The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 14

The Arabs brought more than just a pay-to-pray tax system. Muhammad had been a big fan of learning and scholars.h.i.+p, and literacy rates in Arab-dominated areas were quite high for the time. Arab scientists excelled in taking the building blocks of cla.s.sical Greek learning and improving on them, especially in math, astronomy, and medicine.

They also left their imprint on architecture and the arts, with intricate geometric designs, pointed arches, and gilded domes. Because they spread out in all directions at once, Arabs brought together heretofore-unknown types of food to other areas of the world, most significantly sugar, rice, and coffee.

Eventually, infighting among factions and a lack of strong leaders led to the weakening of the Arab empire. By the middle of the tenth century, much of the power of Arab caliphs had transited to military commanders who used the t.i.tle "sultan." Many of these were not Arab, but Turk. But they were Muslim, and therefore the political, cultural, and military influence of Islam would continue well into the middle of the next millennium, even as the Arab Empire faded.

IT'S HAMMER TIME Despite their impressive record in terms of empire-expanding, Muslim armies didn't always win. Sometimes this was due to underestimating the enemy. At least that's what happened near Tours, France, in 732.Muslim armies under Emir Abdul Abd-ar-Rahman had just trounced a Frankish force, and were feeling pretty frisky as they got ready to take on another Frankish army, under the command of a guy named Charles. Charles lacked a formal t.i.tle, but was the de facto ruler of much of what is now northern France.Without a real cavalry, Charles had taught his infantry to fight in a phalanx-like formation that resembled a large square. He also carefully picked his place to fight: a wooded area uphill from the enemy, which made it tough for the latter to maneuver on horseback.After six days of feeling out the Frank defenses-which historians figure were probably significantly outnumbered-Abd-ar-Rahman attacked. Bad move. The Arab cavalry could not penetrate the Franks' square; Abd-ar-Rahman was killed, and the Muslim army retreated during the night.One of the significant impacts of the battle was that-coupled with an uprising by the Berbers, former North African allies of the Arabs-it halted Muslim expansion into Europe. The second important effect was that it cemented Charles's hold on the region and paved the way for his son, Pepin the Short, and his grandson, Charlemagne, to follow him.And the coolest result? After the battle, folks began calling the Frankish leader "Charles Martel," or "Charles the Hammer."

China:

Tang-y and Delicious!

While the Arab Empire basically started from scratch, the two dynasties that ran things in China during most of the Not-So-Dark Ages actually did their best work in reestablis.h.i.+ng governmental and cultural structures that had been lost after the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220.

For more than three centuries after the Hans cashed in their chips, China was pretty much a cl.u.s.ter of petty warring kingdoms and badly run territories. Around 550, however, the Chinese formed a temporary alliance with the Turks and drove out a barbarian group known as the Juan-juan. In 581, a Chinese general named Yang Chien became the emperor Wen Ti, the first of two emperors of the short-lived Sui Dynasty.

The Emperor of the land where Sun rises (nihon/hi iduru) (nihon/hi iduru) sends a letter to the Emperor of the land where Sun sets. How are you doing? sends a letter to the Emperor of the land where Sun sets. How are you doing?-j.a.pan's Prince Shotoku to Yangdi, emperor of China, 607

The two Sui leaders employed-surprise-pretty brutal methods to get things done. They got the country's Grand Ca.n.a.l dug, which was a good thing for the farmers of the Yangtze Valley and consumers elsewhere in China. But the cost was the lives of more than one million people who worked on the project. The Sui also resurrected the notion of a strong centralized government.

But high taxes and forced labor led to a peasant revolt in 618, and the beginning of the Tang Dynasty. For just about the next three centuries, Tang rulers would steer China through a most decidedly un-Dark Age. Roads and ca.n.a.ls effectively linked the country together. The Silk Road was reestablished, bringing China's highly coveted goods, such as silk, porcelain, and spices, to the West in return for gold. The city of Chang'an (now called Xian) was one of the world's most ma.s.sive metropolises.

BUT THEY DON'T TAKE AMERICAN EXPRESS Trade grew so rapidly in Tang China, they had a coin shortage. To make up for it, they used paper money and letters of credit. The letters were called "flying cash."

JAYWALKING NOT RECOMMENDED.

Chang'an, city on the plains of the Wei River, southwest of Beijing, was probably the largest in the world in the middle of the eighth century, with more than one million inhabitants in a metropolis that covered thirty square miles.We're talking about a city whose main thoroughfare was as wide as a modern forty-five-lane highway-if we had forty-five-lane highways. There were striking temples and paG.o.das (including the Big Goose PaG.o.da, which is 331 feet high) and a statue of Buddha that was one of the largest in the world.In addition to being a major trade hub, Chang'an was also a spiritual and artistic center. It was so admired that the j.a.panese modeled their own capital of Kyoto after it in 794.

The Tang raised the standards of both the military and the bureaucracy, while allowing commoners a chance to succeed and rise in both areas. The introduction of tea from Southeast Asia helped raised health standards, since boiling the water eliminated a lot of sickness-inducing germs. Artisans devised a kind of three-color glazed porcelain that their European counterparts wouldn't match for several hundred years. And someone invented gunpowder.

POP! CULTURE.

The firecracker's origin is somewhat short on details, and further confused by the invention of gunpowder. Historians believe that as early as the third century, the Chinese were roasting bamboo to enjoy the pop it made when heated. One version of the invention of gunpowder is that an alchemist searching for a formula for eternal life concocted the substance. But the most often-repeated explanation for gunpowder's invention is that a Chinese cook inadvertently mixed up the right proportions of three ingredients-sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal-sometime in the tenth century. All three items would have been found in a Chinese kitchen of the time: the sulfur for intensifying the heat of a cooking fire, the saltpeter as a preservative, and the charcoal as fuel.The idea of confining the powdery substance to a hollowed piece of bamboo is generally credited to a monk named Li Tian, who used them to drive away evil spirits from the city of Liu Yang. Whether it's true or not, the fact is that the city is today one of the world's biggest producers of fireworks.

When it came to matters of the soul, the adaptable Chinese took morality direction from old-school Confucianism and spiritual solace from Buddhism. And the Tang Dynasty's political influence extended far beyond its borders: Korea, what is now Vietnam, and j.a.pan were all heavily swayed in their way of doing things by the Chinese. j.a.pan, in fact, began largely to model its government structures after the Tang model. In fact, Tang China was considered so cool by the rest of the world that large Chinese cities of the time were truly cosmopolitan, sporting communities of expatriate Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Asians, Turks, and other a.s.sorted groups.

Internal power struggles and external sniping by barbarian groups and the Turks, however, gradually led to the disintegration of the Tang Dynasty, which disappeared in 907. What reappeared was another century of governmental and cultural chaos in China.

The Byzantine Empire

(aka the Eastern Half of the Empire Previously Known as Rome)

If the Arabs were inventing themselves and the Chinese reinventing themselves, empire-ically speaking, the Byzantine Empire was basically trying to hang on to and preserve the status quo during this period.

What had originally been the eastern half of the Roman Empire kept a lot of what was good about that ent.i.ty (e.g., a well-organized government structure), while harking back to the Greeks for some stuff (such as a common language).

Centered on its capital of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire was well situated to act as the world's middleman when it came to trade between East and West. The empire's bezant replaced the Roman denarius as the world's most widely accepted currency, and Byzantine merchants took a little taste of the action in goods that flowed through the empire in both directions.

While it had able leaders at the beginning and end of the Not-So-Dark Era (Justinian at the front and Basil II at the end), the Byzantine Empire did occasionally have a bozo in control. Nonetheless, it did okay even during those periods, mostly because the Roman way of doing things still lingered in the bureaucracy.

It also didn't hurt that most of the time farmers doubled as soldiers, which kept down the expense of standing armies, which in turn helped keep taxes low. In addition, the codification of Roman law in 534 by Justinian helped reinforce the legal system and served as a model for Western legal thought for centuries to come.

Although it spent a good deal of time fighting off the attentions of Rome's old rivals, the Persians, the Byzantine Empire generally chugged along during this period. In the sixth century, Justinian's armies expanded the empire nearly to the limits of the old Roman Empire. In the tenth century, Basil II took back a lot of land that had been lost to the Arabs, and claimed new territory in Eastern Europe. As the millennium ended, the Byzantines were still hanging in there, although somewhat withered by age and attrition. They would continue to hang for a few hundred years more.

GOT SILK?.

For centuries, the Chinese jealously guarded the secret that silk was produced from the coc.o.o.ns of the mulberry silk moth. Their secret eventually reached India in the fourth century CE, but the West still had to pay dearly for it.Sometime around the middle of the sixth century, however, according to the Byzantine historian Procopius, two Indian monks came up with a way to smuggle the insects' eggs out China to Constantinople, by covering them in dung to keep them alive and secreting them in their hollowed-out walking sticks.However the eggs actually got there, by the middle of the next century, sericulture (the process of silk production) had become a thriving industry in the West.

BASHED AND BLINDED BULGARS.

Basil II was only five when his dad, the Byzantine emperor Romanos II died, so he had to wait quite awhile to succeed his pop. While he was waiting, he honed his military skills.It proved to be time well spent. Once he took over the empire, he beat back uprisings by powerful landowners in Asia Minor, in part by marrying off his sister to a Russian prince. In return, Prince Vladimir I of Kiev allied his armies with Basil's and converted to the Orthodox Christian Church. Then he whupped the Arabs and restored much of Syria to Byzantine rule.Basil followed this up by beating the Bulgarians. After crus.h.i.+ng the Bulgarian army at the Battle of Kleidion, he had 99 percent of the fifteen thousand captured enemy soldiers blinded. The remaining 1 percent had only one of their eyes put out, so they could lead the rest back to the Bulgarian leader, who subsequently died of a stroke.By the time of Basil's death in 1025, the Byzantine Empire was at its greatest height in several centuries. When he died at the age of sixty-seven, he was buried near the cavalry field, reportedly so that he could forever hear his troops training for battle.

The Roman Empire

(aka the Western Half of the Larger Empire Previously Also and Somewhat Confusingly Known as Rome)

The western half of the old Roman Empire (which covered most of what we now call Europe), however, was another story. The collapse of the empire left Europe with no central government and no military protection. The population of urban areas rapidly dwindled, since cities were prime targets for marauding hordes. (This turned out to have something of a silver lining, since more people on the farms meant more production, and famine generally lessened.)

O Christ...if you accord me the victory...I will believe in you and be baptized in your name. I have called on my G.o.ds, but I have found from experience that they are far from my aid...it is you whom I believe able to defeat my enemies.-A contemporary account of the prayer offered by the Frankish ruler Clovis before a battle in 496 with a Germanic tribe. Clovis won and not only converted to Christianity, but forced his entire army to convert as well.

The transportation system fell apart, and since Europe's main exports were heavy things such as timber and metals that were hard to transport, trade with the rest of the world withered. People rarely traveled far from home, which meant the exchange of ideas ceased.

Even here, however, where the "Dark Ages" appellation could arguably be applied, there was progress. Stone and wooden tools were replaced with metal implements. The water-powered mill became commonplace. Farmers learned to rotate their crops in order to rejuvenate soil. And the harness was redesigned so that it fell across a horse's shoulders rather than its throat, thus increasing its proficiency in pulling a plow.

Charlemagne managed to put together a respectable empire in the second half of the eighth century, and even got crowned Holy Roman emperor in 800 by the pope after helping his holiness out of a jam in northern Italy with a Germanic group called the Lombards. But things soon fell apart again after Charlemagne's death, and Europe reverted to a collection of futilely feuding feudal states.

If there was a unifying element for Europeans during this period, it was their fear and hatred of their northernmost brethren, the Vikings (more to come on these guys).

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY.

Around 600 CE, craftsmen along the Rhine River and in Normandy came up with a way to roll gla.s.s into flat panels that could be used in windows-something the Romans were never able to perfect.

LACKl.u.s.tER LEADERS, SUPERIOR SOBRIQUETS.

They didn't get to vote for their leaders, but that didn't stop folks in the Not-So-Dark Ages from giving their rulers some pretty descriptive nicknames. Such as: Basil the Macedonian, Basil the Bulgar Slayer, Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Edred Weak-in-the-feet, Edward the Martyr, Louis the Pious, Louis the German, Louis the Sluggard, and Louis the Stammerer.The roots of most nicknames were pretty self-explanatory. Pepin the Short, for example, was, at a reported three-foot-six, decidedly height-challenged. (Conversely, one of Pepin's sons, Charles the Great, aka Charlemagne, was a really big guy, described as being seven times as tall as the length of his foot, or about six-foot-four.)But the nicknames weren't always straightforward. Take Ethelred the Unready. Historians say the name wasn't due to his not being prepared. Instead, the language of the time meant that he was "without counsel," or lacked good advice. That made it sort of a pun, since Ethelred Ethelred meant "well-advised." meant "well-advised."

The Americas:

Huari and Chimu and Toltecs...Oh My!

In what is now Peru, the Huari culture conquered a five-hundred-mile-long strip on the coastal side of the Andes and supplanted the Moche. Another Peruvian group settled around a town called Tiahuanaco, in the Bolivian highlands, which eventually grew to a population of thirty-five thousand, or much bigger than London or Paris at the time. In northern Peru, a group called the Chimu was making its presence felt. All three were predecessors to an even greater culture to come: the Inca.

In Central America, the Mayan civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula had peaked and was on its way down. A new group, the Toltec, had traded its meandering ways for militaristic ones, and was taking over much of central Mexico.

And in the Southwest of North America, several tribes were developing irrigation systems and creating high-quality ceramics, while tribes in the Mississippi Valley were mastering the bow and arrow and settling in true towns.

But all of this was just a warm-up for the advent of civilizations in the Americas that in terms of architecture, sophistication, science, and really sick bloodthirsty gore would rival any of those in Europe and Asia.

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