So with the death of this unnamed martyr the great persecution opened.

But, as Gibbon points out, our information as to its severity is of very

doubtful value. He estimates the total of victims as about two thousand,

and contrasts this with the known multitudes of Christians martyred by

their fellow Christians during the period of the Reformation. Gibbon was

strongly prejudiced against Christianity, and here he seems disposed to

minimize the fortitude and sufferings of the Christians. In many

provinces, no doubt, there must have been a great reluctance to enforce

the edict. But there was a systematic hunt for the copies of Holy Writ,

and in many places a systematic destruction of Christian churches. There

were tortures and executions, as well as a great crowding of the gaols

with Christian presbyters and bishops. We have to remember that the

Christian community was now a very considerable element of the

population, and that an influential proportion of the officials charged

with the execution of the edict were themselves of the proscribed faith.

Galerius, who was in control of the eastern provinces, was among the

most vigorous of the persecutors, but in the end, on his deathbed (371),

he realized the futility of his attacks upon this huge community, and

granted toleration in an edict, the gist of which Gibbon translates as

follows:--

“Among the important cares which have occupied our mind for the utility

and preservation of the empire, it was our intention to correct and

re-establish all things according to the ancient laws and public

discipline of the Romans. We were particularly desirous of reclaiming

into the way of reason and nature the deluded Christians who had

renounced the religion and ceremonies instituted by their fathers; and

presumptuously despising the practice of antiquity, had invented

extravagant laws and opinions according to the dictates of their fancy,

and had collected a various society from the different provinces of our

empire. The edicts which we have published to enforce the worship of the

gods having exposed many of the Christians to danger and distress, many

having suffered death, and many more who still persist in their impious

folly, being left destitute of any public exercise of religion, we are

disposed to extend to those unhappy men the effects of our wonted

clemency. We permit them, therefore, freely to profess their private

opinions and to assemble in their conventicles without fear or

molestation, provided always that they preserve a due respect to the

established laws and government. By another rescript we shall signify

our intentions to the judges and magistrates; and we hope that our

indulgence will engage the Christians to offer up their prayers to the

deity whom they adore, for our safety and prosperity, for their own, and

for that of the republic.”

In a few years Constantine the Great was reigning, first as associated

emperor (312) and then as the sole ruler (324), and the severer trials

of Christianity were over. If Christianity was a rebellious and

destructive force towards a pagan Rome, it was a unifying and organizing

force within its own communion. This fact the genius of Constantine

grasped. The spirit of Jesus, for all the doctrinal dissensions that

prevailed, made a great freemasonry throughout and even beyond the

limits of the empire. The faith was spreading among the barbarians

beyond the border; it had extended into Persia and Central Asia. It

provided the only hope of moral solidarity he could discern in the great

welter of narrow views and self-seeking over which he had to rule. It,

and it alone, had the facilities for organizing _will_, for the need of

which the empire was falling to pieces like a piece of rotten cloth. In

312 Constantine had to fight for Rome and his position against

Maxentius. He put the Christian monogram upon the shields and banners of

his troops, and claimed that the God of the Christians had fought for

him in his complete victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge just

outside Rome. By this act he renounced all those pretensions to divinity

that the vanity of Alexander the Great had first brought into the

western world, and with the applause and enthusiastic support of the

Christians he established himself as a monarch more absolute even than

Diocletian.

In a few years’ time Christianity had become the official religion of

the empire, and in A.D. 337 Constantine upon his deathbed was baptized

as a Christian.[294]

§ 7

The figure of Constantine the Great is at least as cardinal in history

as that of Alexander the Great or Augustus Cæsar. We know very little of

his personality or of his private life; no Plutarch, no Suetonius, has

preserved any intimate and living details about him. Abuse we have of

him from his enemies, and much obviously fulsome panegyric to set

against it; but none of these writers give us a living character of him;

he is a party symbol for them, a partisan flag. It is stated by the

hostile Zosimus that, like Sargon I, he was of illegitimate birth; his

father was a distinguished general and his mother, Helena, an

innkeeper’s daughter of Nish in Serbia. Gibbon,[295] however, is of

opinion that there was a valid marriage. In any case it was a lowly

marriage, and the personal genius of Constantine prevailed against

serious disadvantages. He was comparatively illiterate, he knew little

or no Greek. It appears to be true that he banished his eldest son

Crispus, and caused him to be executed at the instigation of the young

man’s stepmother, Fausta; and it is also recorded that he was afterwards

convinced of the innocence of Crispus, and caused Fausta to be

executed--according to one account by being boiled to death in her bath,

and according to another by being exposed naked to wild beasts on a

desolate mountain--while there is also very satisfactory documentary

evidence that she survived him. If she was executed, the fact remains

that her three sons, together with two nephews, became the appointed

heirs of Constantine. Clearly there is nothing solid to be got from this

libellous tangle, and such soufflé as is possible with these scanty

materials is to be found admirably done by Gibbon (chap. xviii.).

Gibbon, because of his anti-Christian animus, is hostile to Constantine;

but he admits that he was temperate and chaste. He accuses him of

prodigality because of his great public buildings, and of being vain and

dissolute (!) because in his old age he wore a wig--Gibbon wore his own

hair tied with a becoming black bow--and a diadem and magnificent robes.

But all the later emperors after Diocletian wore diadems and magnificent

robes.

But if the personality of Constantine the Great remains phantom-like, if

the particulars of his domestic life reveal nothing but a vague tragedy,

we can still guess at much that was in his mind. It must, in the closing

years of his life, have been a very lonely mind. He was more of an

autocrat than any previous emperor had been--that is to say, he had less

counsel and help. No class of public-spirited and trustworthy men

remained; no senate nor council shared and developed his schemes. How

much he apprehended the geographical weakness of the empire, how far he

saw the complete disaster that was now so near, we can only guess. He

made his real capital at Nicomedia in Bithynia; Constantinople across

the Bosphorus was still being built when he died. Like Diocletian, he

seems to have realized the broken-backed outline of his dominions, and

to have concentrated his attention on foreign affairs and more

particularly on the affairs of Hungary, South Russia, and the Black Sea.

He reorganized all the official machinery of the empire; he gave it a

new constitution and sought to establish a dynasty. He was a restless

remaker of things; the social confusion he tried to fix by assisting in

the development of a caste system. This was following up the work of his

great predecessor Diocletian. He tried to make a caste of the peasants

and small cultivators, and to restrict them from moving from their

holdings. In fact he sought to make them serfs. The supply of slave

labour had fallen off because the empire was no longer an invading but

an invaded power; he turned to serfdom as the remedy. His creative

efforts necessitated unprecedentedly heavy taxation. All these things

point to a lonely and forcible mind. It is in his manifest understanding

of the need of some unifying moral force if the empire was to hold

together that his claim to originality lies.

It was only after he had turned to Christianity that he seems to have

realized the fierce dissensions of the theologians. He made a great

effort to reconcile these differences in order to have one uniform and

harmonious teaching in the community, and at his initiative a general

council of the Church was held at Nicæa, a town near Nicomedia and over

against Constantinople, in 325. Eusebius gives a curious account of this

strange gathering, over which the Emperor, although he was not yet a

baptized Christian, presided. It was not his first council of the

Church, for he had already (in 313) presided over a council at Arles. He

sat in the midst of the council of Nicæa upon a golden throne, and as he

had little Greek, we must suppose he was reduced to watching the

countenances and gestures of the debaters, and listening to their

intonations. The council was a stormy one. When old Arius rose to speak,

one Nicholas of Myra struck him in the face, and afterwards many ran

out, thrusting their fingers into their ears in affected horror at the

old man’s heresies. One is tempted to imagine the great emperor, deeply

anxious for the soul of his empire, firmly resolved to end these

divisions, bending towards his interpreters to ask them the meaning of

the uproar.

The views that prevailed at Nicæa are embodied in the Nicene Creed, a

strictly Trinitarian statement, and the Emperor sustained the

Trinitarian position. But afterwards, when Athanasius bore too hardly

upon the Arians, he had him banished from Alexandria; and when the

church at Alexandria would have excommunicated Arius, he obliged it to

readmit him to communion.

§ 8

This date, 325 A.D., is a very convenient date in our history. It is the

date of the first complete general (“œcumenical”) council of the

entire Christian world. (That at Arles we have mentioned had been a

gathering of only the western half.) It marks the definite entry upon

the stage of human affairs of the Christian church and of Christianity

as it is generally understood in the world to-day. It marks the exact

definition of Christian teaching by the Nicene Creed.

It is necessary that we should recall the reader’s attention to the

profound differences between this fully developed Christianity of Nicæa

and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All Christians hold that the

latter is completely contained in the former, but that is a question

outside our province. What is clearly apparent is that the teaching of

Jesus of Nazareth was a _prophetic teaching_ of the new type that began

with the Hebrew prophets. It was not priestly, it had no consecrated

temple and no altar. It had no rites and ceremonies. Its sacrifice was

“a broken and a contrite heart.” Its only organization was an

organization of preachers, and its chief function was the sermon. But

the fully fledged Christianity of the fourth century, though it

preserved as its nucleus the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, was

mainly a _priestly religion_ of a type already familiar to the world for

thousands of years. The centre of its elaborate ritual was an altar, and

the essential act of worship the sacrifice, by a consecrated priest, of

the mass. And it had a rapidly developing organization of deacons,

priests, and bishops.

But if Christianity had taken on an extraordinary outward resemblance

to the cults of Serapis, Ammon, or Bel-Marduk, we must remember that

even its priestcraft had certain novel features. Nowhere did it possess

any quasi-divine image of God. There was no head temple containing the

god, because God was everywhere. There was no holy of holies. Its

widespread altars were all addressed to the unseen universal Trinity.

Even in its most archaic aspects there was in Christianity something

new.

A very important thing for us to note is the rôle played by the Emperor

in the fixation of Christianity. Not only was the council of Nicæa

assembled by Constantine the Great, but all the great councils, the two

at Constantinople (381 and 553), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451),

were called together by the imperial power. And it is very manifest that

in much of the history of Christianity at this time the spirit of

Constantine the Great is as evident or more evident than the spirit of

Jesus. He was, we have said, a pure autocrat. The last vestiges of Roman

republicanism had vanished in the days of Aurelian and Diocletian. To

the best of his lights he was trying to remake the crazy empire while

there was yet time, and he worked without any councillors, any public

opinion, or any sense of the need of such aids and checks. The idea of

stamping out all controversy and division, stamping out all thought, by

imposing one dogmatic creed upon all believers, is an altogether

autocratic idea, it is the idea of the single-handed man who feels that

to work at all he must be free from opposition and criticism. The

history of the Church under his influence becomes now therefore a

history of the violent struggles that were bound to follow upon his

sudden and rough summons to unanimity. From him the Church acquired the

disposition to be authoritative and unquestioned, to develop a

centralized organization and run parallel to the empire.

A second great autocrat who presently contributed to the stamping upon

Catholic Christianity of a distinctly authoritative character was

Theodosius I, Theodosius the Great (379-395). He forbade the unorthodox

to hold meetings, handed over all churches to the Trinitarians, and

overthrew the heathen temples, throughout the empire, and in 390 he

caused the great statue of Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. There

was to be no rivalry, no qualification to the rigid unity of the

Church.

Here we cannot tell of the vast internal troubles of the Church,[296]

its indigestions of heresy; of Arians and Paulicians, of Gnostics and

Manicheans. Had it been less authoritative and more tolerant of

intellectual variety, it might perhaps have been a still more powerful

body than it became. But in spite of all these disorders, it did for

some time maintain a conception of human unity more intimate and far

wider than was ever achieved before. By the fifth century Christendom

was already becoming greater, sturdier, and more enduring than any

empire had ever been because it was something not merely imposed upon

them, but interwoven with the texture of their minds. It reached out far

beyond the utmost limits of the empire, into Armenia, Persia, Abyssinia,

Ireland, Germany, India, and Turkestan. “Though made up of widely

scattered congregations, it was thought of as one body of Christ, one

people of God. This ideal unity found expression in many ways.

Inter-communication between the various Christian communities was very

active. Christians upon a journey were always sure of a warm welcome and

hospitable entertainment from their fellow-disciples. Messengers and

letters were sent freely from one church to another. Missionaries and

evangelists went continually from place to place. Documents of various

kinds, including gospels and apostolic epistles, circulated widely. Thus

in various ways the feeling of unity found expression, and the

development of widely separated parts of Christendom conformed more or

less closely to a common type.”[297]

Christendom retained at least the formal tradition of this general unity

of spirit until 1054, when the Latin-speaking Western church and the

main and original Greek-speaking church, the “Orthodox” church, severed

themselves from one another, ostensibly upon the question of adding two

words to the creed. The older creed had declared that the “Holy Ghost

proceeded from the Father.” The Latins wanted to add, and did add

“_Filioque_” (=and from the son), and placed the Greeks out of their

communion because they would not follow this lead. But already as early

as the fifth century the Christians in Eastern Syria, Persia, Central

Asia--there were churches at Merv, Herat, and Samarkand--and India had

detached themselves on a similar score. These extremely interesting

Asiatic Christians are known in history as the Nestorian Church, and

their influence extended into China. The Egyptian and Abyssinian

churches also detached themselves very early upon similarly inexplicable

points. Long before this formal separation of the Latin and

Greek-speaking halves of the main church, however, there was a practical

separation following upon the breaking up of the empire. Their

conditions diverged from the first. While the Greek-speaking Eastern

Empire held together and the emperor at Constantinople remained dominant

in the Church, the Latin half of the empire, as we have already told,

collapsed, and left the Church free of any such imperial control.

Moreover, while ecclesiastical authority in the empire of Constantinople

was divided between the high-bishops, or patriarchs, of Constantinople,

Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, authority in the West was

concentrated in the patriarch, or Pope, of Rome. The Bishop of Rome had

always been recognized as first among the patriarchs, and all these

things conspired to justify exceptional pretensions upon his part to a

quasi-imperial authority. With the final fall of the Western Empire, he

took over the ancient title of _pontifex maximus_ which the emperors had

held, and so became the supreme sacrificial priest of the Roman

tradition. Over the Christians of the West his supremacy was fully

recognized, but from the beginning it had to be urged with discretion

within the dominions of the Eastern emperor and the jurisdictions of the

other four patriarchs.

Ideas of worldly rule by the Church were already prevalent in the fourth

century. Saint Augustine, a citizen of Hippo in North Africa, who wrote

between 354 and 430, gave expression to the developing political ideas

of the Church in his book _The City of God. The City of God_ represents

the possibility of making the world into a theological and organized

Kingdom of Heaven. The city, as Augustine puts it, is “a spiritual

society of the predestined faithful,”[298] but the step from that to a

political application was not a very wide one. The Church was to be the

ruler of the world over all nations, the divinely led ruling power over

a great league of terrestrial states. In later years these ideas

developed into a definite political theory and policy. As the barbarian

races settled and became Christian, the Pope began to claim an

overlordship of their kings. In a few centuries the Pope had become in

theory, and to a certain extent in practice, the high priest, censor,

judge, and divine monarch of Christendom; his influence extended in the

west far beyond the utmost range of the old empire, to Ireland, Norway,

and Sweden, and over all Germany. For more than a thousand years this

idea of the unity of Christendom, of Christendom as a sort of vast

Amphictyony, whose members even in war time were restrained from many

extremities by the idea of a common brotherhood and a common loyalty to

the Church, dominated Europe. The history of Europe from the fifth

century onward to the fifteenth is very largely the history of the

failure of this great idea of a divine world government to realize

itself in practice.

§ 9

We have already given an account in the previous chapter of the chief

irruptions of the barbarian races. We may now, with the help of a map,

make a brief review of the political divisions of Europe at the close of

the fifth century. No vestige of the Western Empire, the original Roman

Empire, remained as such. Over many parts of Europe a sort of legendary

overlordship of the Hellenic Eastern Empire held its place in men’s

minds. The emperor at Constantinople was, in theory at least, still

emperor. In Britain, the quite barbaric Teutonic Angles, Saxons, and

Jutes had conquered the eastern half of England; in the west of the

island the Britons still held out, but were gradually being forced back

into Wales and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have been among the

most ruthless and effective of barbarian conquerors, for wherever they

prevailed, their language completely replaced the Keltic or Latin

speech--it is not certain which[299]--used by the British. These

Anglo-Saxons were as yet not Christianized. Most of Gaul, Holland, and

the Rhineland was under the fairly vigorous, Christianized, and much

more civilized kingdom of the Franks. But the Rhone Valley was under

the separate kingdom of the Burgundians. Spain and some of the south of

France were under the rule of the Visigoths, but the Suevi were in

possession of the north-west corner of the peninsula. Of the Vandal

kingdom in Africa we have already written; and Italy, still in its

population and habits Roman, came under the rule of the Ostrogoths.

There was no emperor in Rome, but Theodoric I ruled there as the first

of a line of Gothic kings, and his rule extended across the Alps into

Pannonia and down the Adriatic to Dalmatia and Serbia. To the east of

the Gothic kingdom the emperors of Constantinople ruled definitely. The

Bulgars were still at this time a Mongolian tribe of horse-riding nomads

in the region of the Volga; the Aryan Serbs had recently come southward

to the shores of the Black Sea into the original home of the Visigoths;

the Turko-Finnish Magyars were not yet in Europe. The Lombards were as

yet north of the Danube.

The sixth century was marked by a phase of vigour on the part of the

Eastern Empire under the Emperor Justinian (527-565). The Vandal kingdom

was recovered in 534; the Goths were expelled from Italy in 553. So soon

as Justinian was dead (565), the Lombards descended into Italy and

settled in Lombardy, but they left Ravenna, Rome, Southern Italy, and

North Africa under the rule of the Eastern Empire.

Such was the political condition of the world in which the idea of

Christendom developed. The daily life of that time was going on at a

very low level indeed physically, intellectually, and morally. It is

frequently said that Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries relapsed

into barbarism, but that does not express the reality of the case very

well. Barbarism is a social order of an elementary type, orderly within

its limits; the state of Europe beneath its political fragmentation was

a social disorder. Its morale was not that of a kraal, but that of a

slum. In a savage kraal a savage knows that he belongs to a community,

and lives and acts accordingly; in a slum, the individual neither knows

of nor acts in relation to any greater being.

Only very slowly and weakly did Christianity restore that lost sense of

community and teach men to rally about the idea of Christendom. The

social and economic structure of the Roman Empire was in ruins. That

civilization had been a civilization of wealth and political power

sustained by the limitation and slavery of the great mass of mankind. It

had presented a spectacle of outward splendour and luxurious refinement,

but beneath that brave outward show were cruelty, stupidity, and

stagnation. It had to break down, it had to be removed before anything

better could replace it.

We have already called attention to its intellectual deadness. For three

centuries it had produced neither science nor literature.[300] It is

only where men are to be found neither too rich and powerful to be

tempted into extravagant indulgences nor too poor and limited to care

for anything beyond the daily need that those disinterested curiosities

and serene impulses can have play that give sane philosophy and science

and great art to the world, and the plutocracy of Rome had made such a

class impossible. When men and women are unlimited and unrestrained, the

evidence of history shows clearly that they are all liable to become

monsters of self-indulgence; when, on the other hand, they are driven

and unhappy, then their impulse is towards immoderate tragical resorts,

towards wild revolts or towards the austerities and intensities of

religion.

[Illustration: Map of EUROPE about 500 A.D.]

It is not perhaps true to say that the world became miserable in these

“dark ages” to which we have now come; much nearer the truth is it to

say that the violent and vulgar fraud of Roman imperialism, that world

of politicians, adventurers, landowners, and financiers, collapsed into

a sea of misery that was already there. Our histories of these times are

very imperfect: there were few places where men could write, and little

encouragement to write at all; no one was sure even of the safety of his

manuscript or the possibility of its being read. But we know enough to

tell that this age was an age not merely of war and robbery, but of

famine and pestilence. No effective sanitary organization had yet come

into the world, and the migrations of the time must have destroyed

whatever hygienic balance had been established. Attila’s ravages in

North Italy were checked by an outbreak of fever in 452. There was a

great epidemic of bubonic plague towards the end of the reign of

Justinian (565) which did much to weaken the defence of Italy against

the Lombards. In 543 ten thousand people had died in one day in

Constantinople. (Gibbon says “each day.”) Plague was raging in Rome in

590. The seventh century was also a plague-stricken century. The

Englishman Bede, one of the few writers of the time, records pestilences

in England in 664, 672, 678, and 683, no fewer than four in twenty

years! Gibbon couples the Justinian epidemic with the great comet of

531, and with the very frequent and serious earthquakes of that reign.

“Many cities of the east were left vacant, and in several districts of

Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground.” He alleges

“a visible decrease of the human species which has never been made good

in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” To many in those dark

days it seemed that all learning and all that made life seemly and

desirable was perishing.[301]

How far the common lot was unhappier under these conditions of squalor

and insecurity than it had been under the grinding order of the imperial

system it is impossible to say. There was possibly much local variation,

the rule of violent bullies here and a good-tempered freedom there,

famine this year and plenty the next. If robbers abounded, tax-gatherers

and creditors had disappeared. Such kings as those of the Frankish and

Gothic kingdoms were really phantom rulers to most of their so-called

subjects; the life of each district went on at a low level, with little

trade or travel. Greater or lesser areas of country-side would be

dominated by some able person, claiming with more or less justice the

title of lord or count or duke from the tradition of the later empire or

from the king. Such local nobles would assemble bands of retainers and

build themselves strongholds. Often they adapted pre-existing buildings.

The Colosseum at Rome, for example, the arena of many great gladiatorial

shows, was converted into a fortress, and so was the amphitheatre at

Arles. So also was the great tomb of Hadrian at Rome. In the decaying

and now insanitary towns and cities shrunken bodies of artisans would

hold together and serve the needs of the cultivating villages about them

by their industry, placing themselves under the protection of some

adjacent noble.

§ 10

A very important share in the social recrystallization that went on in

the sixth and seventh centuries after the breakdown and fusion of the

fourth and fifth was taken by the Christian monastic orders that were

now arising in the Western world.

Monasteries had existed in the world before Christianity. During the

period of social unhappiness among the Jews before the time of Jesus of

Nazareth, there was a sect of Essenes who lived apart in communities

vowed to austere lives of solitude, purity, and self-denial. Buddhism,

too, had developed its communities of men who withdrew from the general

effort and commerce of the world to lead lives of austerity and

contemplation. Indeed, the story of Buddha, as we have told it, shows

that such ideas must have prevailed in India long before his time, and

that at last he repudiated them. Quite early in the history of

Christianity there arose a similar movement away from the competition

and heat and stress of the daily life of men. In Egypt, particularly,

great numbers of men and women went out into the desert and there lived

solitary lives of prayer and contemplation, living in absolute poverty

in caves or under rocks, and subsisting on the chance alms of those whom

their holiness impressed. Such lives would signify little to the

historian, they are indeed of their very nature lives withdrawn from

history, were it not for the turn this monastic tendency presently took

among the more energetic and practical Europeans.

One of the central figures in the story of the development of

monasticism in Europe is Saint Benedict, who lived between 480 and 544.

He was born at Spoleto in Italy, and he was a young man of good family

and ability. The shadow of the times fell upon him, and, like Buddha, he

took to the religious life and at first set no limit to his austerities.

Fifty miles from Rome is Subiaco, and there at the end of a gorge of the

Anio, beneath a jungle growth of weeds and bushes, rose a deserted

palace built by the Emperor Nero, overlooking an artificial lake that

had been made in those days of departed prosperity by damming back the

waters of the river. Here, with a hair shirt as his chief possession,

Benedict took up his quarters in a cave in the high southward-looking

cliff that overhangs the stream, in so inaccessible a position that his

food had to be lowered to him on a cord by a faithful admirer.[302]

Three years he lived here, and his fame spread as Buddha’s did nearly a

thousand years before under similar circumstances.

As in the case of Buddha, the story of Benedict has been overlaid by

foolish and credulous disciples with a mass of silly stories of

miracles and manifestations. But presently we find him, no longer

engaged in self-torment, but controlling a group of twelve monasteries,

and the resort of a great number of people. Youths are brought to him to

be educated, and the whole character of his life has changed.

From Subiaco he removed further southward to Monte Cassino, half-way

between Rome and Naples, a lonely and beautiful mountain, in the midst

of a great circle of majestic heights. Here, it is interesting to note

that in the sixth century A.D. he found a temple of Apollo and a sacred

grove and the country-side still worshipping at this shrine. His first

labours had to be missionary labours, and it was with difficulty that he

persuaded the simple pagans to demolish their temple and cut down their

grove. The establishment upon Monte Cassino became a famous and powerful

centre within the lifetime of its founder. Mixed up with the imbecile

inventions of marvel-loving monks about demons exorcised, disciples

walking on the water, and dead children restored to life, we can still

detect something of the real spirit of Benedict. Particularly

significant are the stories that represent him as discouraging extreme

mortification. He sent a damping message to a solitary who had invented

a new degree in saintliness by chaining himself to a rock in a narrow

cave. “Break thy chain,” said Benedict, “for the true servant of God is

chained not to rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ.”

And next to the discouragement of solitary self-torture it is Benedict’s

distinction that he insisted upon hard work. Through the legends shines

the clear indication of the trouble made by his patrician students and

disciples who found themselves obliged to toil instead of leading lives

of leisurely austerity under the ministrations of the lower class

brethren. A third remarkable thing about Benedict was his political

influence. He set himself to reconcile Goths and Italians, and it is

clear that Totila, his Gothic king, came to him for counsel and was

greatly influenced by him. When Totila retook Naples from the Greeks,

the Goths protected the women from insult and treated even the captured

soldiers with humanity. When Belisarius, Justinian’s general, had taken

the same place ten years previously, he had celebrated his triumph by a

general massacre.

Now the monastic organization of Benedict was a very great beginning in

the western world.[303] One of his prominent followers was Pope Gregory

the Great (540-604), the first monk to become Pope (590); he was one of

the most capable and energetic of the popes, sending successful missions

to the unconverted, and particularly to the Anglo-Saxons. He ruled in

Rome like an independent king, organizing armies, making treaties. It is

clear that Augustine’s _City of God_ was a very real thing to him. To

his influence is due the imposition of the Benedictine rule upon nearly

the whole of Latin monasticism.

Closely associated with these two names in the development of a

civilizing monasticism out of the merely egotistic mortifications of the

early recluses is that of Cassiodorus (490-585). He was evidently much

senior to Pope Gregory, and younger by ten years than Benedict, and,

like these two, he belonged to a patrician family, a Syrian family

settled in Italy. He had a considerable official career under the Gothic

kings; and when, between 545 and 553, the overthrow of those kings and

the great pestilence paved the way for the new barbaric rule of the

Lombards, he took refuge in a monastic career. He founded a monastery

upon his private estates, and set the monks he gathered to work in quite

the Benedictine fashion, though whether his monks actually followed the

Benedictine rule that was being formulated about the same time from

Monte Cassino we do not know. But there can be no question of his

influence upon the development of this great working, teaching, and

studying order. It is evident that he was profoundly impressed by the

universal decay of education and the possible loss of all learning and

of the ancient literature by the world; and from the first he directed

his brethren to the task of preserving and restoring these things. He

collected ancient MSS. and caused them to be copied. He made sundials,

water clocks, and similar apparatus, a little last gleam of experimental

science in the gathering ignorance. He wrote a history of the Gothic

kings, and, what is more significant of his sense of the needs of the

time, he produced a series of school books on the liberal arts and a

grammar. Probably his influence was even greater than that of Saint

Benedict in making monasticism into a powerful instrument for the

restoration of social order in the Western world.

The spread of monasteries of the Benedictine order or type in the

seventh and eighth centuries was very considerable. Everywhere we find

them as centres of light, restoring, maintaining, and raising the

standard of cultivation, preserving some sort of elementary education,

spreading useful arts, multiplying and storing books, and keeping before

the eyes of the world the spectacle and example of a social backbone.

For eight centuries thenceforth the European monastic system remained a

system of patches and fibres of enlightenment in what might otherwise

have been a wholly chaotic world. Closely associated with the

Benedictine monasteries were the schools that grew presently into the

medieval universities. The schools of the Roman world had been

altogether swept away in the general social breakdown. There was a time

when very few priests in Britain or Gaul could read the gospel or their

service books. Only gradually was teaching restored to the world. But

when it was restored, it came back not as the duty work of a learned

slave, but as the religious service of a special class of devoted men.

In the east also there was a breach of educational continuity, but there

the cause was not so much social disorder as religious intolerance, and

the break was by no means so complete. Justinian closed and dispersed

the schools of Athens (529), whose origins we have described in chap.

xxiii, §§ 1 and 2; but he did this very largely in order to destroy a

rival to the new school he was setting up in Constantinople, which was

more directly under imperial control. Since the new Latin learning of

the developing western universities had no text-books and literature of

its own, it had, in spite of its strong theological bias to the

contrary, to depend very largely upon the Latin classics and the Latin

translations of the Greek literature. It was obliged to preserve far

more of that splendid literature than it had a mind to do.

XXXI

SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA (CIRCA 50 B.C. TO A.D. 650)

§ 1. _Justinian the Great._ § 2. _The Sassanid Empire in Persia._ §

3. _The Decay of Syria under the Sassanids._ § 4. _The First

Message from Islam._ § 5. _Zoroaster and Mani._ § 6. _Hunnish

Peoples in Central Asia and India._ § 7. _The Great Age of China._

§ 8. _Intellectual Fetters of China._ § 9. _The Travels of Yuan

Chwang._

§ 1

In the preceding two chapters we have concentrated our attention chiefly

on the collapse in the comparatively short space of four centuries of

the political and social order of the western part of the great Roman

Empire of Cæsar and Trajan. We have dwelt upon the completeness of that

collapse. To any intelligent and public-spirited mind living in the time

and under the circumstances of St. Benedict or Cassiodorus, it must have

seemed, indeed, as if the light of civilization was waning and near

extinction. But with the longer views a study of universal history gives

us, we can view those centuries of shadow as a phase, and probably a

necessary phase, in the onward march of social and political ideas and

understandings. And if, during that time, a dark sense of calamity

rested upon Western Europe, we must remember that over large portions of

the world there was no retrogression.

With their Western prepossessions European writers are much too prone to

underrate the tenacity of the Eastern empire that centred upon

Constantinople. This empire embodied a tradition much more ancient than

that of Rome. If the reader will look at the map we have given of its

extent in the sixth century, and if he will reflect that its official

language had then become Greek, he will realize that what we are dealing

with here is only nominally a branch of the Roman Empire; it is really

the Hellenic Empire of which Herodotus dreamt and which Alexander the

Great founded. True it called itself Roman and its people “Romans,” and

to this day modern Greek is called “Romaic.” True also that Constantine

the Great knew no Greek and that Justinian’s accent was bad. These

superficialities of name and form cannot alter the fact that the empire

was in reality Hellenic, with a past of six centuries at the time of

Constantine the Great, and that while the real Roman Empire crumpled up

completely in four centuries, this Hellenic “Roman Empire” held out for

more than eleven, from 312, the beginning of the reign of Constantine

the Great, to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.

And while we have had to tell of something like a complete social

collapse in the west, there were no such equivalent breakdowns in the

east. Towns and cities flourished, the countryside was well cultivated,

trade went on. For many centuries Constantinople was the greatest and

richest city in the world. We will not trouble ourselves here with the

names and follies, the crimes and intrigues, of its tale of emperors. As

with most monarchs of great states, they did not guide their empire;

they were carried by it. We have already dealt at some length with

Constantine the Great (312-337), we have mentioned Theodosius the Great

(379-395), who for a little while reunited the empire, and Justinian I

(527-565).[304] Presently we shall tell something of Heraclius

(610-641). Justinian, like Constantine, may have had Slav blood in his

veins. He was a man of great ambition and great organizing power, and he

had the good fortune to be married to a woman of equal or greater

ability, the Empress Theodora, who had in her youth been an actress of

doubtful reputation. But his ambitious attempts to restore the ancient

greatness of the empire probably overtaxed its resources. As we have

told, he reconquered the African province from the Vandals and most of

Italy from the Goths. He also recovered the South of Spain. He built the

great and beautiful church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, founded a

university, and codified the law.[305] But against this we must set his

closing of the schools of Athens. Meanwhile a great plague swept the

world, and at his death this renewed and expanded empire of his crumpled

up again like a blown-out bladder. The greater part of his Italian

conquests was lost to the Lombards. Italy was indeed at that time almost

a desert; the Lombard historians assert they came into an empty country.

The Avars and Slavs struck down from the Danube country towards the

Adriatic, Slav populations establishing themselves in what is now

Serbia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, to become the Yugo-Slavs of to-day.

Moreover, a great and exhausting struggle began with the Sassanid Empire

in Persia.

But before we say anything of this struggle, in which the Persians

thrice came near to taking Constantinople, and which was decided by a

great Persian defeat at Nineveh (627), it is necessary to sketch very

briefly the history of Persia from the Parthian days.

§ 2

We have already drawn a comparison between the brief four centuries of

Roman imperialism and the obstinate vitality of the imperialism of the

Euphrates-Tigris country. We have glanced very transitorily at the

Hellenized Bactrian and Seleucid monarchies that flourished in the

eastern half of Alexander’s area of conquest for three centuries, and

told how the Parthians came down into Mesopotamia in the last century

B.C. We have described the battle of Carrhæ and the end of Crassus.

Thereafter for two centuries and a half the Parthian dynasty of the

Arsacids ruled in the east and the Roman in the west, with Armenia and

Syria between them, and the boundaries shifted east and west as either

side grew stronger. We have marked the utmost eastward extension of the

Roman Empire under Trajan (see map to chap. xxix., § 3), and we have

noted that about the same time the Indo-Scythians (chap. xxix., § 4),

poured down into India.

In 227 occurred a revolution, and the Arsacid dynasty gave way to a more

vigorous line, the Sassanid, a national Persian line under Ardashir I.

In one respect the empire of Ardashir I presented a curious parallelism

with that of Constantine the Great a hundred years later. Ardashir

attempted to consolidate it by insisting upon religious unity, and

adopted as the state religion the old Persian faith of Zoroaster, of

which we shall have more to say later.

This new Sassanid Empire immediately became aggressive, and under Sapor

I, the son and successor of Ardashir, took Antioch. We have already

noted how the Emperor Valerian was defeated (260) and taken prisoner.

But as Sapor was retiring from a victorious march into Asia Minor, he

was fallen upon and defeated by Odenathus, the Arab king of a great

desert-trading centre, Palmyra.

For a brief time under Odenathus, and then under his widow Zenobia,

Palmyra was a considerable state, wedged between the two empires. Then

it fell to the Emperor Aurelian, who carried off Zenobia in chains to

grace his triumph at Rome (272).

We will not attempt to trace the fluctuating fortunes of the Sassanids

during the next three centuries. Throughout that time war between Persia

and the empire of Constantinople wasted Asia Minor like a fever.

Christianity spread widely and was persecuted, for after the

Christianization of Rome the Persian monarch remained the only

god-monarch on earth, and he saw in Christianity merely the propaganda

of his Byzantine rival. Constantinople became the protector of the

Christians and Persia of the Zoroastrians; in a treaty of 422, the one

empire agreed to tolerate Zoroastrianism and the other Christianity. In

483, the Christians of the east split off from the Orthodox church and

became the Nestorian church; which, as we have already noted, spread its

missionaries far and wide throughout Central and Eastern Asia. This

separation from Europe, since it freed the Christian bishops of the

east from the rule of the Byzantine patriarchs, and so lifted from the

Nestorian church the suspicion of political disloyalty, led to a

complete toleration of Christianity in Persia. With Chosroes I (531-579)

came a last period of Sassanid vigour. He was the contemporary and

parallel of Justinian. He reformed taxation, restored the orthodox

Zoroastrianism, extended his power into Southern Arabia (Yemen), which

he rescued from the rule of Abyssinian Christians, pushed his northern

frontier into Western Turkestan, and carried on a series of wars with

Justinian. His reputation as an enlightened ruler stood so high, that

when Justinian closed the schools of Athens, the last Greek philosophers

betook themselves to his court. They sought in him the philosopher

king--that mirage which, as we have noted, Confucius and Plato had

sought in their day. The philosophers found the atmosphere of orthodox

Zoroastrianism even less to their taste than orthodox Christianity, and

in 549 Chosroes had the kindness to insert a clause in an armistice with

Justinian, permitting their return to Greece, and ensuring that they

should not be molested for their pagan philosophy or their transitory

pro-Persian behaviour.

It is in connection with Chosroes that we hear now of a new Hunnish

people in Central Asia, the Turks, who are, we learn, first in alliance

with him and then with Constantinople.

Chosroes II (590-628), the grandson of Chosroes I, experienced

extraordinary fluctuations of fortune. At the outset of his career he

achieved astonishing successes against the empire of Constantinople.

Three times (in 608, 615, and 627) his armies reached Chalcedon, which

is over against Constantinople; he took Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem

(614), and from Jerusalem he carried off a cross, said to be the true

cross on which Jesus was crucified, to his capital Ctesiphon. (But some

of this or some other true cross had already got to Rome. It had been

brought from Jerusalem, it was said, by the “Empress Helena,” the

idealized and canonized mother of Constantine, a story for which Gibbon

displayed small respect.[306]) In 619, Chosroes II conquered that facile

country, Egypt. This career of conquest was at last arrested by the

Emperor Heraclius (610), who set about restoring the ruined military

power of Constantinople. For some time Heraclius avoided a great battle

while he gathered his forces. He took the field in good earnest in 623.

The Persians experienced a series of defeats culminating in the battle

of Nineveh (627); but neither side had the strength for the complete

defeat of the other. At the end of the struggle there was still an

undefeated Persian army upon the Bosphorus, although there were

victorious Byzantine forces in Mesopotamia. In 628 Chosroes II was

deposed and murdered by his son. An indecisive peace was concluded

between the two exhausted empires a year or so later, restoring their

old boundaries; and the true cross was sent back to Heraclius, who

replaced it in Jerusalem with much pomp and ceremony.

§ 3

So we give briefly the leading events in the history of the Persian as

of the Byzantine Empire. What is more interesting for us and less easy

to give are the changes that went on in the lives of the general

population of those great empires during that time. The present writer

can find little of a definite character about the great pestilences that

we know swept the world in the second and sixth centuries of this era.

Certainly they depleted population, and probably they disorganized

social order in these regions just as much as we know they did in the

Roman and Chinese empires.

The late Sir Mark Sykes, whose untimely death in Paris during the

influenza epidemic of 1919 was an irreparable loss to Great Britain,

wrote in _The Caliph’s Last Heritage_ a vivid review of the general life

of Nearer Asia during the period we are considering. In the opening

centuries of the present era, he says: “the direction of military

administration and imperial finance became entirely divorced in men’s

minds from practical government; and notwithstanding the vilest tyranny

of sots, drunkards, tyrants, lunatics, savages, and abandoned women, who

from time to time held the reins of government, Mesopotamia, Babylonia,

and Syria contained enormous populations, huge canals and dykes were

kept in repair, and commerce and architecture flourished, in spite of a

perpetual procession of hostile armies and a continual changing of the

nationality of the governor. Each peasant’s interest was centred in his

ruling town; each citizen’s interest was in the progress and prosperity

of his city; and the advent of an enemy’s army may have sometimes been

looked on even with satisfaction, if his victory was assured and the

payment of his contracts a matter of certainty.

[Illustration: _The_ EASTERN EMPIRE _and the_ SASSANIDS]

“A raid from the north,[307] on the other hand, must have been a matter

for dread. Then the villagers had need to take refuge behind the walls

of the cities, from whence they could descry the smoke which told of the

wreck and damage caused by the nomads. So long, however, as the canals

were not destroyed (and, indeed, they were built with such solidity and

caution that their safety was assured), no irreparable damage could be

effected....

“In Armenia and Pontus the condition of life was quite otherwise. These

were mountain districts, containing fierce tribes headed by powerful

native nobility under recognized ruling kings, while in the valleys and

plains the peaceful cultivator provided the necessary economic

resources.... Cilicia and Cappadocia were now thoroughly subject to

Greek influence, and contained numerous wealthy and highly civilized

towns, besides possessing a considerable merchant marine. Passing from

Cilicia to the Hellespont, the whole Mediterranean coast was crowded

with wealthy cities and Greek colonies, entirely cosmopolitan in thought

and speech, with those municipal and local ambitions which seem natural

to the Grecian character. The Grecian Zone extended from Caria to the

Bosphorus, and followed the coast as far as Sinope on the Black Sea,

where it gradually faded away.

“Syria was broken up into a curious quiltlike pattern of principalities

and municipal kingdoms; beginning with the almost barbarous states of

Commagene and Edessa (Urfa) in the north. South of these stood Bambyce,

with its huge temples and priestly governors. Towards the coast a dense

population in villages and towns clustered around the independent cities

of Antioch, Apamea, and Emesa (Homs); while out in the wilderness the

great Semitic merchant city of Palmyra was gaining wealth and greatness

as the neutral trading-ground between Parthia and Rome. Between the

Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon we find, at the height of its glory, Heliopolis

(Baalbek), the battered fragments of which even now command our

admiration.... Bending in towards Galilee we find the wondrous cities of

Gerasa and Philadelphia (Amman) connected by solid roads of masonry and

furnished with gigantic aqueducts.... Syria is still so rich in ruins

and remains of the period that it is not difficult to picture to oneself

the nature of its civilization. The arts of Greece, imported long

before, had been developed into magnificence that bordered on vulgarity.

The richness of ornamentation, the lavish expense, the flaunting wealth,

all tell that the tastes of the voluptuous and artistic Semites were

then as now. I have stood in the colonnades of Palmyra and I have dined

in the Hotel Cecil, and, save that the latter is built of iron, daubed

with sham wood, sham stucco, sham gold, sham velvet, and sham stone, the

effect is identical. In Syria there were slaves in sufficient quantity

to make real buildings, but the artistic spirit is as debased as

anything made by machinery. Over against the cities the village folk

must have dwelt pretty much as they do now, in houses of mud and dry

stone wall; while out in the distant pastures the Bedouin tended their

flocks in freedom under the rule of the Nabatean kings of their own

race, or performed the office of guardians and agents of the great

trading caravans.

[Illustration: _Cities of_ ASIA MINOR, SYRIA _&_ MESOPOTAMIA _during the

first centuries of the Christian Era...._]

“Beyond the herdsmen lay the parching deserts, which acted as the

impenetrable barrier and defence of the Parthian Empire behind the

Euphrates, where stood the great cities of Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Hatra,

Nisibin, Harran, and hundreds more whose very names are forgotten. These

great townships subsisted on the enormous cereal wealth of Mesopotamia,

watered as it then was by canals, whose makers’ names were even then

already lost in the mists of antiquity. Babylon and Nineveh had passed

away; the successors of Persia and Macedon had given place to Parthia;

but the people and the cultivation were the same as when Cyrus the

Conqueror had first subdued the land. The language of many of the towns

was Greek, and the cultured citizens of Seleucia might criticize the

philosophies and tragedies of Athens; but the millions of the

agricultural population knew possibly no more of these things than does

many an Essex peasant of to-day know of what passes in the metropolis.”

Compare with this the state of affairs at the end of the seventh

century.

“Syria was now an impoverished and stricken land, and her great cities,

though still populated, must have been encumbered with ruins which the

public funds were not sufficient to remove. Damascus and Jerusalem

themselves had not recovered from the effects of long and terrible

sieges; Amman and Gerash had declined into wretched villages under the

sway and lordship of the Bedouin. The Hauran, perhaps, still showed

signs of the prosperity for which it had been noted in the days of

Trajan; but the wretched buildings and rude inscriptions of this date

all point to a sad and depressing decline. Out in the desert, Palmyra

stood empty and desolate save for a garrison in the castle. On the

coasts and in the Lebanon a shadow of the former business and wealth was

still to be seen; but in the north, ruin, desolation, and abandonment

must have been the common state of the country, which had been raided

with unfailing regularity for one hundred years and had been held by an

enemy for fifteen. Agriculture must have declined, and the population

notably decreased through the plagues and distresses from which it had

suffered.

“Cappadocia had insensibly sunk into barbarism; and the great basilicas

and cities, which the rude countrymen could neither repair nor restore,

had been levelled with the ground. The Anatolian peninsula had been

ploughed and harrowed by the Persian armies; the great cities had been

plundered and sacked.”

§ 4

It was while Heraclius was engaged in restoring order in this already

desolated Syria after the death of Chosroes II and before the final

peace with Persia, that a strange message was brought to him. The bearer

had ridden over to the imperial outpost at Bostra in the wilderness

south of Damascus. The letter was in Arabic, the obscure Semitic

language of the nomadic peoples of the southern desert; and probably

only an interpretation reached him--presumably with deprecatory notes by

the interpreter.

It was an odd, florid challenge from someone who called himself

“Muhammad the Prophet of God.” This Muhammad, it appeared, called upon

Heraclius to acknowledge the one true God and to serve him. Nothing else

was definite in the document.

There is no record of the reception of this missive, and presumably it

went unanswered. The emperor probably shrugged his shoulders, and was

faintly amused at the incident.

But at Ctesiphon they knew more about this Muhammad. He was said to be a

tiresome false prophet, who had incited Yemen, the rich province of

Southern Arabia, to rebel against the King of Kings. Kavadh was much

occupied with affairs. He had deposed and murdered his father Chosroes

II, and he was attempting to reorganize the Persian military forces. To

him also came a message identical with that sent to Heraclius. The thing

angered him. He tore up the letter, flung the fragments at the envoy,

and bade him begone.

When this was told to the sender far away in the squalid little town of

Medina, he was very angry. “Even so, O Lord!” he cried; “rend Thou his

kingdom from him.” (A.D. 628.)

§ 5

But before we go on to tell of the rise of Islam in the world, it will

be well to complete our survey of the condition of Asia in the dawn of

the seventh century. And a word or so is due to religious developments

in the Persian community during the Sassanid period.

From the days of Cyrus onward Zoroastrianism had prevailed over the

ancient gods of Nineveh and Babylon. Zoroaster (the Greek spelling of

the Iranian, “Zarathustra”), like Buddha, was an Aryan. We know nothing

of the age in which he lived; some authorities make him as early as 1000

B.C., others make him contemporary with Buddha or Confucius; and as

little do we know of his place of birth or his exact nationality. His

teachings are preserved to us in the Zend Avesta, but here, since they

no longer play any great part in the world’s affairs, we cannot deal

with them in any detail. The opposition of a good god, Ormuzd, the god

of light, truth, frankness, and the sun, and a bad god, Ahriman, god of

secrecy, cunning, diplomacy, darkness, and night, formed a very central

part of his religion. As we find it in history, it is already surrounded

by a ceremonial and sacerdotal system; it has no images, but it has

priests, temples, and altars, on which burn a sacred fire and at which

sacrificial ceremonies are performed. Among other distinctive features

is its prohibition of either the burning or the burial of the dead. The

Parsees of India, the last surviving Zoroastrians, still lay their dead

out within certain open towers, the Towers of Silence, to which the

vultures come.

Under the Sassanid kings from Ardashir onward (227), this religion was

the official religion; its head was the second person in the state next

to the king, and the king in quite the ancient fashion was supposed to

be divine or semi-divine and upon terms of peculiar intimacy with

Ormuzd.

But the religious fermentation of the world did not leave the supremacy

of Zoroastrianism undisputed in the Persian Empire. Not only was there a

great eastward diffusion of Christianity, to which we have already given

notice, but new sects arose in Persia, incorporating the novel ideas of

the time. One early variant or branch of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, we

have already named.[308] It had spread into Europe by the first century

B.C., after the eastern campaigns of Pompey the Great. It became

enormously popular with the soldiers and common people, and, until the

time of Constantine the Great, continued to be a serious rival to

Christianity. Indeed, one of his successors, the Emperor Julian

(361-363), known in Christian history as “Julian the Apostate,” made a

belated attempt to substitute it for the accepted faith.[309] Mithras

was a god of light, “proceeding” from Ormuzd and miraculously born, in

much the same way that the third person in the Christian Trinity

proceeds from the first. Of this branch of the Zoroastrian stem we need

say no more. In the third century A.D., however, another religion,

Manichæism, arose, which deserves some notice now.

Mani, the founder of Manichæism, was born the son of a good family of

Ecbatana, the old Median capital (A.D. 216). He was educated at

Ctesiphon. His father was some sort of religious sectary, and he was

brought up in an atmosphere of religious discussion. There came to him

that persuasion that he at last had the complete light, which is the

moving power of all religious initiators. He was impelled to proclaim

his doctrine. In A.D. 242, at the accession of Sapor I, the second

Sassanid monarch, he began his teaching.

It is characteristic of the way in which men’s minds were moving in

those days that his teaching included a sort of theocrasia. He was not,

he declared, proclaiming anything new. The great religious founders

before him had all been right: Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus

Christ--all had been true prophets, but to him it was appointed to

clarify and crown their imperfect and confused teaching. This he did in

Zoroastrian language. He explains the perplexities and contradictions of

life as a conflict of light and darkness, Ormuzd was God and Ahriman

Satan. But how man was created, how he fell from light into darkness,

how he is being disentangled and redeemed from the darkness, and of the

part played by Jesus in this strange mixture of religions we cannot

explain here even if we would. Our interest with the system is

historical and not theological.

But of the utmost historical interest is the fact that Mani not only

went about Iran preaching these new and to him these finally satisfying

ideas of his, but into Turkestan, into India, and over the passes into

China. This freedom of travel is to be noted. It is interesting also

because it brings before us the fact that Turkestan was no longer a

country of dangerous nomads, but a country in which cities were

flourishing and men had the education and leisure for theological

argument. The ideas of Mani spread eastward and westward with great

rapidity, and they were a most fruitful rootstock of heresies throughout

the entire Christian world for nearly a thousand years.

Somewhen about A.D. 270 Mani came back to Ctesiphon and made many

converts. This brought him into conflict with the official religion and

the priesthood. In 277 the reigning monarch had him crucified and his

body, for some unknown reason, flayed, and there began a fierce

persecution of his adherents. Nevertheless, Manichæism held its own in

Persia with Nestorian Christianity and orthodox Zoroastrianism

(Mazdaism) for some centuries.

§ 6

It becomes fairly evident that in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. not

merely Persia, but the regions that are now Turkestan and Afghanistan

were far more advanced in civilization than were the French and English

of that time. The obscurity of the history of these regions has been

lifted in the last two decades, and a very considerable literature

written in languages of the Turkish group has been discovered. These

extant manuscripts date from the seventh century onward. The alphabet is

an adaptation of the Syrian, introduced by Manichæan missionaries, and

many of the MSS. discovered--parchments have been found in windows in

the place of glass--are as beautifully written as any Benedictine

production. Mixed up with a very extensive Manichæan literature are

translations of the Christian scriptures and Buddhistic writings. Much

of this early Turkish material still awaits examination.

Everything points to the conclusion that those centuries, which were

centuries of disaster and retrogression in Europe, were comparatively an

age of progress in Middle Asia eastward into China.

A steady westward drift to the north of the Caspian of Hunnish peoples,

who were now called Tartars and Turks, was still going on in the sixth

century, but it must be thought of as an overflow rather than as a

migration of whole peoples. The world from the Danube to the Chinese

frontiers was still largely a nomadic world, with towns and cities

growing up upon the chief trade routes. We need not tell in any detail

here of the constant clash of the Turkish peoples of Western Turkestan

with the Persians to the south of them, the age-long bickering of

Turanian and Iranian. We hear nothing of any great northward marches of

the Persians, but there were great and memorable raids to the south both

by the Turanians to the east and the Alans to the west of the Caspian

before the big series of movements of the third and fourth century

westward that carried the Alans and Huns into the heart of Europe. There

was a nomadic drift to the east of Persia and southward through

Afghanistan towards India, as well as this drift to the north-west.

These streams of nomads flowed by Persia on either side. We have already

mentioned the Yueh-Chi (chap. xxix., § 4), who finally descended into

India as the Indo-Scythians in the second century. A backward, still

nomadic section of these Yueh-Chi remained in Central Asia, and became

numerous upon the steppes of Turkestan, as the Ephthalites or White

Huns. After being a nuisance and a danger to the Persians for three

centuries, they finally began raiding into India in the footsteps of

their kinsmen about the year 470, about a quarter of a century after the

death of Attila. They did not migrate into India; they went to and fro,

looting in India and returning with their loot to their own country,

just as later the Huns established themselves in the great plain of the

Danube and raided all Europe.

The history of India during these seven centuries we are now reviewing

is punctuated by these two invasions of the Yueh-Chi, the Indo-Scythians

who, as we have said, wiped out the last traces of Hellenic rule, and

the Ephthalites. Before the former of these, the Indo-Scythians, a wave

of uprooted populations, the Sakas, had been pushed; so that altogether

India experienced three waves of barbaric invasion, about A.D. 100,

about A.D. 120, and about A.D. 470. But only the second of these

invasions was a permanent conquest and settlement. The Indo-Scythians

made their headquarters on the Northwest Frontier and set up a dynasty,

the Kushan dynasty, which ruled most of North India as far east as

Benares.

The chief among these Kushan monarchs was Kanishka (date unknown), who

added to North India Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. Like Asoka, he was a

great and vigorous promoter of Buddhism, and these conquests, this great

empire of the Northwest Frontier, must have brought India into close and

frequent relations with China and Tibet.

We will not trouble to record here the divisions and coalescences of

power in India, nor the dynasties that followed the Kushans, because

these things signify very little to us from our present point of view.

Sometimes all India was a patchwork quilt of states; sometimes such

empires as that of the Guptas prevailed over great areas. These things

made little difference in the ideas, the religion, and the ordinary way

of life of the Indian peoples. Brahminism held its own against Buddhism,

and the two religions prospered side by side. The mass of the population

was living then very much as it lives to-day; dressing, cultivating, and

building its houses in much the same fashion.

[Illustration: An Ephthalite Coin....]

The irruption of the Ephthalites is memorable not so much because of its

permanent effects as because of the atrocities perpetrated by the

invaders. These Ephthalites very closely resembled the Huns of Attila in

their barbarism; they merely raided, they produced no such dynasty as

the Kushan monarchy; and their chiefs retained their headquarters in

Western Turkestan. Mihiragula, their most capable leader, has been

called the Attila of India. One of his favourite amusements, we are

told, was the expensive one of rolling elephants down precipitous places

in order to watch their sufferings. His abominations roused his Indian

tributary princes to revolt, and he was overthrown (528). But the final

ending of the Ephthalite raids into India was effected not by Indians,

but by the destruction of the central establishment of the Ephthalites

on the Oxus (565) by the growing power of the Turks, working in alliance

with the Persians. After this break-up, the Ephthalites dissolved very

rapidly and completely into the surrounding populations, much as the

European Huns did after the death of Attila a hundred years earlier.

Nomads without central grazing lands must disperse; nothing else is

possible. Some of the chief Rajput clans of to-day in Rajputana in North

India are descended, it is said, from these White Huns.[310]

§ 7[311]

These seven centuries which saw the beginning and the end of the

emperors in Rome and the complete breakdown and recasting of the social,

economic, political, and religious life of Western Europe, saw also very

profound changes in the Chinese world. It is too commonly assumed by

both Chinese, Japanese, and European historians, that the Han dynasty,

under which we find China at the beginning of this period, and the Tang

dynasty, with which it closed, were analogous ascendancies controlling a

practically similar empire, and that the four centuries of division that

elapsed between the end of the Han dynasty (220) and the beginning of

the Tang period (619) were centuries of disturbance rather than

essential change. The divisions of China are supposed to be merely

political and territorial; and, deceived by the fact that at the close

as at the commencement of these four centuries, China occupied much the

same wide extent of Asia, and was still recognizably China, still with a

common culture, a common script, and a common body of ideas, they ignore

the very fundamental breaking down and reconstruction that went on, and

the many parallelisms to the European experience that China displayed.

It is true that the social collapse was never so complete in the Chinese

as in the European world. There remained throughout the whole period

considerable areas in which the elaboration of the arts of life could go

on. There was no such complete deterioration in cleanliness, decoration,

artistic and literary production as we have to record in the West, and

no such abandonment of any search for grace and pleasure. We note, for

instance, that “tea” appeared in the world, and its use spread

throughout China. China began to drink tea in the sixth century A.D.

And there were Chinese poets to write delightfully about the effects of

the first cup and the second cup and the third cup, and so on. China

continued to produce beautiful paintings long after the fall of the Han

rule. In the second, third, and fourth centuries some of the most lovely

landscapes were painted that have ever been done by men. A considerable

production of beautiful vases and carvings also continued. Fine building

and decoration went on. Printing from wood blocks began about the same

time as tea-drinking, and with the seventh century came a remarkable

revival of poetry.

Certain differences between the great empires of the East and West were

all in favour of the stability of the former. China had no general

coinage. The cash and credit system of the Western world, at once

efficient and dangerous, had not strained her economic life. Not that

the monetary idea was unknown. For small transactions the various

provinces were using perforated zinc and brass “cash,” but for larger

there was nothing but stamped ingots of silver. This great empire was

still carrying on most of its business on a basis of barter like that

which prevailed in Babylon in the days of the Aramean merchants. And so

it continued to do to the dawn of the twentieth century.

We have seen how under the Roman republic economic and social order was

destroyed by the too great fluidity of property that money brought

about. Money became abstract, and lost touch with the real values it was

supposed to represent. Individuals and communities got preposterously

into debt, and the world was saddled by a class of rich men who were

creditors, men who did not handle and administer any real wealth, but

who had the power to call up money. No such development of “finance”

occurred in China. Wealth in China remained real and visible. And China

had no need for any Licinian law, nor for a Tiberius Gracchus. The idea

of property in China did not extend far beyond tangible things. There

was no “labour” slavery, no gang servitude.[312] The occupier and user

of the land was in most instances practically the owner of it, subject

to a land tax. There was a certain amount of small scale landlordism,

but no great estates. Landless men worked for wages paid mostly in

kind--as they were in ancient Babylon.

These things made for stability and the geographical form of China for

unity; nevertheless, the vigour of the Han dynasty declined, and when at

last at the close of the second century A.D. the world catastrophe of

the great pestilence struck the system, the same pestilence that

inaugurated a century of confusion in the Roman empire, the dynasty fell

like a rotten tree before a gale. And the same tendency to break up into

a number of warring states, and the same eruption of barbaric rulers,

was displayed in East and West alike. In China, as in the Western

empire, faith had decayed. Mr. Fu ascribes much of the political

nervelessness of China in this period to Epicureanism, arising, he

thinks, out of the sceptical individualism of Lao Tse. This phase of

division is known as the “Three Kingdom Period.” The fourth century saw

a dynasty of more or less civilized Huns established as rulers in the

province of Shen-si. This Hunnish kingdom included not merely the north

of China, but great areas of Siberia; its dynasty absorbed the Chinese

civilization, and its influence carried Chinese trade and knowledge to

the Arctic circle. Mr. Fu compares this Siberian monarchy to the empire

of Charlemagne in Europe; it was the barbarian becoming “Chinized” as

Charlemagne was a barbarian becoming Romanized. Out of a fusion of these

Siberian with native north Chinese elements arose the Suy dynasty, which

conquered the south. This Suy dynasty marks the beginning of a

renascence of China. Under a Suy monarch the Lu-chu isles were annexed

to China, and there was a phase of great literary activity. The number

of volumes at this time in the imperial library was increased, we are

told, to 54,000. The dawn of the seventh century saw the beginning of

the great Tang dynasty, which was to endure for three centuries.

The renascence of China that began with Suy and culminated in Tang was,

Mr. Fu insists, a real new birth. “The spirit,” he writes, “was a new

one; it marked the Tang civilization with entirely distinctive features.

Four main factors had been brought together and fused: (1) Chinese

liberal culture; (2) Chinese classicism; (3) Indian Buddhism; and (4)

Northern bravery. A new China had come into being. The provincial

system, the central administration and the military organization of the

Tang dynasty, were quite different from those of their predecessors. The

arts had been much influenced and revivified by Indian and Central

Asiatic influences. The literature was no mere continuation of the old;

it was a new production. The religious and philosophical schools of

Buddhism were fresh features. It was a period of substantial change.

[Illustration: The CHINESE EMPIRE under the TANG Dynasty (greatest

extent) [Superimposed--The Roman Empire at its greatest extent, under

Trajan.]]

“It may be interesting to compare this making of China with the fate of

the Roman Empire in her later days. As the Roman world was divided into

the eastern and western halves, so was the Chinese world into the

southern and the northern. The barbarians in the case of Rome and in the

case of China made similar invasions. They established dominions of a

similar sort. Charlemagne’s empire corresponded to that of the Siberian

dynasty (Later Wei), the temporary recovery of the Western empire by

Justinian corresponded to the temporary recovery of the north by Liu Yu.

The Byzantine line corresponded to the southern dynasties. But from this

point the two worlds diverged. China recovered her unity; Europe has

still to do so.”

The dominions of the emperor Tai-tsung (627), the second Tang monarch,

extended southward into Annam and westward to the Caspian Sea. His

southern frontier in that direction marched with that of Persia. His

northern ran along the Altai from the Kirghis steppe, north of the

desert of Gobi. But it did not include Korea, which was conquered and

made tributary by his son. This Tang dynasty civilized and incorporated

into the Chinese race the whole of the southward population, and just as

the Chinese of the north call themselves the “men of Han,” so the

Chinese of the south call themselves the “men of Tang.” The law was

codified, the literary examination system was revised, and a complete

and accurate edition of all the Chinese classics was produced. To the

court of Tai-tsung came an embassy from Byzantium, and, what is more

significant, from Persia came a company of Nestorian missionaries (631).

These latter Tai-tsung received with great respect; he heard them state

the chief articles of their creed, and ordered the Christian scriptures

to be translated into Chinese for his further examination. In 638 he

announced that he found the new religion entirely satisfactory, and that

it might be preached within the empire. He also allowed the building of

a church and the foundation of a monastery.

A still more remarkable embassy also came to the court of Tai-tsung in

the year 628, three years earlier than the Nestorians. This was a party

of Arabs, who came by sea to Canton in a trading vessel from Yanbu, the

port of Medina in Arabia. (Incidentally it is interesting to know that

there were such vessels engaged in an east and west trade at this time.)

These Arabs had been sent by that Muhammad we have already mentioned,

who styled himself “The Prophet of God,” and the message they brought to

Tai-tsung was probably identical with the summons which was sent in the

same year to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and to Kavadh in Ctesiphon.

But the Chinese monarch neither neglected the message as Heraclius did,

nor insulted the envoys after the fashion of the parricide Kavadh. He

received them well, expressed great interest in their theological views,

and assisted them, it is said, to build a mosque for the Arab traders in

Canton--a mosque which survives to this day. It is one of the oldest

mosques in the world.

§ 8

The urbanity, the culture, and the power of China under the early Tang

rulers are in so vivid a contrast with the decay, disorder, and

divisions of the Western world, as at once to raise some of the most

interesting questions in the history of civilization. Why did not China

keep this great lead she had won by her rapid return to unity and order?

Why does she not to this day dominate the world culturally and

politically?

For a long time she certainly did keep ahead. It is only a thousand

years later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the

discovery of America, the spread of printed books and education in the

West, and the dawn of modern scientific discovery, that we can say with

confidence that the Western world began to pull ahead of China. Under

the Tang rule, her greatest period, and then again under the artistic

but rather decadent Sung dynasty (960-1279), and again during the period

of the cultured Mings (1358-1644), China presented a spectacle of

prosperity, happiness, and artistic activity far in front of any

contemporary state. And seeing that she achieved so much, why did she

not achieve more? Chinese shipping was upon the seas, and there was a

considerable overseas trade during that time.[313] Why did the Chinese

never discover America or Australia? There was much isolated

observation, ingenuity, and invention. The Chinese knew of gunpowder in

the sixth century,[314] they used coal and gas heating centuries before

these things were used in Europe; their bridge-building, their hydraulic

engineering was admirable; the knowledge of materials shown in their

enamel and lacquer ware is very great. Why did they never organize the

system of record and co-operation in inquiry that has given the world

modern science? And why, in spite of their general training in good

manners and self-restraint, did intellectual education never soak down

into the general mass of the population? Why are the masses of China

to-day, and why have they always been, in spite of an exceptionally high

level of natural intelligence, illiterate?

It is customary to meet such questions with rather platitudinous

answers. We are told that the Chinaman is the most conservative of human

beings, that, in contrast with the European races, his mind is twisted

round towards the past, that he is the willing slave of etiquette and

precedent to a degree inconceivable to Western minds. He is represented

as having a mentality so distinct that one might almost expect to find a

difference in brain structure to explain it. The appeals of Confucius to

the wisdom of the ancients are always quoted to clinch this suggestion.

If, however, we examine this generalization more closely, it dissolves

into thin air. The superior intellectual initiative, the liberal

enterprise, the experimental disposition that is supposed to

characterize the Western mind, is manifest in the history of that mind

only during certain phases and under exceptional circumstances. For the

rest, the Western world displays itself as traditional and conservative

as China. And, on the other hand, the Chinese mind has, under conditions

of stimulus, shown itself quite as inventive and versatile as the

European, and the very kindred Japanese mind even more so. For, take the

case of the Greeks, the whole swing of their mental vigour falls into

the period between the sixth century B.C. and the decay of the

Alexandrian Museum under the later Ptolemies in the second century B.C.

There were Greeks before that time and Greeks since, but a history of a

thousand years of the Byzantine empire showed the Hellenic world at

least as intellectually stagnant as China. Then we have already drawn

attention to the comparative sterility of the Italian mind during the

Roman period and its abundant fertility since the Renaissance of

learning. The English mind again had a phase of brightness in the

seventh and eighth centuries, and it did not shine again until the

fifteenth. Again, the mind of the Arabs, as we shall presently tell,

blazed out like a star for half a dozen generations after the appearance

of Islam, having never achieved anything of importance before or since.

On the other hand, there was always a great deal of scattered

inventiveness in China, and the progress of Chinese art witnesses to new

movements and vigorous innovations. We exaggerate the reverence of the

Chinese for their fathers; parricide was a far commoner crime among the

Chinese emperors than it was even among the rulers of Persia. Moreover,

there have been several liberalizing movements in China, several

recorded struggles against the “ancient ways.”

It has already been suggested that phases of real intellectual progress

in any community seem to be connected with the existence of a detached

class of men, sufficiently free not to be obliged to toil or worry

exhaustively about mundane needs, and not rich and powerful enough to be

tempted into extravagances of lust, display, or cruelty. They must have

a sense of security, but not a conceit of superiority. This class, we

have further insinuated, must be able to talk freely and communicate

easily. It must not be watched for heresy or persecuted for any ideas it

may express. Such a happy state of affairs certainly prevailed in Greece

during its best days. A class of intelligent, free gentlefolk is indeed

evident in history whenever there is a record of bold philosophy or

effective scientific advances.

In the days of Tang and Sung and Ming there must have been an abundance

of pleasantly circumstanced people in China of just the class that

supplied most of the young men of the Academy at Athens, or the bright

intelligences of Renaissance Italy, or the members of the London Royal

Society, that mother society of modern science; and yet China did not

produce in these periods of opportunity any such large beginnings of

recorded and analyzed fact.

If we reject the idea that there is some profound racial difference

between China and the West which makes the Chinese by nature

conservative and the West by nature progressive, then we are forced to

look for the operating cause of this difference in progressiveness in

some other direction. Many people are disposed to find that operating

cause which has, in spite of her original advantages, retarded China so

greatly during the last four or five centuries, in the imprisonment of

the Chinese mind in a script and in an idiom of thought so elaborate and

so difficult that the mental energy of the country has been largely

consumed in acquiring it. This view deserves examination.

We have already given an account in chap. xviii. of the peculiarities of

Chinese writing and of the Chinese language. The Japanese writing is

derived from the Chinese, and consists of a more rapidly written system

of forms. A great number of these forms are ideograms taken over from

the Chinese and used exactly as the Chinese ideograms are used, but also

a number of signs are used to express syllables; there is a Japanese

syllabary after the fashion of the Sumerian syllabary we have described

in chap. xviii. The Japanese writing remains a clumsy system, as clumsy

as cuneiform, though not so clumsy as Chinese; and there has been a

movement in Japan to adopt a Western alphabet. Korea long ago went a

step farther and developed a true alphabet from the same Chinese

origins. With these exceptions all the great writing systems now in use

in the world are based on the Mediterranean alphabets, and are beyond

comparison more easily learnt and mastered than the Chinese. This means

that while other peoples learn merely a comparatively simple and

straightforward method of setting down the language with which they are

familiar, the Chinaman has to master a great multitude of complex word

signs and word groups. He must not simply learn the signs, but the

established grouping of those signs to represent various meanings. He

must familiarize himself, therefore, with a number of exemplary

classical works. Consequently in China, while you will find great

numbers of people who know the significance of certain frequent and

familiar characters, you discover only a few whose knowledge is

sufficiently extensive to grasp the meaning of a newspaper paragraph,

and still fewer who can read any subtlety of intention or fine shades of

meaning. In a lesser degree this is true also of Japan. No doubt

European readers, especially of such word-rich languages as English or

Russian, vary greatly among themselves in regard to the extent of books

they can understand and how far they understand them; their power varies

according to their vocabularies; but the corresponding levels of

understanding among the Chinese represent a far greater expenditure of

time and labour upon their attainment. A mandarin’s education in China

is, mainly, learning to read.

And it may be that the consequent preoccupation of the educated class

during its most susceptible years upon the Chinese classics gave it a

bias in favour of this traditional learning upon which it had spent so

much time and energy. Few men who have toiled to build up any system of

knowledge in their minds will willingly scrap it in favour of something

strange and new; this disposition is as characteristic of the West as of

the East; it is shown as markedly by the scholars of the British and

American universities as by any Chinese mandarins, and the British at

the present time, in spite of the great and manifest advantages in

popular education and national propaganda the change would give them,

refuse to make any move from their present barbaric orthography towards

a phonetic alphabet and spelling. The peculiarities of the Chinese

script, and the educational system arising out of that script, must have

acted age after age as an invincible filter that favoured the plastic

and scholarly mind as against the restive and originating type, and kept

the latter out of positions of influence and authority. There is much

that is plausible in this explanation.

There have been several attempts to simplify the Chinese writing and to

adopt an alphabetical system. In the early days of Buddhism in China,

when there was a considerable amount of translation from Sanskrit,

Indian influences came near to achieving this end; two Chinese alphabets

were indeed invented, and each had some little use. But what hindered

the general adoption of these, and what stands in the way of any

phonetic system of Chinese writing to-day, is this, that while the

literary script and phraseology is the same from one end of China to the

other, the spoken language of the common people, both in pronunciation

and in its familiar idioms, varies so widely that men from one province

may be incomprehensible to men from another. There is, however, a

“standard Chinese,” a rather bookish spoken idiom, which is generally

understood by educated people; and it is upon the possibility of

applying an alphabetical system of writing to this standard Chinese that

the hopes of modern educational reformers in China are based at the

present time. For fresh attempts are now being made to release the

Chinese mind from this ancient entanglement.

A Chinese alphabet has been formed; it is taught in the common schools,

and newspapers and pamphlets are issued in it. And the rigid examination

system that killed all intellectual initiatives has been destroyed.

The very success and early prosperity and general contentment of China

in the past must have worked to justify in that land all the natural

self-complacency and conservatism of mankind. No animal will change when

its conditions are “good enough” for present survival. And in this

matter man is still an animal. Until the nineteenth century, for more

than two thousand years, there was little in the history of China that

could cause any serious doubts in the mind of a Chinaman of the general

superiority of his own civilization to that of the rest of the world,

and there was no reason apparent therefore for any alteration. China

produced a profusion of beautiful art, some delightful poetry,

astonishing cookery, and thousands of millions of glowingly pleasant

lives generation after generation. Her ships followed her marvellous

inland waterways, and put to sea but rarely, and then only to India or

Borneo as their utmost adventure. (Until the sixteenth century we must

remember European seamen never sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean. The

Norse discovery of America, the Phœnician circumnavigation of Africa,

were exceptional feats.) And these things were attained without any such

general boredom, servitude, indignity, and misery as underlay the rule

of the rich in the Roman Empire. There was much poverty, much

discontent, but it was not massed poverty, it was not a necessary

popular discontent. For a thousand years the Chinese system, though it

creaked and swayed at times, seemed proof against decay. Dynastic

changes there were, rebellions, phases of disorder, famines,

pestilences; two great invasions that set foreign dynasties upon the

throne of the Son of Heaven, but no such shock as to revolutionize the

order of the daily round. The emperors and dynasties might come and go;

the mandarins, the examinations, the classics, and the traditions and

habitual life remained. China’s civilization had already reached its

culmination in the seventh century A.D., its crowning period was the

Tang period; and though it continued to spread slowly and steadily into

Annam, into Cambodia, into Siam, into Tibet, into Nepal, Korea,

Mongolia, and Manchuria, there is henceforth little more than such

geographical progress to record of it in this history for a thousand

years.[315]

§ 9[316]

In the year 629, the year after the arrival of Muhammad’s envoys at

Canton and thirty odd years after the landing of Pope Gregory’s

missionaries in England, a certain learned and devout Buddhist named

Yuan Chwang started out from Singan, Tai-tsung’s capital, upon a great

journey to India. He was away sixteen years, he returned in 645, and he

wrote an account of his travels which is treasured as a Chinese classic.

One or two points about his experiences are to be noted here because

they contribute to our general review of the state of the world in the

seventh century A.D.

Yuan Chwang was as eager for marvels and as credulous as Herodotus, and

without the latter writer’s fine sense of history; he could never pass a

monument or ruin without learning some fabulous story about it; Chinese

ideas of the dignity of literature perhaps prevented him from telling us

much detail of how he travelled, who were his attendants, how he was

lodged, or what he ate and how he paid his expenses--details precious

to the historian; nevertheless, he gives us a series of illuminating

flashes upon China, Central Asia, and India in the period now under

consideration.

[Illustration: YUAN CHWANG’S route from China to India, 629-645 A.D.]

His journey was an enormous one. He went and came back by way of the

Pamirs. He went by the northern route, crossing the desert of Gobi,

passing along the southern slopes of the Thien Shan, skirting the great

deep blue lake of Issik Kul, and so to Tashkend and Samarkand, and then

more or less in the footsteps of Alexander the Great southward to the

Khyber Pass and Peshawur. He returned by the southern route, crossing

the Pamirs from Afghanistan to Kashgar, and so along the line of retreat

the Yueh Chi had followed in the reverse direction seven centuries

before, and by Yarkand, along the slopes of the Kuen Lun to rejoin his

former route near the desert end of the Great Wall. Each route involved

some hard mountaineering. His journeyings in India are untraceable; he

was there fourteen years, and he went all over the peninsula from Nepal

to Ceylon.

At that time there was an imperial edict forbidding foreign travel, so

that Yuan Chwang started from Singan like an escaping criminal. There

was a pursuit to prevent him carrying out his project. How he bought a

lean red-coloured horse that knew the desert paths from a strange

grey-beard, how he dodged a frontier guard-house with the help of a

“foreign person” who made him a bridge of brushwood lower down the

river, how he crossed the desert guided by the bones of men and cattle,

how he saw a mirage, and how twice he narrowly escaped being shot by

arrows when he was getting water near the watch-towers on the desert

track, the reader will find in the _Life_. He lost his way in the desert

of Gobi, and for four nights and five days he had no water; when he was

in the mountains among the glaciers, twelve of his party were frozen to

death. All this is in the _Life_; he tells little of it in his own

account of his travels.

He shows us the Turks, this new development of the Hun tradition, in

possession not only of what is now Turkestan, but all along the northern

route. He mentions many cities and considerable cultivation. He is

entertained by various rulers, allies of or more or less nominally

tributaries to China, and among others by the Khan of the Turks, a

magnificent person in green satin, with his long hair tied with silk.

“The gold embroidery of this grand tent shone with a dazzling splendour;

the ministers of the presence in attendance sat on mats in long rows on

either side all dressed in magnificent brocade robes, while the rest of

the retinue on duty stood behind. You saw that although it was a case of

a frontier ruler, yet there was an air of distinction and elegance. The

Khan came out from his tent about thirty paces to meet Yuan Chwang, who,

after a courteous greeting, entered the tent.... After a short interval

envoys from China and Kao-chang were admitted and presented their

despatches and credentials, which the Khan perused. He was much elated,

and caused the envoys to be seated; then he ordered wine and music for

himself and them and grape-syrup for the pilgrim. Hereupon all pledged

each other, and the filling and draining of the winecups made a din and

bustle, while the mingled music of various instruments rose loud:

although the airs were the popular strains of foreigners, yet they

pleased the senses and exhilarated the mental faculties. After a little,

piles of roasted beef and mutton were served for the others, and lawful

food, such as cakes, milk, candy, honey, and grapes, for the pilgrim.

After the entertainment, grape-syrup was again served, and the Khan

invited Yuan Chwang to improve the occasion, whereupon the pilgrim

expounded the doctrines of the ‘ten virtues,’ compassion for animal

life, and the paramitas and emancipation. The Khan, raising his hands,

bowed, and gladly believed and accepted the teaching.”

Yuan Chwang’s account of Samarkand[317] is of a large and prosperous

city, “a great commercial entrepôt, the country about it very fertile,

abounding in trees and flowers and yielding many fine horses. Its

inhabitants were skilful craftsmen, smart and energetic.” At that time

we must remember there was hardly such a thing as a town in Anglo-Saxon

England.

As his narrative approached his experiences in India, however, the pious

and learned pilgrim in Yuan Chwang got the better of the traveller, and

the book becomes congested with monstrous stories of incredible

miracles.[318] Nevertheless, we get an impression of houses, clothing,

and the like, closely resembling those of the India of to-day. Then, as

now, the kaleidoscopic variety of an Indian crowd contrasted with the

blue uniformity of the multitude in China. In the time of Buddha it is

doubtful if there were reading and writing in India; now reading and

writing were quite common accomplishments. Yuan Chwang gives an

interesting account of a great Buddhist university at Nalanda, where

ruins have quite recently been discovered and excavated. Nalanda and

Taxilla seem to have been considerable educational centres as early as

the opening of the schools of Athens. The caste system Yuan Chwang found

fully established in spite of Buddha, and the Brahmins were now

altogether in the ascendant. He names the four main castes we have

mentioned in chap. xx., § 4 (_q.v._), but his account of their functions

is rather different. The Sudras, he says, were the tillers of the soil.

Indian writers say that their function was to wait upon the three “twice

born” castes above them.

But, as we have already intimated, Yuan Chwang’s account of Indian

realities is swamped by his accumulation of legends and pious

inventions. For these he had come, and in these he rejoiced. The rest,

as we shall see, was a task that had been set him. The faith of Buddha

which in the days of Asoka, and even so late as Kanishka, was still pure

enough to be a noble inspiration, we now discover absolutely lost in a

wilderness of preposterous rubbish, a philosophy of endless Buddhas,

tales of manifestations and marvels like a Christmas pantomime,

immaculate conceptions by six-tusked elephants, charitable princes

giving themselves up to be eaten by starving tigresses, temples built

over a sacred nail-paring, and the like. We cannot give such stories

here; if the reader likes that sort of thing, he must go to the

publications of the Royal Asiatic Society or the India Society, where he

will find a delirium of such imaginations. And in competition with this

Buddhism, intellectually undermined as it now was and smothered in

gilded decoration, Brahminism was everywhere gaining ground again, as

Yuan Chwang notes with regret.

Side by side with these evidences of a vast intellectual decay in India

we may note the repeated appearance in Yuan Chwang’s narrative of ruined

and deserted cities. Much of the country was still suffering from the

ravages of the Ephthalites and the consequent disorders. Again and again

we find such passages as this: “he went north-east through a great

forest, the road being a narrow, dangerous path, with wild buffalo and

wild elephants, and robbers and hunters always in wait to kill

travellers, and emerging from the forest he reached the country of

Kou-shih-na-ka-lo (Kúsinagara). The city walls were in ruins, and the

towns and villages were deserted. The brick foundations of the ‘old

city’ (that is, the city which had been the capital) were above ten _li_

in circuit; there were very few inhabitants, the interior of the city

being a wild waste.” This ruin was, however, by no means universal;

there is at least as much mention of crowded cities and villages and

busy cultivations.

The _Life_ tells of many hardships upon the return journey: he fell

among robbers; the great elephant that was carrying the bulk of his

possessions was drowned; he had much difficulty in getting fresh

transport. Here we cannot deal with these adventures.

The return of Yuan Chwang to Singan, the Chinese capital, was, we

gather, a triumph. Advance couriers must have told of his coming. There

was a public holiday; the streets were decorated by gay banners and made

glad with music. He was escorted into the city with great pomp and

ceremony. Twenty horses were needed to carry the spoils of his travels;

he had brought with him hundreds of Buddhist books written in Sanskrit,

and made of trimmed leaves of palm and birch bark strung together in

layers; he had many images great and small of Buddha, in gold, silver,

crystal, and sandalwood; he had holy pictures, and no fewer than one

hundred and fifty well authenticated true relics of Buddha. Yuan Chwang

was presented to the emperor, who treated him as a personal friend, took

him into the palace, and questioned him day by day about the wonders of

these strange lands in which he had stayed so long. But while the

emperor asked about India, the pilgrim was disposed only to talk about

Buddhism.

Buddhist writers thought very highly of Tai-tsung because of his

reception of Yuan Chwang (645). But so did the Moslem historians,

because of that mosque at Canton, and so did the Christian writers,

because of the Nestorian envoys (631).

The subsequent history of Yuan Chwang contains two incidents that throw

light upon the mental workings of this great monarch, Tai-tsung, who was

probably quite as much a Moslem as he was a Christian or a Buddhist. The

trouble about all religious specialists is that they know too much about

their own religion and how it differs from others; the advantage, or

disadvantage, of such creative statesmen as Tai-tsung and Constantine

the Great is that they know comparatively little of such matters.

Evidently the fundamental good of all these religions seemed to

Tai-tsung to be much the same fundamental good. So it was natural to him

to propose that Yuan Chwang should now give up the religious life and

come into his foreign office, a proposal that Yuan Chwang would not

entertain for a moment. The emperor then insisted at least upon a

written account of the travels, and so got this classic we treasure. And

finally Tai-tsung proposed to this highly saturated Buddhist that he

should now use his knowledge of Sanskrit in translating the works of the

great Chinese teacher, Lao Tse, so as to make them available for Indian

readers. It seemed, no doubt, to the emperor a fair return and a useful

service to the fundamental good that lies beneath all religions. On the

whole, he thought Lao Tse might very well rank with or even a little

above Buddha, and therefore that if his work was put before the

Brahmins, they would receive it gladly. In much the same spirit

Constantine the Great had done his utmost to make Arius and Athanasius

settle down amicably together. But naturally enough this suggestion was

repulsed by Yuan Chwang. He retired to a monastery and spent the rest of

his years translating as much as he could of the Buddhist literature he

had brought with him into elegant Chinese writing.

* * * * *

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

¶ Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM

KIPPS

MR. POLLY

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

ANN VERONICA

TONO BUNGAY

MARRIAGE

BEALBY

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS

THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP

JOAN AND PETER

THE UNDYING FIRE

¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

THE TIME MACHINE

THE WONDERFUL VISIT

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

THE SEA LADY

THE SLEEPER AWAKES

THE FOOD OF THE GODS

THE WAR IN THE AIR

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET

THE WORLD SET FREE

And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the title

of THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

¶ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900)

MANKIND IN THE MAKING

FIRST AND LAST THINGS

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

A MODERN UTOPIA

THE FUTURE IN AMERICA

AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD

WHAT IS COMING?

WAR AND THE FUTURE

IN THE FOURTH YEAR

GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

¶ And two little books about children’s play, called

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS

* * * * *

THE OUTLINE OF

HISTORY

Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind

BY

H. G. WELLS

WRITTEN WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF

MR. ERNEST BARKER,

SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER

AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY

AND ILLUSTRATED BY

J. F. HORRABIN

VOLUME II

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1920

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1920,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

COPYRIGHT, 1920,

BY H. G. WELLS.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

SCHEME OF CONTENTS

BOOK VI (CONTINUED)

PAGE

CHAPTER XXXII. MUHAMMAD AND ARAB ISLAM

§ 1. Arabia before Muhammad 1

§ 2. Life of Muhammad to the Hegira 4

§ 3. Muhammad becomes a fighting prophet 8

§ 4. The teachings of Islam 14

§ 5. The caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar 16

§ 6. The great days of the Omayyads 22

§ 7. The decay of Islam under the Abbasids 31

§ 8. The intellectual life of Arab Islam 34

CHAPTER XXXIII. CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES

§ 1. The Western world at its lowest ebb 40

§ 2. The feudal system 42

§ 3. The Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians 46

§ 4. The Christianization of the western barbarians 48

§ 5. Charlemagne becomes emperor of the West 54

§ 6. The personality of Charlemagne 59

§ 7. The French and the Germans become distinct 61

§ 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk Turks 64

§ 9. How Constantinople appealed to Rome 72

§ 10. The Crusades 76

§ 11. The Crusades a test of Christianity 84

§ 12. The Emperor Frederick II 86

§ 13. Defects and limitations of the papacy 90

§ 14. A list of leading Popes 96

BOOK VII

THE GREAT MONGOL EMPIRES OF THE LAND WAYS

AND THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE SEA WAYS

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND HIS

SUCCESSORS

§ 1. Asia at the end of the twelfth century 105

§ 2. The rise and victories of the Mongols 108

§ 3. The travels of Marco Polo 114

§ 4. The Ottoman Turks, the Turkish Caliph, and Constantinople 120

§ 5. Why the Mongols were not Christianized 126

§ 5A. Kublai Khan founds the Yuan Dynasty 127

§ 5B. The Mongols revert to tribalism 128

§ 5C. The Kipchak empire and the Tsar of Muscovy 128

§ 5D. Timurlane 130

§ 5E. The Mongol empire of India 133

§ 5F. The Mongols and the Gipsies 137

CHAPTER XXXV. THE RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

§ 1. Christianity and popular education 139

§ 2. Europe begins to think for itself 148

§ 3. The Great Plague and the dawn of communism 153

§ 4. How paper liberated the human mind 158

§ 5. Protestantism of the princes and Protestantism of the peoples 160

§ 6. The reawakening of science 167

§ 7. The new growth of European towns 177

§ 8. America comes into history 184

§ 9. What Machiavelli thought of the world 194

§ 10. The republic of Switzerland 198

§ 11A. The life of the Emperor Charles V 199

§ 11B. Protestants if the prince wills it 210

§ 11C. The intellectual under-tow 210

BOOK VIII

THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS

CHAPTER XXXVI. PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS

§ 1. Princes and foreign policy 213

§ 2. The English republic 218

§ 3. The Dutch republic 228

§ 4. The break-up and disorder of Germany 232

§ 5. The splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe 236

§ 6. The growth of the idea of Great Powers 243

§ 7. The crowned republic of Poland and its fate 248

§ 8. The first scramble for empire overseas 251

§ 9. Britain dominates India 254

§ 10. Russia’s ride to the Pacific 259

§ 11. What Gibbon thought of the world in 1780 262

§ 12. The social truce draws to an end 269

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA

AND FRANCE

§ 1. Inconveniences of the Great Power system 278

§ 2. The thirteen colonies before their revolt 280

§ 3. Civil war is forced upon the colonies 286

§ 4. The War of Independence 291

§ 5. The constitution of the United States 294

§ 6. Primitive features of the United States constitution 301

§ 7. Revolutionary ideas in France 307

§ 8. The Revolution of the year 1789 311

§ 9. The French “crowned republic” of ’89-’91 313

§ 10. The Revolution of the Jacobins 321

§ 11. The Jacobin republic, 1792-4 331

§ 12. The Directory 337

§ 13. The pause in reconstruction and the dawn of modern Socialism 339

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

§ 1. The Buonaparte family in Corsica 348

§ 2. Bonaparte as a republican general 349

§ 3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804 354

§ 4. Napoleon I Emperor, 1804-1814 360

§ 5. The Hundred Days 368

§ 6. The cult of the Napoleonic 373

§ 7. The map of Europe in 1815 377

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATION OF THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY. THE INCREASE OF KNOWLEDGE AND CLEAR

THINKING. THE NATIONALIST PHASE

§ 1. The mechanical revolution 384

§ 2. Relation of the mechanical to the industrial revolution 393

§ 3. The fermentation of ideas, 1848 399

§ 4. The development of the idea of Socialism 401

§ 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a scheme of human society 411

§ 6. How Darwinism affected religious and political ideas 416

§ 7. Mr. Gladstone and the idea of Nationalism 426

§ 8. Europe between 1848 and 1878 436

§ 9. The (second) scramble for overseas empires 449

§ 10. The Indian precedent in Asia 461

§ 11. The history of Japan 464

§ 12. Close of the period of overseas expansion 469

§ 13. The British Empire in 1914 470

CHAPTER XL. THE INTERNATIONAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914 AND THE

CLOSE OF THE GREAT POWER PERIOD

§ 1. The armed peace before the Great War 475

§ 2. Imperial Germany 477

§ 3. The spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland 486

§ 4. Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans 499

§ 5. Russia still a Grand Monarchy in 1914 502

§ 6. The United States and the Imperial idea 503

§ 7. The immediate causes of the Great War 508

§ 8. A summary of the Great War up to 1917 513

§ 9. The Great War from the Russian collapse to the armistice 524

§ 10. The political, economic, and social disorganization caused by

the Great War 532

§ 11. President Wilson and the problems of Versailles 543

§ 12. Summary of the first Covenant of the League of Nations 558

§ 13. A general outline of the treaties of 1919 and 1920 562

§ 14. A forecast of the “next war” 567

§ 15. The state of men’s minds in 1920 572

BOOK IX

THE NEXT STAGE IN HISTORY

CHAPTER XLI. MAN’S COMING OF AGE. THE PROBABLE STRUGGLE

FOR THE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD INTO ONE COMMUNITY

OF KNOWLEDGE AND WILL

§ 1. The possible unification of men’s wills in political matters 579

§ 2. How a Federal World Government may come about 583

§ 3. Some fundamental characteristics of a modern world state 586

§ 4. What this world might be like, were men united in a common

peace and justice 588

§ 5. The stages beyond? 594

FIVE TIME CHARTS OF THE WORLD’S AFFAIRS FROM B.C. 1000 TO A.D. 1920 599

A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FROM 800 B.C. TO A.D. 1920 605

INDEX 625

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Arabia and Adjacent Countries 2

The Beginnings of Moslem Power 19

The Growth of Moslem Power in 25 Years 23

The Moslem Empire 25

Europe, 500 A.D. 44

Frankish Dominions in the Time of Charles Martel 45

England, 640 A.D. 49

England, 878 A.D. 52

Europe at the Death of Charlemagne 55

France at the Close of the 10th Century 65

Empire of Otto the Great 68

The Coming of the Seljuks (Map) 70

The First Crusade (Map) 77

Europe and Asia, 1200 107

Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227 111

Travels of Marco Polo 115

Ottoman Empire before 1453 123

Ottoman Empire, 1566 125

Empire of Timurlane 131

Europe at the Fall of Constantinople 141

“We have the payne....” John Bull’s Speech 155

Ignatius of Loyola 164

European Trade Routes in the 14th Century 183

The Chief Voyages of Exploration up to 1522 191

Mexico and Peru 192

Switzerland 198

Europe in the Time of Charles V 201

Martin Luther 203

Francis I 204

Henry VIII 206

Charles V 207

Central Europe, 1648 233

Louis XIV 237

The Partitions of Poland 250

Britain, France, and Spain in America, 1750 255

Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century 256

India in 1750 260

American Colonies, 1760 283

Boston in 1775 292

The United States in 1790 295

The United States Showing Dates of the Chief Territorial Extensions 299

Benjamin Franklin 303

George Washington 304

The Flight to Varennes (Map) 322

North Eastern Frontier of France, 1792 330

Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign 352

Napoleon as Emperor 360

Tsar Alexander I 362

Napoleon’s Empire, 1810 365

The Trail of Napoleon 369

Europe after the Congress of Vienna 379

The Natural Political Map of Europe 383

Mr. Gladstone 427

Tribal Gods of the 19th Century 434

Map of Europe, 1848-1871 439

Italy, 1861 441

Bismarck 443

The Balkans, 1878 448

Comparative Maps of Asia under Different Projections 450

The British Empire in 1815 452

Africa in the Middle of 19th Century 458

Africa, 1914 459

Japan and the East Coast of Asia 468

Overseas Empires of European Powers, 1914 474

Emperor William II 482

Ireland . 491

The Balkan States, 1913 501

The Original German Plan, 1914 514

The Western Front, 1915-18 517

Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 528-29

President Wilson 551

M. Clemenceau 552

Mr. Lloyd George 553

Germany after the Peace Treaty, 1919 561

The Turkish Treaty, 1920 563

The Break-up of Austria-Hungary 565

Time-chart 1000 B.C.-300 B.C. 599

Time-chart 400 B.C.-A.D. 300 600

Time-chart A.D. 200-A.D. 900 601

Time-chart A.D. 800-A.D. 1500 602

Time-chart A.D. 1220-A.D. 1920 603

BOOK VI (_Continued_)

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM (_Continued_)

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

XXXII

MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM[319]

§ 1. _Arabia before Muhammad._ § 2. _Life of Muhammad to the

Hegira._ § 3. _Muhammad becomes a Fighting Prophet._ § 4. _The

Teachings of Islam._ § 5. _The Caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar._ § 6.

_The Great Days of the Omayyads._ § 7. _The Decay of Islam under

the Abbasids._ § 8. _The Intellectual Life of Arab Islam._

§ 1

We have already described how in A.D. 628 the courts of Heraclius, of

Kavadh, and of Tai-tsung were visited by Arab envoys sent from a certain

Muhammad, “The Prophet of God,” at the small trading town of Medina in

Arabia. We must tell now who this prophet was who had arisen among the

nomads and traders of the Arabian desert.

From time immemorial Arabia, except for the fertile strip of the Yemen

to the south, had been a land of nomads, the headquarters and land of

origin of the Semitic peoples. From Arabia at various times waves of

these nomads had drifted north, east, and west into the early

civilizations of Egypt, the Mediterranean coast, and Mesopotamia. We

have noted in this history how the Sumerians were swamped and overcome

by such Semitic waves, how the Semitic Phœnicians and Canaanites

established themselves along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,

how the Babylonians and Assyrians were settled Semitic peoples, how the

Hyksos conquered Egypt, how the Arameans established themselves in Syria

with Damascus as their capital, and how the Hebrews partially conquered

their “Promised Land.” At some unknown date the Chaldeans drifted in

from Eastern Arabia and settled in the old southern Sumerian lands.

With each invasion first this and then that section of the Semitic

peoples comes into history. But each of such swarmings still leaves a

tribal nucleus behind to supply fresh invasions in the future.

[Illustration: Map of ARABIA and adjacent countries]