among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing glimpses of
his power. He ruled not only over the Huns but over a conglomerate of
tributary Germanic tribes; his empire extended from the Rhine cross the
plains into Central Asia. He exchanged ambassadors with China. His
head camp was in the plain of Hungary east of the Danube. There he was
visited by an envoy from Constantinople, Priscus, who has left us an
account of his state. The way of living of these Mongols was very like
the way of living of the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The
common folk were in huts and tents; the chiefs lived in great stockaded
timber halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards.
The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian companions of Alexander
would probably have felt more at home in the camp-capital of Attila
than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent court of
Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning in
Constantinople.
For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership of the
Huns and Attila would play the same part towards the Græco-Roman
civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the barbaric Greeks
had played long ago to the Ægean civilization. It looked like history
repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the Huns were much more
wedded to the nomadic life than the early Greeks, who were rather
migratory cattle farmers than true nomads. The Huns raided and
plundered but did not settle.
For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His armies
devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople, Gibbon
says that he totally destroyed no less than seventy cities in the
Balkan peninsula, and Theodosius bought him off by payments of tribute
and tried to get rid of him for good by sending secret agents to
assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention to the remains of
the Latin- speaking half of the empire and invaded Gaul. Nearly every
town in northern Gaul was sacked. Franks, Visigoths and the imperial
forces united against him and he was defeated at Troyes in a vast
dispersed battle in which a multitude of men, variously estimated as
between 150,000 and 300,000, were killed. This checked him in Gaul, but
it did not exhaust his enormous military resources. Next year he came
into Italy by way of Venetia, burnt Aquileia and Padua and looted
Milan.
HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF
HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF
_(In the British Museum)_
Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and particularly
from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic
and laid there the foundations of the city state of Venice, which was
to become one of the greatest or the trading centres in the middle
ages.
In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate his
marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder confederation
of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear from history, mixed
into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations. But
these great Hun raids practically consummated the end of the Latin
Roman Empire. After his death ten different emperors ruled in Rome in
twenty years, set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops. The Vandals
from Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the
chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring
as emperor under the impressive name of Romulus Augustulus, and
informed the Court of Constantinople that there was no longer an
emperor in the west. So ingloriously the Latin Roman Empire came to an
end. In 493 Theodoric the Goth became King of Rome.
All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs were reigning
as kings, dukes and the like, practically independent but for the most
part professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to the emperor. There
were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such practically independent
brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain and Italy and in Dacia the Latin speech
still prevailed in locally distorted forms, but in Britain and east of
the Rhine languages of the German group (or in Bohemia a Slavonic
language, Czech) were the common speech. The superior clergy and a
small remnant of other educated men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere
life was insecure and property was held by the strong arm. Castles
multiplied and roads fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century
was an age of division and of intellectual darkness throughout the
western world. Had it not been for the monks and Christian
missionaries Latin learning might have perished altogether.
Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely decayed?
It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it together.
Throughout the days of the expanding republic, and even into the days
of the early empire there remained a great number of men conscious of
Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an obligation to be a
Roman citizen, confident of their rights under the Roman law and
willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome. The prestige of Rome
as of something just and great and law- upholding spread far beyond the
Roman boundaries. But even as early as the Punic wars the sense of
citizenship was being undermined by the growth of wealth and slavery.
Citizenship spread indeed but not the idea of citizenship.
The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive organization; it did
not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes of
citizens, did not invite their co-operation in its decisions. There
was no network of schools to ensure a common understanding, no
distribution of news to sustain collective activity. The adventurers
who struggled for power from the days of Marius and Sulla onward had no
idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the imperial
affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation and no one
observed it die. All empires, all states, all organizations of human
society are, in the ultimate, things of understanding and will. There
remained no will for the Roman Empire in the World and so it came to an
end.
But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the fifth century,
something else had been born within it that was to avail itself
enormously of its prestige and tradition, and that was the
Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the empire
died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men, because it had
books and a great system of teachers and missionaries to hold it
together, things stronger than any law or legions. Throughout the
fourth and fifth centuries A.D. while the empire was decaying,
Christianity was spreading to a universal dominion in Europe. It
conquered its conquerors, the barbarians. When Attila seemed disposed
to march on Rome, the patriarch of Rome intercepted him and did what no
armies could do, turning him back by sheer moral force.
The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the entire
Christian church. Now that there were no more emperors, he began to
annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of _pontifex
maximus_, head sacrificial priest of the Roman dominion, the most
ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed.
XLI
THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES
The Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire showed much more
political tenacity than the western half. It weathered the disasters of
the fifth century A.D., which saw a complete and final breaking up of
the original Latin Roman power. Attila bullied the Emperor Theodosius
II and sacked and raided almost to the walls of Constantinople, but
that city remained intact. The Nubians came down the Nile and looted
Upper Egypt, but Lower Egypt and Alexandria were left still fairly
prosperous. Most of Asia Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians.
The sixth century, which was an age of complete darkness for the West,
saw indeed a considerable revival of the Greek power. Justinian I
(527-565) was a ruler of very great ambition and energy, and he was
married to the Empress Theodora, a woman of quite equal capacity who
had begun life as an actress. Justinian reconquered North Africa from
the Vandals and most of Italy from the Goths. He even regained the
south of Spain. He did not limit his energies to naval and military
enterprises. He founded a university, built the great church of Sta.
Sophia in Constantinople and codified the Roman law. But in order to
destroy a rival to his university foundation he closed the schools of
philosophy in Athens, which had been going on in unbroken continuity
from the days of Plato, that is to say for nearly a thousand years.
From the third century onwards the Persian Empire had been the
steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires kept Asia Minor,
Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual unrest and waste. In the first
century A.D., these lands were still at a high level of civilization,
wealthy and with an abundant population, but the continual coming and
going of armies, massacres, looting and war taxation wore them down
steadily until only shattered and ruinous cities remained upon a
countryside of scattered peasants. In this melancholy process of
impoverishment and disorder lower Egypt fared perhaps less badly than
the rest of the world. Alexandria, like Constantinople, continued a
dwindling trade between the east and the west.
THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE
THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE
The obelisk of Theodosius in in the foreground statue on left
_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_
Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both these warring
and decaying empires. The last philosophers of Athens, until their
suppression, preserved the texts of the great literature of the past
with an infinite reverence and want of understanding. But there
remained no class of men in the world, no free gentlemen with bold and
independent habits of thought, to carry on the tradition of frank
statement and enquiry embodied in these writings. The social and
political chaos accounts largely for the disappearance of this class,
but there was also another reason why the human intelligence was
sterile and feverish during this age. In both Persia and Byzantium it
was all age of intolerance. Both empires were religious empires in a
new way, in a way that greatly hampered the free activities of the
human mind.
THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIA
THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIA
_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_
Of course the oldest empires in the world were religious empires,
centring upon the worship of a god or of a god-king. Alexander was
treated as a divinity and the Cæsars were gods in so much as they had
altars and temples devoted to them and the offering of incense was made
a test of loyalty to the Roman state. But these older religions were
essentially religions of act and fact. They did not invade the mind.
If a man offered his sacrifice and bowed to the god, he was left not
only to think but to say practically whatever he liked about the
affair. But the new sort of religions that had come into the world,
and particularly Christianity, turned inward. These new faiths
demanded not simply conformity but understanding belief. Naturally
fierce controversy ensued upon the exact meaning of the things
believed. These new religions were creed religions. The world was
confronted with a new word, Orthodoxy, and with a stern resolve to keep
not only acts but speech and private thought within the limits of a set
teaching. For to hold a wrong opinion, much more to convey it to other
people, was no longer regarded as an intellectual defect but a moral
fault that might condemn a soul to everlasting destruction.
THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS COURT
THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS COURT
_Photo: Alinari_
THE ROCK HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA
THE ROCK HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
Both Ardashir I who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the third century
A.D., and Constantine the Great who reconstructed the Roman Empire in
the fourth, turned to religious organizations for help, because in
these organizations they saw a new means of using and controlling the
wills of men. And already before the end of the fourth century both
empires were persecuting free talk and religious innovation. In Persia
Ardashir found the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster (or
Zarathushtra) with its priests and temples and a sacred fire that burnt
upon its altars, ready for his purpose as a state religion. Before the
end of the third century Zoroastrianism was persecuting Christianity,
and in 277 A.D. Mani, the founder of a new faith, the Manichæans, was
crucified and his body flayed. Constantinople, on its side, was busy
hunting out Christian heresies. Manichæan ideas infected Christianity
and had to be fought with the fiercest methods; in return ideas from
Christianity affected the purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine. All ideas
became suspect. Science, which demands before all things the free
action of an untroubled mind, suffered a complete eclipse throughout
this phase of intolerance.
War, the bitterest theology, and the usual vices of mankind constituted
Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque, it was romantic; it
had little sweetness or light. When Byzantium and Persia were not
fighting the barbarians from the north, they wasted Asia Minor and
Syria in dreary and destructive hostilities. Even in close alliance
these two empires would have found it a hard task to turn back the
barbarians and recover their prosperity. The Turks or Tartars first
come into history as the allies first of one power and then of another.
In the sixth century the two chief antagonists were Justinian and
Chosroes I; in the opening of the seventh the Emperor Heraclius was
pitted against Chosroes II (580).
At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor (610) Chosroes II
carried all before him. He took Antioch, Damascus and Jerusalem and
his armies reached Chalcedon, which is in Asia Minor over against
Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt. Then Heraclius pressed a
counter attack home and routed a Persian army at Nineveh (627),
although at that time there were still Persian troops at Chalcedon. In
628 Chosroes II was deposed and murdered by his son, Kavadh, and an
inconclusive peace was made between the two exhausted empires.
Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war. But few people as yet
dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the deserts to put
an end for ever to this aimless, chronic struggle.
While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria a message reached him. It
had been brought in to the imperial outpost at Bostra south of
Damascus; it was in Arabic, an obscure Semitic desert language, and it
was read to the Emperor, if it reached him at all, by an interpreter.
It was from someone who called himself “Muhammad the Prophet of God.”
It called upon the Emperor to acknowledge the One True God and to serve
him. What the Emperor said is not recorded.
A similar message came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon. He was annoyed, tore up
the letter, and bade the messenger begone.
This Muhammad, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader whose headquarters
were in the mean little desert town of Medina. He was preaching a new
religion of faith in the One True God.
“Even so, O Lord!” he said; “rend thou his Kingdom from Kavadh.”
XLII
THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA
Throughout the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there was a
steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of Attila were
merely precursors of this advance, which led at last to the
establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary and
Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages akin to Turkish,
survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads were, in fact, playing a role
towards the Aryanized civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that
the Aryans had played to the Ægean and Semitic civilizations ten or
fifteen centuries before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now
Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish officials
and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of history,
absorbed into the general population of Persia. There were no more
Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia; Mongolian people had
replaced them. The Turks became masters of Asia from China to the
Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D. that
had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han dynasty in China.
Then came a period of division and of Hunnish conquests from which
China arose refreshed, more rapidly and more completely than Europe was
destined to do. Before the end of the sixth century China was reunited
under the Suy dynasty, and this by the time of Heraclius gave place to
the Tang dynasty, whose reign marks another great period of prosperity
for China.
CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TANG DYNASTY, 616-906
CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TANG DYNASTY, 616-906
Specimens in glazed earthenware, in brown, green and buff, discovered
in tombs in China
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was the most
secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty had
extended her boundaries in the north; the Suy and Tang dynasties now
spread her civilization to the south, and China began to assume the
proportions she has to-day. In Central Asia indeed she reached much
further, extending at last, through tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia
and the Caspian Sea.
The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the old
China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school appeared,
there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had revolutionized
philosophical and religious thought. There were great advances in
artistic work, in technical skill and in all the amenities of life.
Tea was first used, paper manufactured and wood-block printing began.
Millions of people indeed were leading orderly, graceful and kindly
lives in China during these centuries when the attenuated populations
of Europe and Western Asia were living either in hovels, small walled
cities or grim robber fortresses. While the mind of the west was black
with theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant
and enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai- tsung, who
began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at Nineveh.
He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was probably seeking an
ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a party of
Christian missionaries (635). They were allowed to explain their creed
to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation of their Scriptures.
He pronounced this strange religion acceptable, and gave permission
for the foundation of a church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad. They came
to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way from Arabia
along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh, Tai-Tsung gave
these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in their
theological ideas and assisted them to build a mosque in Canton, a
mosque which survives, it is said, to this day, the oldest mosque in
the world.
XLIII
MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM
A prophetic amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of
the seventh century might have concluded very reasonably that it was
only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia
fell under Mongolian domination. There were no signs of order or union
in Western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian Empires were
manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction. India also was divided and
wasted. On the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which
probably at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the
Turkish people who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed
to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have been
an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the thirteenth century
when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific,
and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine
and Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of India.
Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would have
been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the Latin end of
Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia
would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of
small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an
empire now for more than a thousand years.
Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splendour.
They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boundaries of
China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that
is still to this day one of the most vital forces in the world.
The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young
husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of Mecca, named
Muhammad. Until he was forty he did very little to distinguish himself
in the world. He seems to have taken considerable interest in
religious discussion. Mecca was a pagan city at that time worshipping
in particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of great repute throughout all
Arabia and a centre of pilgrimages; but there were great numbers of
Jews in the country—indeed all the southern portion of Arabia professed
the Jewish faith—and there were Christian churches in Syria.
About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic characteristics like
those of the Hebrew prophets twelve hundred years before him. He
talked first to his wife of the One True God, and of the rewards and
punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can be no doubt that his
thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas.
He gathered about him a small circle of believers and presently began
to preach in the town against the prevalent idolatry. This made him
extremely unpopular with his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to
the Kaaba were the chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed.
He became bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself
to be the last chosen prophet of God entrusted with a mission to
perfect religion. Abraham, he declared, and Jesus Christ were his
forerunners. He had been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation
of God’s will.
He produced verses which he said had been communicated to him by an
angel, and he had a strange vision in which he was taken up through the
Heavens to God and instructed in his mission.
AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT
AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow townsmen
increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him; but he escaped
with his faithful friend and disciple, Abu Bekr, to the friendly town
of Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities followed between
Mecca and Medina which ended at last in a treaty. Mecca was to adopt
the worship of the One True God and accept Muhammad as his prophet,
_but the adherents of the new faith were still to make the pilgrimage
to Mecca_ just as they had done when they were pagans. So Muhammad
established the One True God in Mecca without injuring its pilgrim
traffic. In 629 Muhammad returned to Mecca as its master, a year after
he had sent out these envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung, Kavadh and
all the rulers of the earth.
LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND
LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread his
power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives in his
declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern standards
unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of very
considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere
religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions,
the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him from God.
Regarded as literature or philosophy the Koran is certainly unworthy of
its alleged Divine authorship.