar dynasty, which lasted until 1925. Czarist Russia began to encroach upon Persian territories in the 19th century. Afghanistan was detached from Iran in 1857. The last Shah, Reza Pahlevi, was deposed in 1979 by forces supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini. Akbar’s Mogul successors in India abandoned his policy of tolerance towards Hindus. When Emperor Aurangzeb sought to impose his rule on the southern tip of India, it provoked a furious Hindu counterattack. However, Afghan Persian forces under the Zand dynasty invaded northern India and defeated the Hindu armies in 1758-61. About the same time, British forces under Robert Clive defeated the French. Weakened by wars with the Hindus and Sikhs, the Mogul empire was ruined. The British East India Company ran the Indian government under a succession of puppet regimes. The British crown took possession of India in 1877 and granted this colony its independence seventy years later. Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan became two separate nations.
The Hindu and Buddhist Religions
A most ancient religion developed in northern India during the middle and latter part of the 2nd millennium B.C. The Aryan conquerors of India brought with them a pre-philosophical religion of rituals and prayers intended to achieve practical results. This religion had a pantheon of nature gods and goddesses, not unlike that of the Greeks. The hymns, myths, prayers, and poetic utterances, long carried within the memory of priests, were eventually written down in a collection of Vedic-language literature called the Rig-Veda. This religion had a powerful Brahman priesthood and a caste system which perpetuated social roles. Public ceremonies such as the horse ritual, which dramatized military victories, reinforced Aryan values. Priestly commentaries in the Brahmanas and Aranyakas explained liturgical practice and discussed the mysteries of the universe.
In the last section of the Veda, called the Upanishads, philosophical discussions appear concerning man’s relationship to God. The individual person, or soul, was seen to be experiencing a cosmic journey which includes life in this world. This life is a kind of bondage to delusional existence. The soul of each person is actually identical with the universe as a whole. The Hindu cosmology involved a belief that human souls were born and reborn in cycles of reincarnation. One’s status in the next life depended upon the moral quality of actions undertaken in this and previous existences. The law of karma stated that each action had a consequence in the soul’s future experience. Wrong or hurtful acts might bring lower status or seemingly unjust treatment in a future life, while benevolent actions would be rewarded. Conversely, one’s situation in the present life could partly be explained by one’s activities in previous incarnations. Such an explanation helped to reconcile individuals to their place in the caste system. It created an incentive to behave. The goal, however, was to escape the treadmill of reincarnations and be released into the cosmic whole. Certain yoga exercises or other methods known to the priests helped to hasten that process.
Buddhism is one of two Hindu “heresies” of the 6th century B.C., Jainism being the other. The Hindu salvation, “nirvana” or release from the cycle of earthly rebirths, was not available to ordinary people. If one followed the “way of works”, it was still necessary to be reborn as a Brahman to achieve nirvana at death. If one followed the path of knowledge through the Upanishads, one needed time for contemplation and study. Buddha and Mahavira, founder of Jainism, offered salvation to everyone. “No Brahman is such by birth ... A Brahman is such by his deeds,” Buddha declared. Jainism required strict asceticism and total renunciation of the world. Buddhism offered a “middle way” between asceticism and living in the world. Buddha saw a moral dichotomy between selfishness and love of truth. “Learn to distinguish between Self and Truth,” he said. “If we liberate our souls from our petty selves, wish no ill to others, and become clear as a crystal diamond reflecting the light of truth, what a radiant picture will appear in us, mirroring things as they are, without the admixture of burning desires, without the distortion of erroneous illusion, without the agitation of clinging and unrest.”
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born in Nepal in 567 B.C., son of a petty king. A seer informed his father that Buddha was destined to become the greatest king in history. If, however, he saw four things - disease, old age, death, and a monk who had renounced the world - then he would forgo that destiny to become the discoverer of a universal path of salvation. Buddha’s father, wishing to have a royal successor, tried to shield the boy from those experiences, but to no avail. Buddha saw each of the four fateful situations during a ride in the park. He renounced his throne, abandoned his wife and infant son, and spent six years practicing spiritual disciplines including physical self-torture and philosophical study as a wanderer and hermit. Finally, after meditating for seven weeks under a Bo tree, Buddha experienced personal enlightenment in the form of an insight concerning human suffering. He returned to the world to teach this doctrine as an itinerant preacher until his death in 483 B.C. The group of disciples who accompanied him became the nucleus of the Buddhist sangha, a monastic community. Buddha’s followers produced a scripture from the memory of his teachings.
The insights which Buddha had under the Bo tree can be summarized in a set of philosophical principles called the “four noble truths”. They include the ideas that:
(1) Life is filled with sorrow.
(2) Sorrow originates in personal desire.
(3) Sorrow ends when desires end.
(4) The way to end desire is by following the “eight-fold path.”
This path consists of the following elements:
(1) right belief,
(2) right resolve,
(3) right speech,
(4) right conduct,
(5) right occupation,
(6) right effort,
(7) right contemplation, and
(8) right meditation.
If one attains complete extinction of desire, one achieves the blissful state of nirvana. This was an attitude of detachment from the world, which brought freedom from pain. Having reached its spiritual goal, the human soul would then be spared of further rebirths.
Though born in Nepal, Buddha spent most of his life in northeast India in the present-day state of Bihar, near the Ganges river. It was the site of the powerful Magadha kingdom. Buddha often preached in a deer park at Sarnath, which adjoined the holy city of Benares. Like Confucius, he and his followers wandered among warring kingdoms without interference. Neither Buddha nor Mahavira belonged to the Brahman class. Both opposed the caste system and filled the ranks of their followers with men and women of all backgrounds. Hinayana Buddhism, which represented Buddha’s original teaching, grew out of a council to certify the accuracy of these doctrines and set rules for the sangha. The third council was held during the reign of the Indian emperor, Asoka, more than two hundred years after Buddha’s death. He was Buddhism’s great patron.
Asoka (reigned 269-232 B.C.) was the grandson of Chandragupta, founder of the Mauryan dynasty. He conquered neighboring kingdoms until his empire included much of the Indian subcontinent. Remorseful after the bloody conquest of Kalinga, Asoka converted to Buddhism in 261 B.C. He announced that he would cease to pursue military conquest and instead seek conquests of religion. Asoka joined a Buddhist lay order and promoted Buddhism within his realm. He sent Buddhist missionaries to Syria, Egypt, Greece, and Ceylon. While Buddhism was the state religion of the Mauryan empire, Asoka tolerated other religious practices. He promoted a strict ethical code, including the humane treatment of animals. In his zealous attempt to remake Indian society, emperor Asoka resembles China’s first emperor, Shih Hwang-ti, who lived during the same century. Unlike him, however, Asoka did not leave an enduring model of political empire by which the state might become resurrected after a dynastic decline. Instead, his pacifist policies invited political disintegration. The empire fell apart fifty years after Asoka’s death. Yet, his adoption of Buddhism as a state religion set an important precedent for the coming age.
The early Buddhist religion consisted of doctrines, scripture, and traditions associated with the Hinayana branch, sometimes called Theravadin Buddhism. It accepts the Pali canon adopted at the time of Asoka. This philosophically inclined religious path allows only a few persons who strictly follow Buddha’s example of worldly renunciation to achieve nirvana. Someone who marries, has children, and earns a livelihood might become a lay follower of Buddhism (as Asoka was), but that person could not attain the ultimate goal of spiritual release and bliss. To become a mass religion, Buddhism had to provide a means of salvation within everyone’s reach. The Mahayana or “greater vehicle”, which was developed in Bactria at the time of Jesus, offered salvation through a personal savior. It asserted that Buddha had taught an inner circle of followers a higher teaching which allowed anyone to gain release. The idea was that Buddha, showing compassion for other suffering souls, had delayed the time of his own departure from earth in order to save others. Because this saving help from Buddha is universally available, the devotee can remain engaged in worldly pursuits while continuing on the path to nirvana.
Buddhism spread to the Bactrian empire of northwest India after Asoka’s death. The Bactrian king Menander (160-130 B.C.) converted to its religion. Later, the Kushan emperor Kanishka (ca. 100 A.D.) became an ardent patron. There was a strong Greek influence in the Bactrian culture expressing itself through written language, philosophy, and the visual arts. That was the environment in which Mahayana Buddhism developed. Greek philosophy and the Zoroastrian cosmology of Heaven and Hell transformed Buddhism from a philosophical religion into a cult of personal saviors or “bodhisattvas” - Buddha-like personalities embodying the essence of enlightenment. They were ones who had attained Buddhahood but had declined to enter nirvana until other sentient beings preceded them. The Mahayana Buddhist religion readily enlisted the local gods of different regions in that role. Under influence of the Greek visual arts, Buddhism projected itself through statues of the Buddha seated in contemplation; one finds such images in numerous temples and caves. The Mahayana sect taught life after death, which increased its popular appeal. The “compassionate Buddha” aided by other bodhisattvas would arrange passage to that blissful domain for all those who called upon them for help.
The Brahman tradition began to make a comeback in the years after the Mauryan dynasty fell in 183 B.C. The subsequent Sunga and Kanva dynasties brought a Sanskrit revival in Hindustan. Sanskrit, a literary version of the ancient Vedic language, became the sacred language of Hindu texts, while Prakrits, a vernacular-language script associated with Buddhist and Jainist texts, became less widely used. The Gupta dynasty of north India (320-544 A.D.) did much to develop and spread the Hindu culture. Its religion was split into two main branches, Shivaism and Vaishnavism. The former comprised worship of Shiva, a phallic god also associated with death. The latter comprised worship of Vishnu, the Preserver, who has appeared in several human incarnations. Such innovations were made in response to the Buddhist challenge. These gods were like Hindu bodhisattvas. Buddha himself was regarded as an avatar of Vishnu. There was an emotional relationship between the god and his devotees. Sankara, a Hindu philosopher of the 9th century, argued that personal identities were an illusion and so special relationships between persons and gods were unnecessary. Each person was instead identified directly with ultimate reality. Ramanuja, in the 11th century, accused Sankara of being a crypto-Buddhist. In his view, one could still have a devotional relationship with the gods.
The Tamil-speaking part of southern India may have led the way toward this more emotional type of religion. During the 7th century, there was a resurgence of devotional Hinduism in the southern kingdoms of Pandya and Pallava, where Buddhism and Jainism had once been strong. Rock carvings and temples at Mamallapuram and Kanchipuram are among the treasures of Hindu architecture. Sankara, the great theologian, was a native of Kerala in the southwest. Buddhism became extinct in India as a result of devastation inflicted upon its monasteries by foreign invaders beginning with the White Huns in the 6th century. The Pala kingdom in Bengal, which Moslem armies conquered in 1202, was its last stronghold. The Bengalis preferred Tantric Buddhism which emphasized magical rites and worship of divine beings. They passed along this form of religion to the Tibetan people. The Palas dominated northern India during the opening decades of the 9th century but then lost out to the Pratihara dynasty of Rajasthan and central India, who were worshipers of Shiva and Vishnu. Jainism, also patronized by this regime, survived the purging of Buddhism; there are today about two million Jainists in India. However, the revived Brahman religion, Hinduism, gained a firm hold on the vast majority of India’s population.
After Muhammad Ghori defeated an alliance of Rajput kings in 1192, the religion of Islam was added to the Indian religious mix. Possessing a highly developed religion, these Moslems were unable to be absorbed into the Indian culture; but neither was the Hindu population willing to convert to Islam. Consequently, India presented the paradoxical case of a state whose rulers professed one religion and whose people observed another. Out of respect for a superior civilization as well as political expediency, Moslem rulers of India felt obliged to designate their polytheistic Hindu subjects as “peoples of the Book”. Emperor Akbar formed an alliance with the Hindu Rajput kings to keep the power of his Turkish commanders in check. He abolished the special taxes on Hindus and gave them permission to build Hindu temples. Moslem clerics regarded this as apostasy. A Mogul successor, Aurangzeb, undid these concessions and, in the process, provoked a furious counterattack by the Hindu Marathas. Religious teachers or poets such as Nanak and Kabir synthesized elements of both religions. Their doctrines appealed to lower-caste Hindus as did Islam. Higher-caste Hindus were recruited into the armed forces and civil service of the Persian-style Moslem governments, following a practice of Islamic administrations everywhere.
The Spread of Indian Religion to Lands outside India
The Kushan empire, which united Bactria and northwest India in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., was the epicenter of emerging Mahayana Buddhism. It included lands in western Afghanistan and Uzbekistan abutting the eastern part of China. Mahayana Buddhism was adaptable to local creeds and traditions. There was a ripe combination of circumstances for this religion to penetrate Chinese culture starting in the 2nd century A.D. Trade routes from western China to the Middle East and Europe ran through the Tarim basin and Soghd, southeast of the Aral sea, which were located just north of the Kushan empire. Buddhism may have seeped into China from that region in the form of neo-Sanskrit documents and works of visual art in the Gandharan Greek style. The Chinese and Indian modes of thinking were quite different. Chinese thought was expressed concretely and in a monosyllabic language. Indian thoughts were more abstract. Of the Chinese philosophies, the Buddhist mentality came closest to Taoism, so the early Buddhist writings frequently used Taoist concepts and terminology. Numerous scholars were at work translating Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.
When the eastern Han dynasty fell in the 3rd century A.D., there was a spiritual vacuum in China which Mahayana Buddhism filled. The Confucian ideology was discredited by its close association with the former corrupt imperial administration. The Taoists were discredited by their passivity in the face of public need. Zealous Buddhist missionaries were met by Chinese willing to listen to new ideas. Between 399 and 414 A.D., a Chinese pilgrim named Fa-hsien traveled to India to study Buddhism at its source. An Indian scholar named Kumarajiva, taken captive in 382 by a Chinese raiding party, spent his remaining life in China translating Buddhist classics. The Chinese Buddhists created their own sects. One was the “pure land” school which offered escape to a western paradise through faith in the bodhisattva Amitabha. Another was the Ch’an (Zen) school which stressed contemplation and personal discipline. The Buddhist monasteries acquired wealth. Emperors of the Sui and T’ang dynasties were personally attracted to Buddhism though they tolerated other religious philosophies. However, in a time of troubles the Confucians and Taoists conspired to curtail Buddhist activities. Between 842 and 845 A.D., the Chinese imperial government cracked down on Buddhist institutions. Monks and nuns were defrocked in large numbers. Property was seized from the monasteries.
Buddhism became the dominant religion in lands outside India which were influenced primarily by Indian or Chinese culture. The civilization of India began to spread towards southeast Asia and Indonesia during the 1st century A.D. That trend accelerated in the 3rd century as the Gupta society radiated cultural influence. Tibet came into India’s cultural orbit when a Tibetan king who invaded northern India after the death of emperor Harsha in 647 developed a script in the Indian style for the Tibetan language. That script was used to translate Mahayana Buddhist scripts from Sanskrit. Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism later became the religion of nomadic peoples living in Manchuria and Mongolia. It tamed the warlike spirit of those peoples, eliminating them as a threat to civilized societies. Buddhism first came to Ceylon in the 3rd century B.C. Missionaries from the Pala kingdom brought the Mahayana religion to Java in the 8th century A.D. In 1190, monks who had visited Ceylon introduced Hinayana Buddhism to Burma and Cambodia. Vietnam’s adoption of Mahayana Buddhism, in contrast with other southeastern nations, reflects Chinese influence.
China also exerted cultural influence upon the neighboring lands of Korea and Japan. Emperor Han Wu-ti established a colonial output in Korea during the 2nd century B.C. Although the Koreans later expelled the Chinese from that outpost, their culture remained. In the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., a large number of Koreans migrated to Japan, bringing with them the Korean version of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. The Buddhist religion was introduced to Japanese society in the 7th century A.D. Block printing had been invented in T’ang China to mass-produce Buddhist and Confucian texts. Some of this literature made its way to Japan where scholars adapted the Chinese characters to spoken Japanese. The resulting script is based on associations between Chinese visual characters and syllabic sounds in the Japanese speech of that day. Japanese Buddhists developed simplified versions of Chinese religious teachings to appeal to a wider audience. Zen Buddhism, taken from the Ch’an school, was introduced to the samurai court at Kamakura in 1191. Its strict mental and physical discipline was attractive to soldiers. Honen and Shinran Buddhism were mass cults which promised entrance to a heavenly paradise to persons who repeated the name of the bodhisattva Amida. The Nichiren sect taught salvation by chanting praise of the Lotus Sutra.
The rival Buddhist sects established kingdoms of their own. They fought one another employing techniques of the martial arts. Buddhist monks trained squads of Ninja warriors to infiltrate enemy headquarters and kidnap or assassinate individuals. Ieyasu, last of the three great shoguns of the 16th century, once hired these warriors to kidnap the children of a rival warlord so that he would have a bargaining chip to offer in exchange for his own captive children. However, he and his successors promoted the neo-Confucian philosophy because they believed its ethical doctrines would strengthen their regime. Portuguese missionaries brought Christianity to Japan in the 16th century. Nobunaga, first of the three shoguns, tolerated Christianity because it offset Buddhist power. His successor, Hideyoshi, was of another mind. He mistrusted the western missionaries believing that religious conversions might precede a political takeover as had happened in the Philippines. Persecution of Christians began under Hideyoshi in 1597. When a rebellion broke out in the Catholic community of Shimabara in 1638, the government suppressed both Christianity and foreign trade. Buddhism was not suppressed. Indeed, all Japanese were required to register as a lay associate of a Buddhist temple to prove they were not Christians.
Hinayana Buddhism spread from Burma into the neighboring countries of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia during the 13th century, ousting the Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist religions. The Thai people had come from western China, but they converted to the Burmese type of religion. A dynasty of god-kings influenced by Indian civilization had ruled the Khmer empire in Cambodia for over five hundred years. The Vietnamese carried their Chinese-style Mahayana Buddhism with them as they conquered the Champa kingdom to the south. The Chams then became Moslem. The Srivijaya empire on Sumatra, founded in the 7th century, and the Sailendra empire, founded in Java in the following century, were both Mahayana Buddhist; however a Shaivist Hindu regime, the Sanjayas, arose in east Java in the late 8th century to replace the Sailendra kings. The Empire of Majapahit was founded in Java in 1293 in the aftermath of the Mongols’ naval defeat. This far-flung empire was founded by a Mahayana Buddhist prince, but Hindu and animistic religious influences were also strong. In the 15th century, Islamic religion from India poured over Malaya and the Indonesian archipelago to form the last religious layer. Rulers of port cities and coastal principalities found it advantageous to adopt the same religion as the Moslem merchants on whose trade their livelihoods depended.
An alluring religious possibility in the 13th century was that the world’s largest political empire might convert as a block to whatever religion managed to win over its Mongol rulers. Although the Mongols were originally shamanists, Kublai Khan’s mother was a Nestorian Christian. The great Khan asked Marco Polo’s father and uncle to invite the Pope to send a delegation of learned Christians to his court to persuade him of the merits of their religion. Nothing came of that invitation. Kublai himself preferred Buddhism, especially Tibetan Lamaism. The Mongols converted to “Yellow Church” Buddhism, associated with the Dalai Lama, in the late 16th century, although several of their successors in the west converted to Islam. However, a former Buddhist monk, Chu Yüan-chang, led a rebellion against the Mongol dynasty in southeast China and, in 1368, proclaimed himself emperor of the Ming dynasty. Nestorian Christianity was expelled from China. Neo-Confucianism became again the state religion. In the mid 19th century, a religious visionary named Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, who believed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, aroused a horde of peasants and unemployed workers to rebel against the Manchu government and non-Christian religions. These soldiers of the “Taiping Rebellion” controlled the Yangtze Valley for more than a decade but, with western help, were suppressed.
Civilizations and Historical Epochs
About Historical Knowledge
In reflecting upon its past, humanity is aware of times when life was different than it now is. The artifacts of those times are still to be seen in stone monuments, pottery shards, tools, and other physical remains. History is a collection of stories from the past which explain how the world that we know came to be. Unlike fiction, the stories of history are considered to be literally true. That brings other scholarly disciplines into the process of establishing historical truth. While our memories of history are forever receding into the past, its knowledge therefore increases as new facts come to light. Research techniques developed within the natural sciences, such as carbon dating, have improved the accuracy of information accepted as historical fact. Because the Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan, and other peoples kept records of astronomical events observed in their times, we are able to date stories found in ancient literature mentioning them. Archeological excavations, the discovery of manuscripts or carved inscriptions, and the deciphering of previously unknown languages increase our knowledge of long-lost civilizations.
One might say that the writing of history extends only so far as historians have knowledge of its events. What may once have happened will, of course, be excluded if the experience has been forgotten. Since stories include an interior consciousness of events, our knowledge of them will necessarily depend upon preserving them in a medium which can express human thoughts. Such a medium is, of course, written language. Some stories have come to us in the form of folklore handed down within tribal societies. While the stories may be based on actual experiences, their long process of oral transmission from one generation to another poses a risk of corruption. Writing, on the other hand, holds together in the same form so long as the material in which it has been expressed can weather processes of natural decay.
Conventionally one associates the experience of preliterate societies with “prehistoric” times. Arnold Toynbee has written: “Nomadism is essentially a society without a history. Once launched on its annual orbit, the Nomadic horde revolves in it thereafter and might go on revolving for ever if an external force against which Nomadism is defenseless did not eventually bring the horde’s ... life to an end. This force is the pressure of the sedentary civilizations round about.” Malidoma Somé, an African ritualist living in the United States, has compared the preliterate culture of his native village with the culture he found in the West. Westerners, he observed, are always in a hurry to go somewhere, and, in the process, they lose touch with their spiritual roots. Malidoma noted that the people of his tribe, the Dagara people of West Africa, do not have a conception of history. Their world view is timeless. What happens now is important, not what has happened. If an important event takes place, it quickly passes into the realm of mythology.
In the western view, human societies improve through the contributions of creative individuals. There is also destruction as once-healthy institutions become corrupt. Yet, world civilization is always moving towards an expanded state of consciousness. Human societies have changed. Fewer people live in tribal societies and more in those urbanized societies which are called “civilized.” World history tells the story of humanity’s changing from one situation to the other. The situation at the beginning of the story is different than at the end. Significant history is that which leaves an imprint upon the structure of society. It is the story of how the most advanced types of society came to be. There is not a single story to describe this process but several stories. That is because modern society consists of a plurality of institutions to handle its various functions. They emerged in different times.
The purpose here is to take the confused themes of world history, separate them into their different strands, and present each in a clear and coherent set of images. It is analogous to inserting a prism into a stream of white light. Such light is a mixture of variously colored rays with distinctive wave lengths. A prism inserted into its beam breaks the colors apart so that a person can see the separate spectral components. Likewise, world civilization as it exists today is a mixture of several different civilizations. Each has a story to tell. Since these civilizations overlap in time, their combined history is murky and confused. Historical understanding requires that one separate out the events connected with these different civilizations so that the direction behind each set of experiences becomes plainly seen.
Competition for Space in Books of History
World history, being the accumulated record of past human experience, might consist of a large collection of personal biographies in the form of books, letters, notes, photographs, and other effects. Each person who has ever lived had a story to tell. If history were the sum total of all such stories, world history would not be contained in books but in large warehouses or computer files. Such a massive amount of information would make this history quite inaccessible. No one would have time to review more than a tiny part of it. Traditionally, history has never been a narrative of people’s lives but of important people’s lives. Some persons are more prone to being historical figures than others. To be lifted to that plane, one needs a device of personal magnification. Government office has placed certain individuals in positions of authority over others. The early histories were, therefore, chronologies of royal dynasties. Democracy has broadened the cast of historical characters. Besides kings and prime ministers, historians now record the lives of philosophers, saints, writers, scientists, entertainers, and other public figures.
The writing of history has lately become a matter of some controversy. That is because, as historical personalities have become democratized, people’s expectations have increased that they will find representation in historical writings. It is understood that individuals are included in books of history because of some accomplishment or creative work. It is therefore an honor to be mentioned in history, and the amount of space given to describing a person’s life would be a measure of that honor. If the average person is not mentioned, he or she aspires to assume historical importance through surrogates who are of a similar demographic type. People expect that history will provide attractive role models for themselves. Therefore, a political battle is raging about the kind of history textbook which ought to be used in the schools. Histories which give insufficient attention to the accomplishments of certain groups are challenged on the grounds of historical bias: Since “the victors write history”, they reflect merely the views of the politically strong in an age when those histories were written.
Opponents of that view accuse its adherents of rewriting history in a partisan way. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has compared contemporary efforts to give African-Americans, women, and others greater historical prominence with a similar struggle waged by Irish-American zealots at the beginning of the 20th century. He noted that “John V. Kelleher, for many years Harvard’s distinguished Irish scholar, once recalled his first exposure to Irish-American history - ‘turgid little essays on the fact that the Continental Army was 76% Irish, or that many of George Washington’s friends were nuns and priests, or that Lincoln got the major ideas for the Second Inaugural Address from the Hon. Francis P. Magehegan of Alpaca, New York, a pioneer manufacturer of cast-iron rosary beads.’ John Kelleher called this ‘the there’s-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-of-doing-the-real-work approach to American history.’ About 1930, Kelleher said, those ‘turgid little essays’ began to vanish from Irish-American papers. He added, ‘I wonder whose is the major component in the Continental Army these days?’”
Does such a thing exist as a truly objective world history? Probably not. Each selection of facts involves someone’s preconceived point of view. Subjectively, many or most people want to believe that historical trends culminate in their own situation. However, a world history is written for all humanity. In a pluralistic world, one must accept that this history will include experiences of persons unlike ourselves. One needs to organize the writing of history by idea or theme rather than by types of persons given space in its works. World history is not centered in anyone’s parochial experience.
An Example of a Biased History
In the late 19th century, western peoples had a strong sense of self-confidence. In the United States, the focus upon European civilization was combined with a jingoistic appreciation of U.S. national strength. Historical textbooks of that era reflected ethnocentric values. A leather-bound book in my great-grandparents’ collection, Illustrated Universal History, exemplifies historical thinking at the time. Published in Philadelphia in 1878, this book divided world history into three parts: “Ancient History”, “the Middle Ages”, and “Modern History”. Ancient history began with Adam’s life in the Garden of Eden and ended with the fall of the west Roman empire in 476 A.D. The Middle Ages followed Rome’s fall and continued until 1517 A.D., the year that Martin Luther challenged papal authority. Modern history covered the subsequent period up until the time that the book was published. In a preface, the author informed readers that “(t)he greatest prominence is given to the annals of those nations of ancient and modern times which have acted a leading part on the stage of the world’s history.”
It is revealing to see the number of pages assigned in this 685-page book to the histories of various nations. The first two pages deal with “Antediluvian History” and the “Dispersal of Mankind.” The history of “Oriental Nations” occupies the next thirteen pages. Histories of China, India, Assyria and Babylonia, Egypt, and Phoenicia each claim one page. Persian and Hebrew history together have seven pages. Nearly thirty pages are devoted to the history of ancient Greece, and fifty to Roman history. The 78-page section on the Middle Ages chronicles royal dynasties in Europe between the 5th and 15th centuries A.D. Mohammed’s “Saracen Empire” is covered in four pages. India and China are mentioned as destinations of European exploration. “Modern History”, focused on post-Reformation European dynasties and U.S. political administrations, claims the remaining pages. Wars and revolutions are the most heavily covered events. They include the “Thirty Years’ War”, the “English Revolution” and the “War of the Austrian Succession”. Tucked away in this history are one-page summaries of events in India and Persia and a brief description of Spanish conquests in America. The history of the United States between 1776 and 1876 takes up sixty-five pages.
Today such a book would not be considered a “universal history”. While it is interesting to know, for instance, that a Roman emperor named Heliogabalus was assassinated in 222 A.D. and that rude behavior by the Duke of Buckingham upset plans for Charles I of England to be married to a Spanish princess, such events of western political history shed little light upon fundamental issues affecting those societies. While the history of governments has served as a proxy for general history, human societies do involve more than their political aspect. A more serious deficiency is the book’s preoccupation with western Europe and North America. It may have seemed in 1876 that the whole world was moving toward domination by the western powers. Events of the last century have corrected that impression. Much has been omitted from this book concerning the experiences of peoples in the nonwestern world who did leave a complete written record. If the scattered societies on earth each have separate histories, the question then becomes how much space to give each people’s experiences in a book of world history.
Population as a Guide to Historical Coverage
One approach might be to assume that each person’s experiences are as deserving of historical coverage as another’s, and, since all individuals have an equal claim to this coverage, the amount of space given in world history to the various national histories should follow the size of national populations. The nation with the largest population in a given time period should have the greatest historical coverage for that period, the second most populous nation should have the second most coverage, and so on. If the size of populations drives historical coverage, historians need to review population statistics over a period of time. Colin McEvedy’s and Richard Jones’ book, Atlas of World Population History, provides data concerning world population between 10000 B.C., when the neolithic revolution began, and 1975 A.D. This information has been updated to the present.
Click here to see the earth’s total population and its percentage breakdown by region in years between 400 A.D. and 1997 A.D. China and India together have accounted for about half the total population for much of this time. The European share of world population increased between the 17th and 19th centuries and then declined. The population of North and South America plus Oceania (Australia and the Pacific islands) gained a sharply higher share of world population between 1850 and 1997. This surge in population roughly corresponds with the emergence of the United States as a world power. European power and influence in the world reached a peak in the 19th century, as did Europe’s share of world population. The main reason for gains in population has been the spread of agriculture. Some societies develop agricultural economies sooner than others. Other factors supporting population increases have been industrialization, medical advances cutting the death rate, and migration into underpopulated territories. War, famine, pestilence, and disease bring sudden drops in population. Another cause of population decline is the reduced fertility of women in affluent societies.
Changes in world population can mask conflicting trends between nations. The surge in population growth during the first millennium B.C. took place primarily in Asia, north Africa, and Europe. Greek peoples settling the coastal regions of the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black seas were major contributors to this growth. Because of their increasing numbers, the Greeks were able to withstand the Persian emperor Xerxes II’s invasion of their homeland in the 6th century B.C. and provide muscle for the army of Alexander the Great two centuries later. However, the Greek population stagnated during Hellenistic times. Rome’s population of 5 million persons around 200 B.C. gave it an advantage in the war with Carthage, whose population then numbered about 1.5 million. A Jewish population boom during the 1st century A.D. brought Judaism and Christianity to cities throughout the Roman empire. The following table shows the three largest cities in the world in years since 2000 B.C. The names of those cities evoke the memory of kingdoms and empires which have left their mark upon world history.
Three Largest Cities in the World
date first second third
2000 B.C. Ur Memphis Thebes
1600 B.C. Avaris Babylon Setabul
1200 B.C. Memphis Khattushash Dur-Kurigalza
1000 B.C. Thebes Sian Loyang
800 B.C. Thebes Sian Loyang
650 B.C. Nineveh Lintzu Loyang
430 B.C. Babylon Yenhsiatu Athens
200 B.C. Chang'an Patna Alexandria
100 A.D. Rome Loyang Seleucia
361 A.D. Constantinople Ctesiphon Patna
500 A.D. Constantinople Ctesiphon Loyang
622 A.D. Ctesiphon Chang'an Constantinople
800 A.D. Baghdad Chang'an Loyang
1000 A.D. Cordoba Kaifeng Constantinople
1200 A.D. Hangchow Fez Cairo
1350 A.D. Hangchow Peking Cairo
1500 A.D. Peking Vijayanagar Cairo
1600 A.D. Peking Constantinople Agra
1700 A.D. Constantinople Yedo Peking
1800 A.D. Peking London Canton
1850 A.D. London Peking Paris
1900 A.D. London New York Paris
1950 A.D. New York London Tokyo
1975 A.D. Tokyo New York Osaka
Source: Chandler, Tertius. Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth. (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.)
The population of both the Roman and Han Chinese empires hit a peak in the 3rd century A.D. The Roman empire then had a total population of 46 million, and the Chinese empire more than 50 million people. China’s population declined after the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 A.D. Europe’s population, which totaled 36 million persons in 200 A.D., fell to 26 million in 600 A.D. At both ends of the Eurasian continent, nomadic tribes from central Asia with population of perhaps 5 million persons were infiltrating and defeating empires ten times as populous. In China, population growth resumed when imperial rule was reestablished. Its population rose from 60 million persons in 1000 A.D. to 115 million in 1200 A.D. thanks to fuller rice cultivation in the Yangtze valley. The population of Europe began a similar recovery, starting in 1000 A.D. Its center of gravity began to shift from the Mediterranean region to countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea. The population of India, centered in the Jumna and Ganges valleys, rose steadily from 41 million in 200 A.D. to 79 million in 1000 A.D., before settling into a more gently rising pattern for the next five centuries.
This period of population growth came to an abrupt end in China when Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan overthrew the Sung dynasty in the 13th century. Those barbarian tribes set about to destroy China’s agricultural infrastructure which they saw as a threat to the nomadic way of life. It is estimated that three fourths of the people in China’s northern provinces died from the Mongol violence. Similar attacks against the Islamic and Byzantine empires and kingdoms in eastern Europe also brought great loss of life. The population of western Europe reached a plateau in this period as agricultural technology ran up against the limit of available land. Then, in 1347, a terrible plague hit Europe which had originated in a caravan unloading its cargo at Kaffa in the Crimea. The “bubonic plague”, which raged for six years, killed between one third and one fourth of Europe’s population.
Perhaps the most unusual event in the history of world population took place with European colonization of the Americas. The native population declined by a fifth during the century which followed Columbus’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere. While Spanish rule was brutal, the main cause of the decline was disease. The American Indians lacked immunity to measles and smallpox germs brought from Europe. The colonists, who had originally used Indians to mine silver and gold, needed to find new sources of labor. First Portuguese, then Dutch and English merchants found it profitable to bring captives from east Africa across the ocean to sell as slaves. Between 1500 and 1850, 9.5 million Negro slaves were brought to the Americas, mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean islands. After the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, voluntary emigration from Europe drove population gains in the New World. About 41 million persons arrived in the great migration that took place between 1845 and 1914. Population growth in all parts of the world has accelerated during the 20th century.
Because so many more people are living today than in previous periods, our sense of historical “space” should take into account not only numbers of years but the weight of populations attached to those years. The quantity of historical experience - if this concept has any validity - should follow man-years of human life. The following table shows the cumulative man-years at selected intervals of time between 10000 B.C. and 1997 A.D. By this reckoning, more “history” has been packed into the last half century than into the ten thousand years before Christ. If one wishes to divide world history between 10000 B.C. and 1999 A.D. into two equal population-weighted periods, the dividing line would be drawn at 1577 A.D. While this approach has obvious limitations, it does underscore the fact that historical experience has accelerated. One should not underestimate the importance of modern times in any scheme of world history.
Cumulative Man-Years of History 10000 B.C. to 1999 A.D. by Percent of 1999 Total
7500 B.C. 1.7 % 800 A.D. 27.9 %
5000 B.C. 2.1 % 900 A.D. 29.8 %
4000 B.C. 2.6 % 1000 A.D. 31.9 %
3000 B.C. 3.7 % 1100 A.D. 34.4 %
2500 B.C. 4.5 % 1200 A.D. 37.3 %
2000 B.C. 5.6 % 1300 A.D. 40.1 %
1500 B.C. 7.1 % 1400 A.D. 42.9 %
1000 B.C. 9.1 % 1500 A.D. 46.3 %
500 B.C. 9.9 % 1550 A.D. 48.2 %
400 B.C. 10.7 % 1600 A.D. 50.3 %
300 B.C. 11.6 % 1650 A.D. 52.5 %
200 B.C. 12.8 % 1700 A.D. 54.9 %
100 B.C. 14.1 % 1750 A.D. 57.8 %
0 A.D. 15.4 % 1800 A.D. 61.3 %
100 A.D. 16.9 % 1850 A.D. 66.1 %
200 A.D. 18.4 % 1875 A.D. 68.7 %
300 A.D. 19.9 % 1900 A.D. 71.9 %
400 A.D. 21.4 % 1925 A.D. 75.9 %
500 A.D. 22.9 % 1950 A.D. 80.9 %
600 A.D. 24.5 % 1975 A.D. 88.6 %
700 A.D. 26.1 % 1999 A.D. 100.0 %
Source: Atlas of World Population History, Penguin, 1978
A Division into Parts
History is a great mass of experiences awaiting interpretation. The first step in understanding an unintelligible mass of phenomena is to articulate it in some way. So we divide the mass of historical experience into civilizations. Times and places where human culture was fundamentally different from our own we say belonged to a different civilization. World civilization has existed in many different places on earth. The peoples living in those societies may or may not have had contact with each other. If isolated from one another, they would not have had a common history. In that case, world history would be a plurality of histories proceeding on separate tracks. Each society would have its own recollection of memorable events. Now that the world’s people are aware of each other’s existence, the concept of world history has become important. Historians face the challenge of finding a coherent scheme to describe their past experience.
World history is a form of story-telling on the highest level. There is not just one story to cover all events in this world. Stories describe movement from one situation to another. In the case of world history, one finds that events move in one direction in one period and then reverse themselves in the next. Therefore, the broad narration of world history is divided into parts, called “epochs”, to increase narrative coherence. These are large periods of time when people’s experiences of the society and culture and historical events run in the same direction. The division of world history into epochs is like the division of a book into chapters. Such organization increases understanding. A key to understanding world history is to know how to split it by epoch or, in other words, to tell one civilization from another.
Toward a Definition of Epochs
The early Christian community had a sense of the world coming to an end. This apocalyptic expectation established the idea of a dividing point between two historical epochs which could not have been more different. On one side of the divide was a period of human turmoil and wickedness when Satan seemed to be in control of the world. On the other was the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth when justice and mercy would reign forever. The one period would pass over to the other in the “twinkling of an eye” once the necessary conditions were fulfilled. Because Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah who was associated with this process, his appearance on earth assumed epochal importance. The western world has adopted the convention of dividing world history into the periods before and after Christ’s birth. The years before Jesus lived are designated “B.C.”, or “before Christ”. Those after his birth are designated “A.D.”, or “Anno Domini”, which in Latin means “in the Year of the Lord.”
This scheme of epochs was first proposed in the 6th century A.D. by a Greek-speaking Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus. Prior to that time, people were not conscious of living in a Christian era. The early Christians expected Christ’s imminent return. The Disciples met weekly in the room where Jesus had shared his “last supper” with them. This meal was symbolic of the messianic banquet. Christians believed that Jesus’s “Second Coming” would take place on such an occasion, when his followers were gathered in one place. After the Christian community became too large to meet in a single room, it became important to establish a single time when Christians in scattered places could meet to share a communal meal. Because Jesus’ return was thought likely to occur on the anniversary of his resurrection, the problem of establishing a common date for Easter became a concern for the church. The Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. decided that Christians in all places should celebrate this holiday on the first Sunday after the vernal equinox.
After western society had existed for more than a thousand years after Christ’s birth, a Cistercian monk named Joachim of Fiore speculated that a third phase of the Christian era was fast approaching. Its period corresponded to the third member of the Holy Trinity, he said. The first epoch, the age of the Father, covered the time before Jesus appeared on earth. The second epoch, the age of the Son, covered the time when the Christian church was active in the world. The third epoch would be an age of the Holy Spirit. Direct experience of God’s spirit would then become more important to Christianity than the sacraments. This doctrine, which appealed to Franciscan monks and other spiritually sensitive persons, was a challenge to the institutional church. Joachim’s predictions centered on the year 1260 A.D. No cataclysmic events occurred then which triggered waves of spirit. It was, instead, a year of interregnum in the succession to the office of Holy Roman Emperor. Emperor Frederick II, seen by some in the church as the Anti-Christ, had died ten years earlier. The next emperor, Rudolf I of Habsburg, would not be chosen until 1271.
Joachim’s prediction may have helped to prepare western peoples for thinking in terms of three historical epochs: ancient, medieval, and modern. That scheme came into fashion during the Renaissance, although the term “medieval” had previously been used to identify the time between Christ’s first and second comings. Before the Renaissance, Europeans had tended to see a cultural continuity between the Romans and themselves; they were near the end of a long age extending back to Augustus Caesar and Christ. Before Christ was another age, which was an age of darkness. At some point in the 14th or 15th century, people began to realize that a full millennium separated them from Roman times. Their society had evolved into something quite different than what existed then. The old culture of classical Greece and Rome was through; it had the completed look of another culture. Renaissance scholars who studied the Graeco-Roman texts were aware of a civilization comparable or, perhaps, superior to their own, separated by a large number of years. They gave the name “medieval” to that intervening period and associated modernity with themselves. Today, much later, we are still living in “modern” times.
Renaissance historians looked at the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome as a superior culture and their own culture as a revival of classical learning. That left the “medieval” period as a time when culture went into decline. Where Christianity had once represented historical progress, its influence was now seen as narrow, ignorant, and backward. This disdain of Christian culture deepened during the 18th century Enlightenment. Medieval society became associated with the “Dark Ages”. Yet, the Christian religion had played an important role in shaping western culture. Its epoch of dominance, occupying the middle position in European history, touched both the ancient and modern in a defining way.
The relationship between Christianity and the Roman empire has been a key element in western history. Its epochs changed when those institutions were fundamentally affected: The dividing point between ancient and medieval times has been variously defined as the year when the Roman emperor Constantine decided to tolerate Christianity (313 A.D.), when Constantine founded the city of Constantinople as the empire’s second capital (330 A.D.), when emperor Theodosius I was baptized into the Christian faith (380 A.D.), and when the last emperor of the west Roman empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Heruli king Odoacer (476 A.D.). The dividing point between medieval and modern times has been defined as the year when the Ottoman Turks extinguished the east Roman empire by capturing Constantinople (1453 A.D.), when Columbus first set foot in America (1492 A.D.), and when Martin Luther caused a split in western Christianity by posting his “95 Theses” on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany (1517 A.D.).
Nonwestern Peoples’ Histories
The division of world history into three parts - ancient, medieval, and modern - may describe the experience of peoples in western Europe, but not in the rest of the world. Most of the world’s population is not Christian, and only the westernmost part of Eurasia belonged to the Roman empire. Therefore, the experience of a collapsing empire followed by a universal but empireless religion and then its fracturing and replacement by a secular order is peculiar to western society. The histories of other societies show a different pattern.
Even the society most closely related to western Christendom, the Orthodox Christian society, had a different historical experience. In its case, the original empire lived on until 1453 A.D. Byzantine society engaged in prolonged wars against, successively, the Sasanian Persians, Umayyad Moslems, Frankish crusaders, Saljuq Turks, Mongols, and Ottoman Turks before Constantinople fell. The Orthodox community then led a dual existence. After the Duke of Moscow accepted its faith, imperial religion shifted locations to Russia. Meanwhile, in Asia Minor and the Balkan peninsula Orthodox Christianity was allowed to continue within an Islamic society. Following World War I, the Ottoman empire dissolved and the Czarist empire in Russia was replaced by an atheistic political regime.
In China, religion (in the form of an ethical philosophy) was subservient to a system of imperial government which dominated that society for two thousand years. The first epoch began with the unification of the Chinese nation in 221 B.C. Thereafter, the succession of imperial dynasties provides a framework for organizing Chinese history: Ch’in, Han, Sui, T’ang, northern and southern Sung, Yüan, Ming, and Ch’ing. These dynasties rose and fell and were sometimes followed by periods of interregnum; but always, until the 20th century, hereditary monarchies were reestablished with administrations staffed by Confucian scholars. Only the Yüan (Mongol) dynasty differed in that respect. The Ch’ing (Manchu) dynasty ended in 1912 when the last emperor was quietly deposed by Chinese nationalists.
India has a completely different history. Only two indigenous political dynasties - the Maurya and Gupta - have ruled over the Indian subcontinent, both for a relatively short time. Instead, Indian society has coped with a series of foreign invaders: Aryan nomads, Macedonian Greeks, Ephthalite Huns, Turkish Moslems, Timurid Moslems, and European merchant-adventurers. India has also been a principal battleground between religions. The original religion possessed by its Aryan conquerors was challenged in the 6th century B.C. by two religious philosophers, Buddha and Mahavira. The Gupta dynasty brought a resurgence of Hinduism, which succeeded in expelling Buddhism from India. Moslem armies from the northwest later took the subcontinent by force as Hindu kingdoms in the south were extinguished. Conflict between Moslems and Hindus marks the latter part of Indian history.
In the case of Islamic society, a single religion created and sustained an enduring network of political empires. Its first epoch might have begun with the message delivered by the archangel Gabriel to Mohammed and ended with the prophet’s death in 632 A.D. The next might include Islam’s rapid conquest of territory by Mohammed’s successors and the reign of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. The Abbasid rebellion in 747-750 A.D. replaced Arab with Iranian ascendancy as the caliphate moved to Baghdad. This epoch brought a fracturing of political rule. New kingdoms affiliated with the Abbasid dynasty appeared in north Africa while an Umayyad refugee ruled the Iberian peninsula. Islam came under attack from western Christian crusaders and, more importantly, from the Mongols during the 12th and 13th centuries. After that threat had subsided, three new Islamic empires appeared: the Turkish Ottoman empire, the Persian Safavi empire, and the Mogul empire in India.
The Moslem calendar begins with the hegira, Mohammed’s journey from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D. The Christian era begins at the time of Christ’s birth. Before world religion took charge of such matters, it was customary to begin chronologies with important political events. The Roman calendar began with Rome’s founding in 750 B.C. The Greek Seleucid empire used a chronology that began with Seleucus Nicator’s occupation of Babylon in 311 B.C. The Babylonian Era of Nabonassar, used by the Greeks of Alexandria, began in 747 B.C. If the United Nations had the same degree of influence within the world community as these ancient empires had in their regions, we might have renumbered the dates of world history with a base line set in 1945 A.D. However, government is no longer such a dominant institution, and neither is religion. Other institutions share the power with them in society. It becomes more difficult to find a focal event to represent the society’s collective experience.
According to a traditional Christian view, world history began with God’s creation of the world in six days. Studying the Biblical lists of generations, Archbishop Ussher of the Anglican church came to the conclusion that the world had been created in 4404 B.C. The Greek and Russian Orthodox church set the date of creation at 5509 B.C. Millennial anniversaries have raised expectations of epochal change. When mankind approached the end of the 1st millennium A.D., many expected the world to end. Clergy of the Russian Orthodox church had a similar expectation in 1492 A.D., which was seven thousand years after the supposed date of creation. Because God had created the world in seven days and one of God’s days might have been equivalent to one thousand years, it was thought possible that the world would end on August 31, 1492. Only after that date had safely passed did the Orthodox clergy do their calculations for Easter in the eighth millennium. Now, as humanity approaches the end of the 2nd millennium A.D., its doomsday thoughts center upon the possibility that a massive computer glitch may occur because an earlier generation of programmers failed to provide for more than two digits in the year’s field. Many predict an economic recession or worse in the impending Y2K catastrophe.
Religious Histories
There is a reason why the best-known models of world history are rooted in religious traditions. That is because religion gives history a basis of universality. The natural tendency would be for each society to have its own history. Each society’s history would have its own developmental dynamic. World history, if it existed, would be a compilation of diverse experiences described in separate sections of a book. However, religion includes the concept of a God (or gods) who created the entire world. Judaic religion asserts that Jehovah, the tribal God of the Hebrews, is synonymous with this universal God. Therefore, the story of Jehovah’s relationship with his chosen people is also humanity’s story. If Jehovah is God, then he has power over the earth and holds in his hand the fate of all its inhabitants. God’s plan for the world is the basis of a truly universal history.
Since diverse peoples on earth have had experiences apart from encounters with this God, religious history must be oriented towards the future. Eventually, God will reveal himself to all humanity. The apocalyptic element of Judaic religion gives it a future-looking vision. Although Judaism is a tribal religion, it projects a universal message through its two daughter religions, Christianity and Islam, which extend God’s promises to all people. Judaic history is highly personalized and thus agreeable to human sensibilities. It incorporates the idea of historical progress. Each epoch has a clear theme.
Starting with Adam’s creation on the sixth day, the Judaic religious history might be divided into the following epochs:
The first epoch began with Adam and Eve, progenitors of the human race. From Adam until Noah, the earth’s people lived without divine guidance.
A second epoch began with God’s promise to Abraham that he would become the father of a great tribe whose descendants would possess the land of Canaan forever. The offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did become numerous during their sojourn in Egypt.
In the third epoch, Moses organized this increasing people into an independent nation. He led the Hebrew people on a migration back to their ancestral homeland and gave them a set of divine laws to obey.
The fourth epoch began with David’s anointment as king of this nation. The Hebrew people acquired their own political empire. After Solomon’s reign, the empire fell apart in a period of more or less unrighteous kings. This epoch ended with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and the exile of Jewish leaders to Babylon.
A fifth epoch began with Jewish prophetic writings during the Babylonian captivity and with the subsequent return from exile and restoration of the Temple cult. This was a period of Messianic expectation that God would restore the Jewish nation to its former prominence. The epoch ended with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
The sixth epoch encompasses Jewish experience during the Diaspora. It began with rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s establishment of a religious academy in Jamnia shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem.
The seventh epoch began with the success of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist movement which restored a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 A.D.
Starting with the fifth epoch, the record of past events was mixed with an idealized history projected onto the future. Jewish prophecies written at that time presented a scenario of coming events which culminated in the time when the Messiah appeared and God’s Kingdom was established on earth. The next part of the story would be the Messiah’s appearance; and that has not yet happened. Therefore, this history is essentially on hold. Many interesting things may have happened in the meantime but nothing of religious consequence. Christianity shares these expectations, with a twist. Christians believe that the Messiah has already come in the person of Jesus. However, he did not come in the glorious manner that was foretold in prophecy. Consequently, the Christian community now looks forward to a “Second Coming” when Jesus, arisen from the dead and revealed as Son of God, will return to satisfy the full range of Messianic expectations.
The Messiah was a character in a story. It was a story of future history which Jesus knew and self-consciously worked to complete. In the coming day of the Lord, wrote the prophets, God would bring vengeance upon the enemies of Israel and restore the Jewish nation to the glory it had possessed in the days of David and Solomon. One of David’s descendants, the Messiah, would act as God’s agent in the course of those events. When Jesus said in the Gospels, “the kingdom of God is upon you”, he meant that the scenario of events foretold in Messianic prophecy was about to happen. Jesus was himself stepping into this story to fulfill its conditions. (Already the prophet Elijah had returned in the form of John the Baptist.) However, God’s timetable is different than man’s, so that human expectations are easily deceived. Jesus spoke of the Son of Man, or the Messiah, “coming on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory.” He spoke of wars, earthquakes, famines, and other “birth-pangs of the new age.” The apocalyptic event to which Jesus referred would mark the dividing point between two historical epochs. The preceding epoch would consist of events in ordinary history. That which followed would be a post-historic time when God’s perfect Kingdom would come down to earth.
The prophet Mohammed appeared on earth six centuries after Jesus’s death. Moslems believe that he, like Jesus, was a prophet in the Judaic tradition. Such divinely appointed figures periodically deliver new messages from God. Historical epochs run in the times from one major prophet to another. Yet, the messages delivered by God’s prophets are often considered heresies by followers of the previous tradition. The Jews rejected Christian teachings. Christians and Jews both rejected Moslem teachings. The reverse was not true. Christians accepted the religious validity of Judaism up to the time that Jesus lived, but afterwards they condemned the Jewish people for rejecting God’s son. Likewise, Moslems acknowledge the divine origin of both the Christian and Jewish faiths while faulting their adherents for rejecting the message delivered by the last and greatest prophet, Mohammed. One perceives in this the idea of historical progress. The last of God’s messengers is best because, assuming that his inspiration comes from God, he is delivering a more suitable and complete message for the times. Then, once again, living history is closed. God does not speak.
Long after the time of Jesus and Mohammed there appeared another kind of prophet, a political economist named Karl Marx. Proclaiming that religions were “an opiate of the people”, this economist nevertheless embraced the historical view of Judaic religion. Marx argued that the forms of economic relationship in a society control its political, cultural, and spiritual life. Social progress occurs when the relationships change. So humanity has advanced in successive epochs from savagery to barbarism and to civilization. Civilization has advanced from societies with slave-based economies to feudal societies and then to those based upon the capitalistic system. A further and final progression was expected from capitalism to the socialist order. Violent insurrections and social upheavals marked the points of change. As the French revolution brought society from feudalism to a capitalistic economy, so a bloody revolution would take place when capitalism gave way to a socialist society. Its peaceful activities would fill history’s final epoch.
A revolutionary event did take place when Lenin and his followers seized political power in Russia in 1917. The Bolsheviks liquidated the old order and remade society according to socialist principles. This was the Marxist equivalent of apocalypse. In theory, a “kingdom” of everlasting perfection had been created in the form of a society whose government was committed to managing the economy according to scientific principles. The certainty of science, rather than God’s will, guaranteed that history would unfold as Marx and Engels had prophesied. A tumultuous change in governments, rather than divine intervention, brought about a change in the world order. Lenin, as a secular Messiah, presided over this process of epochal change. Unfortunately for Marxist believers, the Russian revolutionaries had an opportunity to put their theory into practice. Lenin found it expedient to revive the sagging Soviet economy by introducing capitalistic incentives. Stalin resorted to terror to enforce the socialist program. The system bogged down in production inefficiencies, militarism, and spiritual decay. Seventy five years later, the communist state came to an end in Russia. Socialism was revealed to be, not society’s final stage, but a place on the way back to capitalism.
Hegel’s Scheme of Historical Progress
An important influence upon the Marxist history was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who lectured at the University of Berlin in the 1820s. His work added a historical dimension to western idealistic philosophies. Like Plato and Aristotle, Hegel held that reason controlled worldly events. Unlike them, he envisioned that ideas, or their worldly representations, turned into something else during the process of being realized. World history exhibited progress in ideas. Hegel believed that the various institutions in society were produced through rational processes driven by historical necessity. World history proceeded by a dynamic of institutional development which followed dialectical logic. By this logic, purposes which have been realized bring into existence new purposes which pull in the opposite direction. While an idea of purpose is being fulfilled in the world, it tends to create its opposite, which is the antithesis of this idea. The two movements together then create a synthesis which reconciles their conflicting tendencies in a more complex form. Believing that society’s material conditions governed ideas, Karl Marx converted Hegelian dialectics into the philosophy of dialectical materialism.
Hegel’s thoughts on world history are expressed in The Philosophy of History, based on lectures first given in 1822. In his view, the major figures of history were persons “whose own particular aims involve those larger issues which are the will of the World-Spirit.” They knew which historical possibilities were “ripe for development” in their own time. Hegel saw world history as a process of developing towards an ever increasing state of freedom in human society. “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” he declared. A German chauvinist, Hegel wrote that “the History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.” He divided world history into epochs associated with: (1) Asia, (2) Greece, (3) Rome, and (4) Germany. The “Roman”, or Christian, era was divided into the periods between the time of Jesus and Charlemagne and between Charlemagne and Martin Luther. The “German” era comprised the period between Martin Luther’s time and the 19th century. Hegel believed that German culture was superior to the previous types of culture because it exhibited the highest degree of freedom. While the slave-based societies of Greece and Rome were aware of freedom for some people, contemporary Germans were first to realize that “man is free” and freedom is the end of all history.
Hegel’s philosophy assumes that a universal mind controls the world, ever spinning out new forms. These forms have a permanent existence somewhere. In that respect, Hegel’s scheme is like Plato’s. However, Plato had little interest in the changing nature of human societies. Hegel was first to recognize the social dynamic underlying history. His philosophy conveys the idea of historical progress. Since the Hegelian world mind is universal, its processes are equally valid for the Chinese, Peruvian Incas, and west Europeans. Like God, this mind is capable of creating a unified world history. Since ideas are indestructible, the world fills up with more of them as new ideas are created. Development occurs in a single direction. There will be turning points when the force of newly created ideas begins to be felt within human society. There will be historical epochs describing the times when one or another idea system holds sway. While cloaked in objectivity, Hegel’s history is, however, really another form of religious history. As such, it is prone to ethnocentric bias.
Theories of Historical Recurrence
If the historian does not believe in God or in the idea of a universal mind creating worldly institutions, then the mechanism to ensure that world history will follow a single course is missing. The idea of historical progress stands on shaky ground. All that the historian can do is report the histories of separate cultures that have come and gone in the past. “Vanity, vanity ... all is vanity ... What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing is nothing new under the sun,” said the worldly wise preacher in Ecclesiastes. Only fools believe that what they now see is being experienced for the very first time. If one studies history, one finds precedents in earlier society for nearly every idea or type of behavior that one observes today. On the other hand, the conditions of contemporary life do seem to be different than in the past. Which theory is correct? Does human society continually develop new and more sophisticated and complex kinds of institutions or does worldly experience repeat in predictable cycles?
In the view of eastern religion, a person’s earthly existence is but a single incarnation of soul. Life goes round like a wheel, which is the wheel of delusion and suffering. The object of religious practice is to escape the karmic cycles of incarnation through personal enlightenment or direct experience of God. World history is not a major concern of persons with this outlook. If worldly events repeat in cycles, nothing which happens in a particular cycle can have much significance. The most interesting thing in life would be the possibility of jumping off its revolving treadmill to merge with the cosmic being.
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, advanced the idea that worldly empires inevitably become corrupt and fail. When people refer to “the lesson of history”, they are normally suggesting a parallel between past societies like Rome’s which have collapsed and disappeared and their own society which they believe has entered into the stage of moral decay. Presumably, contemporary society might heed the historical warning and take steps to avoid disaster before it is too late. The fact that Gibbon believed that Christianity had undermined Roman morals and faith does not stop Christian moralists from lamenting today’s decline in religious faith. However that may be, Rome’s example of a civilization that has disappeared has impressed upon western minds the impermanence of earthly cultures. World history has become a kind of garden in which past and present civilizations can be seen and compared.
Spengler’s History
A German historian, Oswald Spengler, popularized historical recurrence in the early 20th century. He believed that human cultures have a life cycle like those of natural organisms. As an individual person matures and grows old, so entire cultures experience a state of ripeness and then die when they have exhausted the possibilities inherent in their type. His theory, presented in Decline of the West, proposed that western culture had reached that stage. Spengler’s aim was to create a new method of analyzing history which he called the “morphology” of history. That technique implied that human societies could be understood, and their futures predicted, by recognizing the cultural forms which appeared at certain times in their development. Though the particular forms might be different for the different cultures, they could also be chronologically analogous, or “contemporary”, in terms of life cycle. “It is a matter of knowledge,” wrote Spengler, “that the expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons, are ever repeating themselves true to type.”
Spengler was contemptuous of historians who held that world history exhibits progress. They were, he said, “a sort of tapeworm industriously adding onto itself one epoch after another.” Instead, human cultures were like the various species of plant or animal life. Spengler declared: “I see in place of that empty figment of one linear history, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image ... Each Culture has its own new possibilities which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.”
The idea of organic life cycles led Spengler to make distinction between culture and civilization. “A culture”, he wrote, “is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself ... It blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul ... The aim once attained, the culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals ... and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years.” Spengler’s assessment of the West’s future arose from his belief that European society had entered into the phase of civilization. Its creative potential had been realized. This was not classical Greece or Gothic Europe, but a time of moribund empire. With cold and calculated decisions, London banks were tightening their grip upon society. All else had been pushed to the limit. Extinction remained the only unrealized possibility.
Toynbee’s Theory of Civilizations
Spengler’s was not an ethnocentric history. Western culture was merely one of several cultural types that had appeared in world history. Spengler did not consider this to be better than the others or unique, just different. Arnold Toynbee, British author of A Study of History, admitted to having once been in awe of Spengler’s “firefly flashes of historical insight” and have wondered “whether my whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions ... had fully taken shape in my own mind.” He agreed with the idea that different cultures might have parallel histories, but disagreed with Spengler’s practice of treating preconceived metaphors as if they were ironclad historical principles. Toynbee supposed this to reflect a difference in national traditions of scholarly thinking. “Where the German a priori method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism,” he declared.
Toynbee proposed that “the intelligible unit of historical study is neither a nation state nor mankind as a whole but a certain grouping of humanity which we have called a society.” A society, he said, provides “common ground” for communities of people to engage in various pursuits. Civilizations were societies that had advanced to a certain level. In A Study of History, Toynbee set about to identify and examine societies of that kind. He found twenty-one different examples. (See the following table.) Of the twenty-one civilizations, eight still exist while thirteen have become extinct. Toynbee acknowledged that world history also includes societies which have not become civilizations. Some, such as the Irish or Nestorian Christian cultures, were “abortive” civilizations. Others, including the Polynesian and Eskimo cultures, were “arrested” civilizations. Numerous other societies were what Toynbee called “primitive societies.” In 1915, a team of anthropologists counted 650 different cultures of that type.
Toynbee's Twenty-one Civilizations
name place when began
Egyptiac Egypt before 4000 B.C.
Sumeric Iraq before 3500 B.C.
Minoan Crete & Cyprus before 3000 B.C.
Hittite Turkey before 1500 B.C.
Babylonic Iraq & Syria before 1500 B.C.
Syriac Syria before 1100 B.C.
Western Christian Western Europe before 700 A.D.
Orthodox Christian Turkey & Balkans before 700 A.D.
Russian Orthodox Russia 10th century A.D.
Arabic Arabia before 1300 A.D.
Iranic Persia before 1300 A.D.
Sinic China c. 1500 B.C.
Indic India c. 1500 B.C.
Far Eastern China before 500 A.D.
Far Eastern - Japanese Japan after 500 A.D.
Hindu India before 800 A.D.
Mayan Central America before 500 B.C.
Andean Peru c. 1st Century A.D.
Yucatec Mexico after 629 A.D.
Mexic Mexico after 629 A.D.
Source: Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford Univ. Press, 1956 Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Initially, one might suppose that the more advanced and successful kinds of societies were blessed with richer soils, more intelligent people, more advanced technology, or some other advantage. Having studied the matter, Toynbee concluded that societies did not prosper through natural advantage but through the experience of successfully meeting a challenge. For example, the early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia faced the challenge of desiccation in the waning years of the Ice Age, as once lush grasslands turned to desert. In response to that challenge, they constructed irrigation works which provided water for agriculture. Likewise, communities on the frontier with barbarian peoples or in a buffer zone between two different societies are often stimulated to superior achievement. Primitive societies, on the other hand, tend to be satisfied with doing things in the same way as before. Lacking a reason to change, they let custom settle upon them with a thick crust. If the society experiences too much hardship, though, it might become retarded or destroyed.
Prehistoric conditions describe life in a state of nature. Allegorically, this may be identified with the Garden of Eden where life is balanced and perfect. A new element enters into this world to upset its balance and set in motion a process of recovery. Such an event represents “an intrusion of the Devil into the universe of God”. If God’s prehistoric world is balanced and perfect, then historical times are unbalanced and evil. They exhibit a dynamism born of the need to correct error. Yet, the less perfect, civilized societies invariably prevail in confrontations with primitive peoples. That is because their long experience of creative struggle has given these societies the knowledge and power both to tame nature and conquer other human communities. The Biblical story of Cain and Abel personifies this process. “Though the Lord may have respect for Abel,” wrote Toynbee, “no power can save Abel from being slain by Cain.”
Toynbee offered an analogy to describe humanity’s “advancement” from a primitive to a civilized state. “Primitive societies,” he wrote, “may be likened to people lying torpid upon a ledge on a mountainside, with a precipice below and a precipice above; civilizations may be likened to companions of those sleepers who have just risen to their feet and have started to climb up the face of the cliff above ... Starting with the mutation of primitive societies into civilizations, we have found that this consists in a transition from a static condition to a dynamic condition.” It was a process known to ancient Chinese philosophers: “This alternating rhythm of static and dynamic, of movement and pause and movement, has been ... described ... (by Chinese sages) ... in terms of Yin and Yang - Yin the static and Yang the dynamic ... In the Chinese formula Yin is always mentioned first, and, within our field of vision, we can see that our breed, having reached the ‘ledge’ of primitive human nature 300,000 years ago, has reposed there for ninety-eight percent of that period before entering on the Yang-activity of civilization.”
Toynbee, like Spengler, believed that civilizations pass through life cycles that bring certain events. Their societies typically begin with nomadic tribes who wander into a territory and settle there. Alternatively, they may be resurrected from the social rubble of a fallen civilization. There is generally a “time of troubles” when the new society is put under stress. Civilizations then achieve a “universal state” in the form of a political empire which is able to keep the peace for many years. Finally, the empire decays and falls. A new period of disorder then ensues; and then a new order. A religion created from within the fallen society may provide a cultural structure from which the next civilization can emerge. Toynbee compared this process with a chrysalis connecting moribund insects with larvae that appear in the next generation. The Christian church was such a link between the moribund society of the late Roman empire and the one subsequently ruled by Frankish kings. A similar event took place in China as Mahayana Buddhism penetrated and converted the Han dynasty.
According to Toynbee, the twenty-one civilizations were related to each other generationally, as if arranged in a family tree. (See the following table.) “The continuity of history is not a continuity such as is exemplified in the life of a single individual,” he wrote. “It is rather a continuity made up of the lives of successive generations ... in a manner comparable ... with the relationship of a child to its parent.” Toynbee noted that all known civilizations have existed within the span of three “generations”. A first-generation society would be one which arose, without precedent, by its own efforts. After existing for a time, such a society would typically fall prey to marauding barbarians and disappear. Second-generation societies emerge from the rubble of this collapse, often comprising the same barbarian tribes that were responsible for it. With third-generation societies, the process is repeated.
A Family Tree of Civilizations
first generation
Sumeric
Mayan
second generation
Babylonic
Hittite
Yucatec
Mexic
first generation
Minoan
second generation
Syriac
Hellenic
third generation
Iranic
Arabic
Western Christian
Orthodox Christian
Russian Orthodox
first generation
Sinic
Indic
second generation
Far Eastern
Japanese
Hindu
Source: Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford Univ. Press, 1956. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
In such manner, the Hittite and Babylonian civilizations took the place of the Sumeric, their parent, after it collapsed in the 16th century, B.C. A satellite of Sumerian society, the Minoan, was parent to the Syriac and Hellenic civilizations. The Minoans were a seafaring people on Crete and neighboring islands who were overcome by an avalanche of uncivilized peoples around 1200 B.C. Hellenic society was formed from descendants of these people settling along the coastal regions of the Aegean sea. Syriac society was formed from peoples who settled at the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea about the same time. It included the Hebrew kingdom of David and Solomon, Phoenician settlements in Lebanon and North Africa (Carthage), and the Persian Hebrew empire established by Cyrus. Belatedly this society achieved a universal state in the empire created by Mohammed and his successors. Hellenic civilization was spread through Asia and Africa by the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Romans later embraced it.
Syriac society was parent to two third-generation societies which were created through Islamic religion. The Syriac and Hellenic (or Graeco-Roman) societies together gave birth to Christianity, which, in turn, spawned three third-generation societies. These were the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and Western Christian societies. The remaining Old World civilizations which exist today, located in Asia, are offspring of two other first-generation societies, the Indic and Sinic. Both are products of world religions that had contact with Hellenic civilization at critical points in their development. Mahayana Buddhism, prevalent in China and Japan, was a variant of the Buddhist teaching which developed in the Greek kingdom of Bactria and its Kushan successor state in northern India. The modern Hindu religion is also a product of that cultural cross-fertilization. In the New World, the Andean (Inca) and Mayan societies were first-generation civilizations. Mayan society was parent to the Yucatec and Mexic civilizations overthrown by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
A devout Christian, Toynbee envisioned that Christianity might last forever, syncretistically absorbing new influences and being influenced by them. Since western society was culturally linked with this religion, it, too, might continue indefinitely. The repetitious rise and fall of civilizations suggests historical recurrence. The cumulative wisdom of religion suggests cultural progress. Toynbee found a way to reconcile these different elements in the model of a chariot on wheels. Toynbee compared world religion to a chariot which “mounts towards Heaven ... (through) ... the periodic downfalls of civilizations on Earth.” If, as Aeschylus said, wisdom comes from suffering, then the immense suffering that accompanies a fallen society adds to humanity’s fund of moral knowledge. Progress will occur in spiritual understanding even if the material structure of society is bound to life cycles: Turning wheels move the chariot ahead.
A Critique of Toynbee’s Scheme
If civilizations are analogous to plant or animal life, a society in a later generation could not advance much beyond its parent. Locked into this model, historians could not admit that contemporary society appears to be quite different than societies were in the past. Human culture seems obviously to be advancing toward new and better forms of knowledge, organization, and material equipment. We have airplanes, automobiles, and television sets while our remote ancestors had suits of armor, shields, and spears. According to Toynbee, our “western Christian” civilization has existed for nearly 1,400 years. Begun at some time during the 6th century A.D., it is still going strong. To suppose, however, that Europeans and Americans in the late 20th century belong to the same civilization as the one which existed in the time of Charlemagne taxes belief. Then, warrior kings and Popes ruled society; today, kids watch Saturday-morning cartoons on television. While Christianity is an element connecting the two cultures, many other influences also touch modern life.
Toynbee associated changing civilizations with the process of their military and political overthrow. The critical event would be a barbarian invasion of the civilized societies, which resulted in destruction of the old order and creation of a new one. Yet, as Toynbee himself observed, the Christian church was a more important factor in shaping western society than the barbarian invaders. Rome’s state religion, Christianity, brilliantly survived the wreck of the Roman political structure. There was a continuity of beliefs and values between the Roman and Frankish societies. If the Christian religion was the principal force holding this civilization together, then perhaps one should say that the civilization went back farther than the 6th century A.D. Perhaps it began at the time when Constantine embraced Christianity? Better still, it might have started at the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection; or, perhaps, at the time of his birth? Or perhaps this civilization actually began when Jewish prophets first started writing about the Messiah?
The problem may be that Toynbee has equated civilizations with societies. Civilizations he considered to be a subset of societies; they were ones culturally more advanced. By another definition, however, societies may be said to embrace a community’s material organization - its government, its economy, its physical infrastructure - while civilizations pertain to the cultural aspect. Accordingly, a civilization would encompass the dominant set of images, ideas, and values in the society; it would be its fabric of consciousness. If that is so, then a single civilization like Christianity’s might pass ghost-like through several different societies and not end when those societies came to an end. Conversely, a single society might contain several different civilizations. What determines a civilization’s beginning and end may have to do with its pool of consciousness rather than with dynastically continuous governments. Civilization is formed of a people’s historical memory. It constitutes an unbroken awareness of experiences. Society is like the structure of cell tissues in a body.
From the perspective of societies, the turning points of world history would be important battles, successions of rulers, and other elements affecting political organization. However, that approach to history is today making less sense. It used to be that the fortunes of nations were tied to the success of wars waged by their political rulers. If wars were lost, the defeated peoples were slaughtered or taken into slavery. But now, peoples have become morally separated from their governments. We can condemn an Adolf Hitler while helping the German people to recover from the war which he conducted in their name. The history of political empires will be interesting to people if, in some way, they can identify personally with those behemoth-like structures. Otherwise, accumulations of worldly power follow what used to be called “the vain repetition of the Gentiles.” Nothing much is accomplished by their ceaseless rise and fall.
Common Elements in World Culture
Even if the world’s people grew up in separate places on earth, one finds evidences of a common culture. For example, all of Toynbee’s civilizations except for the Inca mastered the technology of writing. One might suppose that, in the Old World, the knowledge of written language spread from Mesopotamia, its first known location, to other lands. It appears less likely that the pre-Columbian Indians had contact with literate societies of the Old World. How then did the Mayans, Aztecs, and other American peoples acquire a script? If their scripts were original, it suggests that some uncanny force drives human cultures. Something in the nature of an organic imperative required that the Mayan people invent written language, as the Sumerians had done, when their society reached a certain stage of development.
Primitive cultures throughout the world have many similar characteristics. They are tribal societies held together by ties of blood kinship. They lack a knowledge of writing. Their practices include, in Arnold Toynbee’s words: “the religion of the annual agricultural cycle; totemism and exogamy; tabus, initiations, and age-classes; segregation of the sexes, at certain stages, in separate communal establishments.” When civilization first appears, society acquires a different set of characteristics. According to Roger Lewin, its institutions include: “sedentism, elaborate burial and substantial tombs, social inequality, occupational specialization, long-distance exchange, technological innovation, (and) warfare.” These characteristics apply to societies throughout the earth. Whether or not the societies had contact with each other, there seem to be a universal process at work as civilizations emerge from tribal society. One finds the same stone-faced pyramids, hierarchies of priest-kings, and wars of conquest in pre-Columbian Mexico as in Shang China and Pharaonic Egypt. One finds the same transition to written language.
We can therefore begin to see the outlines of a world history in the process of moving from one type of culture to another. The adoption of a new cultural technology such as writing would be an element in this process. So would a change in the nature of the society’s power structure. Comparing Toynbee’s description of primitive society with Lewin’s description of the earliest civilizations, one finds a change in the type of society as a relatively small and homogeneous tribal community governed by custom gives way to a large-scale society governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy of kings and priests. The “civilized” society is characterized by this new form of government. Its kings wage wars, use jewelry and fine clothing, facilitate trade, require large burial structures, etc. The technique of writing is useful in transmitting the king’s message to scattered communities of people. The two elements - cultural technologies and institutions of power - go together in certain ways.
The cultural technology is the easier of the two to place within a historical context. If history is a record of events in public life, then the mechanism that transmits awareness of high-level events to the public will be a fundamental part of the process. When a new type of cultural technology is introduced, it creates a new kind of public space. Its own qualities as an expressive medium affect the kind of expression that people receive. Public life changes in a certain way, and history is affected by that change. Our own culture appears to be undergoing a transition away from the use of written language and toward communication through electronic devices such as films, audiotapes, radio, and television. As a reversion from written to spoken language, some would say that this revival of non-literate culture denotes the “end of civilization”. Let us say only that it denotes a different kind of civilization. The communications technology will have a profound impact upon the society and its scheme of values.
Changing Cultural Technologies as a Guide to Historical Epochs
Although cultural technologies and institutions of power are both determining factors in civilization, it might be well to start with a review of cultural technologies. In simplest form, one might envision a three-part scheme of history to describe the progression from (1) preliterate to (2) literate and (3) postliterate societies. Prior to the 4th millennium B.C., all societies had a preliterate culture. Such cultures were based upon oral transmission of the ancestral knowledge. The first literate cultures, which we call “civilizations”, appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia between 3500 and 3000 B.C. Written language came to the Harappan culture of India during the 3rd millennium B.C., and to the Minoan and Chinese cultures around 2000 B.C. Meanwhile, preliterate societies continued in places where the people pursued a nomadic or tribal way of life. In the 20th century A.D., a postliterate culture emerged first in the affluent western societies and then in other societies as the technologies of electronic recording and communication became widely used. However, that did not mean that people ceased to read and write.
Looking at Arnold Toynbee’s list of twenty-one civilizations, one is struck with a sense that the civilizations which Toynbee called “first-generation” societies were different in type than those which he called “second” or “third” generation societies. The first-generation societies included the Egyptiac, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumeric, Mayan, and Indic civilizations. Second-generation societies included the Syriac, Hellenic, and Hindu civilizations, among others. The third-generation societies were offshoots of religious culture, descended from the Syriac and Hellenic civilizations. Apart from their more ancient appearance, the first-generation societies are distinguished from the others by the fact that their societies used pre-alphabetic systems of writing. Admittedly, some second-generation societies - the Yucatec, Mexic, Babylonian, Hittite, Far Eastern, and Japanese civilizations - also possessed this kind of writing. However, the transition from ideographic or syllabic writing to alphabetic scripts is an important element of historical change.
Alphabetic writing first appeared in the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. It was effectively introduced in the eastern Mediterranean region and in India between the 11th and 7th centuries, B.C. The Phoenician, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, and Roman societies all had alphabetic scripts while the earlier Mideastern societies used cuneiform or hieroglyphic ideographic writing. Therefore, a dividing line might be drawn in world history at some point during the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. That line would divide the earliest civilizations from those which are familiar to us from reading the Bible or works of classical literature. Perhaps this literature helps to explain why the Hittites seem alien and cruel while the Greeks seem culturally advanced. The Greek and Roman alphabetic literature creates a cultural bond between these ancient peoples and ourselves. We connect with them through a literate tradition which conveys their philosophies, myths, and religions.
In the middle of the 15th century A.D., the technology of printing was introduced in western Europe. This was another cultural technology which changed society. Printing greatly increased the number and variety of books in circulation. It made printed newspapers possible, and, with them, advertising and the prompt dissemination of news. The age of printing was, therefore, a third epoch within the period of literate culture. In the first epoch, which ran from the 4th millennium B.C. to the first half of the 1st millennium B.C., pre-alphabetic scripts produced a primitive type of literature. In the second epoch, which ran from the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. to the late 15th century A.D., the literate tradition begun in Biblical and classical times continued through handwritten manuscripts written in alphabetic scripts. In the third epoch, which ran from the late 15th century through the end of the 19th century, printed texts dominated the culture.
The postliterate culture of the 20th century is driven by inventions which record and transmit visual and aural images. Its dominant technologies include photography, sound recording, motion pictures, and radio and television broadcasting. In the late 20th century, the computer has also come into popular use. This is a radically different type of device than the others. While computers also work through electronic circuitry, they allow the sensory images to be changed. Two-way communication can take place between the sender and receiver of messages. A whole range of information processing becomes possible with computers that the earlier devices could not handle. Therefore, one might place a dividing line within the history of the postliterate culture to create two epochs, one dominated by the earlier set of communications technologies and the other by computers. However, since the computer age has begun so recently, its epoch is more potentially than historically developed.
Summing up, we have a five-part scheme of world history which would include the following civilizations:
Civilization Approximate Dates
Civilization I 3000 B.C. to 550 B.C.
Civilization II 550 B.C. to 1450 A.D.
Civilization III 1450 A.D. to 1920 A.D.
Civilization IV 1920 A.D. to 1990 A.D.
Civilization V 1990 A.D. to the present
The beginning and ending dates are a bit misleading. World-historical epochs are not marked by clean-cut events which bring one period to an end as another begins. Historians cannot pinpoint such changes in time, saying that one civilization replaced another on a certain date. Regarding the first civilization, only a small fraction of the earth’s population lived in the Sumerian or Egyptian societies. Most still lived in tribal societies. When alphabetic scripts took hold in the middle part of the 1st millennium B.C., many peoples continued to use the older system of writing. The Chinese still do to this day. Handwritten manuscripts did not cease to be produced when printing became available. Literacy has not become a lost skill since radio and television came along. A more complicated model of history is required to describe the process of change.
When a new cultural technology is invented and adopted, it does not altogether replace the older technologies. Neither does its type of culture replace the preceding culture. Rather, the technology and its cultural product join what went before. Society fills up with an increasing variety of elements. At the same time, the new cultural technology, being new and unrealized, tends to project itself more energetically than the old ones. It tends to stamp itself more vigorously upon the culture. Perhaps historical epochs are like the different phases of vegetal growth after a forest fire has charred a section of land. First the ferns return, then shrubs of various types, then small trees like poplar and birch, and finally the taller pines which dominate a forest in its period of mature growth. When a certain type of plant appears in a later phase, the other types do not disappear. The forest simply fills up with a broader mix of vegetation.
We use the terms “epoch” and “civilization” quite interchangeably. They are different aspects of the same thing. A civilization is a kind of cultural presence. An epoch is a period of time. Our scheme of world history maintains that epochs change when the civilizations associated with them change. Although a new cultural technology may be the triggering agent, we are concerned more with the effect. It would be convenient for historians if societies in all parts of the world simultaneously switched from one type of culture to another. We could then have clean-cut epochs presented in simple diagrams. However, the reality is that civilizations arrived in the earth’s societies at different times. For example, the nascent city-state arrived in Egypt and Mesopotamia at least a millennium sooner than it did in China. That means that the beginning date of the first epoch is at least one thousand years earlier in the two Middle Eastern societies than in the Far Eastern society. Even if the same sequence of events is experienced by all or most cultures, the timetable of world history applies differently to the different geographical segments. The civilization itself follows the type of social structure that embodies its relations of power.
A SHORT HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION
6:18 AM | BY ZeroDivide
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