Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (35 page)

THE PRANKISH EMPIRE

In 751 Pippin III (r. 741/751–768), the Frankish Mayor of the Palace, overthrew the Merovingian Dynasty, which had existed only nominally for several decades. He established the Carolingian Dynasty, and had its legitimacy proclaimed in much propaganda and in public works. The Frankish Empire
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found stable rulers in the Carolingians. The background of their overthrow of the Merovingians is fairly well understood and appears to be wholly political and internal.

Other factors, however, may have been involved as well. Jewish merchants were extremely influential among the Carolingians, who protected and patronized them.
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The Carolingians also did much to foster international trade between the Frankish Empire and the Islamic world by coining silver deniers modeled on Arab silver coins. They developed a good relationship with the Abbasids and expanded into the trade routes to Central Eurasia by conquering the Saxons, to their northeast, and the Avars in Pannonia, to their southeast.
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THE TIBETAN EMPIRE

In 755 a major rebellion shook the Tibetan Empire. The reigning emperor, Khri Lde Gtsug Brtsan (’Mes Ag-tshoms’, r. 712–755) was assassinated, and the crown prince, Srong Lde Brtsan, could not be enthroned for a year.
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When he was finally enthroned, as Khri Srong Lde Brtsan, he remained in a politically weak position for two decades.

To say that the reasons for the rebellion are unknown is an understatement. However, two things are clear. The rebellion had something to do with legitimacy. It also certainly had something to do with the T’ang military successes against the Tibetans, who had lost so much ground that the empire itself was in very grave danger. A Tibetan vassal in the northeastern part of the realm surrendered to the T’ang early in 755. The great ministers who led the rebellion were perhaps only trying to save the Tibetan Empire from disintegration and conquest by the Chinese.
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THE CHINESE EMPIRE

In 750 a T’ang general of Koguryo origin, Ko S?nji (Kao Hsien-chih), campaigned against the Tibetans in the Pamirs and defeated them there. He followed this success with intervention in a war between the kings of Ferghana and Shâsh (Čâč, now Tashkent). He and the king of Ferghana captured Shâsh in 750. Nevertheless, though the king of Shâsh surrendered peacefully, Ko broke the agreement. He sent his army in to rape, murder, and plunder, and took the king to Ch’ang-an, where Emperor Hsüan-tsung had him executed. The crown prince of the city escaped to the Arabs in Samarkand and pleaded for help. The Abbasids dispatched an army, which met Ko S?nji’s army in the Battle of Atlakh, near Talas, in July, 751. In the midst of the battle, the Karluk Turks, who had formed part of the T’ang forces, changed sides and joined the Central Asians and Arabs. The T’ang army was destroyed and the Arabs were victorious.
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Despite this setback, and increasingly severe problems at home caused by the constant T’ang military campaigns, Hsüan-tsung continued his policy of expansion. By 753 the T’ang had captured all of the Tibetans’ Central Asian territories and kept pressing deeper into the Tibetan Plateau. The Tibetan realm was riven by a great revolt in 755; the empire seemed destined to be defeated by the T’ang.

Then, at the end of 755, An Lu-shan,
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a T’ang general of Sogdian-Turkic merchant origin,
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openly rebelled against his longtime patron, Hsüan-tsung, and almost brought down the T’ang Dynasty. He had the assistance of many other Sogdians and Turco-Sogdians, who were also warrior-merchants.
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And like any great Sogdian or Turkic leader, he had a large personal comitatus, consisting of Khitans and other Central Eurasians.
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What is astonishing, though, is that An and his co-conspirators used the merchant network of North China and neighboring Central Eurasian territory to prepare for their rebellion over a period of eight or nine years—in other words, the Sogdians in the Chinese Empire were secretly involved in planning a rebellion against the T’ang Dynasty at the very same time as the Sogdians in the Arab Empire were planning a rebellion against the Umayyad Dynasty. The description of the activities of An Lu-shan and the other warrior-merchants
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reads like a mirror image of what the Central Asian conspirators based in Marw did in their preparations for the Abbasid Rebellion against the Umayyad Dynasty. In these two instances, at least, it is probable that the conspirators knew each other and kept in touch via the international component of the Silk Road trade system, which was dominated by the Sogdians. The overwhelming influence of the Sogdians among the Uighurs, who overthrew the Türk Empire of the Eastern Steppe, is well known. It must therefore be wondered if the Tibetan Rebellion of 755 had anything to do with the Sogdian rebellions that covered much of Eurasia. Another question is whether there was any central organization that coordinated the rebellions or revolutions.

Only in 757, with the military help of the Uighurs, did the T’ang manage to recapture both capitals, Ch’ang-an and Lo-yang, and regain control over the central parts of North China. But most of northeastern China, especially Hopei, the center of the rebellion, became semi-independent, and the T’ang lost many of their most important foreign conquests, including the eastern frontiers of the Tibetan Empire and the Liao-hsi and Liao-tung regions near Korea in the Northeast. With the severe weakening of China’s military and economic power after the rebellion, the T’ang also soon lost much of East Turkistan and the lands south of the Gobi to the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

Religion and the State after the Revolution

With the Arabs’ interest in and fostering of commerce, the Arab Empire under the Abbasids became increasingly prosperous. The second caliph, Abû Ja’far al-Mansûr, built a new imperial capital near the ancient town of Baghdad on the Tigris near where the Tigris and Euphrates approach each other, not far upriver from the former Sasanid capital of Ctesiphon. The palace-city complex, the City of Peace, had a remarkable circular design based on the plan of several Sasanid imperial capitals, including that of the old capital of Ctesiphon and that of the Central Asian Buddhist monastery of Nawbahâr, the ‘New Vihâra’, which had originally been built as a Sasanid provincial capital complex at Balkh. The circular Sasanid plan had been adopted from the Parthians, the Central Asian Iranians who ruled Persia before them. The plan of the City of Peace was the work of Khâlid ibn Barmak, the sometime vizier and son of the last Buddhist abbot of the Naw-bahâr.
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In the center of the City of Peace was the palace of the caliph, which was topped by a great “heavenly” sky-green dome.
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Around the capital structure, Abû Ja’far settled the Abbasid Dynasty’s Central Asian army, the Khurâsâniyya.

The Tibetan Rebellion was quickly suppressed and the empire soon expanded back into many of its former conquests. After some two decades of military success—which included capture of the T’ang capital Ch’ang-an for a brief period in 763
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and capture of the southern Ordos and the cities along the Great Wall there
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—the new emperor, Khri Srong Lde Brtsan (r. 756–797), was politically secure enough to proclaim Buddhism as the state religion. He built a large circular monastery complex, Samye (Bsam-yas), at Brag-mar, one of the imperial estates in south-central Tibet.
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It symbolized the Buddhist universe, the emperor’s position as a righteous Buddhist ruler, and the establishment of Buddhism as the state religion of the Tibetan Empire. The particular form of Buddhism eventually settled on was Indian Mahâyâna, with a Sarvâstivâdin institutional foundation. The teachers and translators in Central Tibet came from practically all directions under Tibetan imperial rule, including parts of what are now Nepal, India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and China,
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and from countries further away, including Korea and Ceylon.

The Uighurs, who adopted Manichaeism and proclaimed it to be their state religion in 763, built their capital, Khanbalïk (Karabalgasun), into a large city. The political center of the realm was a fabulous golden tent, a domed yurt wherein the kaghan “sat upon a golden throne.”
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The Kirghiz, the chief enemies of the Uighurs, swore to capture the golden tent. The Uighurs partly settled in their capital city, but they remained a traditional Central Eurasian steppe zone people with a strong interest in international trade
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down to the overthrow of their empire. The pacifistic nature of Manichaeism had little effect on their politics.

At the other end of Eurasia, the Franks under Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, 768–814) conquered most of continental Western Europe, including the Avar Kingdom. The capture of the kingdom’s great fortified capital, the Ring of the Avars, was followed by subjugation of Pannonia. This is said by his biographer to be one of Charlemagne’s greatest accomplishments, the other being the conquest of Saxony. Both areas occupied the most strategic land trade routes to Central Eurasia. The Carolingians, unlike the Merovingians, claimed to be truly orthodox “Roman” Catholics. In his new capital at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) Charlemagne built the sixteen-sided—essentially circular—church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, with its great dome
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and centrally placed royal throne. The Carolingians also had a very close alliance with the Catholic popes, who blessed both Pippin the Short and Charlemagne as rightful rulers of the Frankish Empire and were rewarded with Frankish suppression of the popes’ enemies. The popes also supported the Carolingians’ attempts to rein in the Frankish church.

The Khazars, the close allies of the Byzantines, adopted Judaism as their official religion, apparently in 740,
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three years after an invasion by the Arabs under Marwân ibn Muḥammad. Marwân had used treachery against a Khazar envoy to gain peaceful entrance to Khazar territory. He then declared his dishonorable intentions and pressed deep into Khazar territory, only subsequently releasing the envoy. The Arabs devastated the horse herds, seized many Khazars and others as captives, and forced much of the population to flee into the Ural Mountains. Marwân’s terms were that the kaghan and his Khazars should convert to Islam. Having no choice, the kaghan agreed, and the Arabs returned home in triumph.
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As soon as the Arabs were gone, the kaghan renounced Islam—with, one may assume, great vehemence. The Khazar Dynasty’s conversion to Judaism is best explained by this specific historical background, together with the fact that the mid-eighth century was an age in which the major Eurasian states proclaimed their adherence to distinctive world religions. Adopting Judaism also was politically astute: it meant the Khazars avoided having to accept the overlordship (however theoretical) of the Arab caliph or the Byzantine emperor.
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The T’ang and Byzantine empires recovered from their rebellions with the restoration of their displaced dynasties. The T’ang was seriously weakened, however. Unlike the postrevolutionary leaders of the new Eurasian empires, the only legitimizing activity the Chinese and Byzantine rulers undertook was to harken back to the golden age of their glorious predecessors and continue their religious policies, which in both cases took an extremely brutal turn sooner or later.

In this respect, it is remarkable that the two older empires maintained idiosyncratic official religious policies throughout the Early Middle Ages, particularly insofar as they were otherwise rigidly orthodox throughout most of their history.

The T’ang Dynasty officially supported Taoism, which was not popular with rulers at any other time in Chinese history and was generally frowned on by the orthodox Confucians who ran the government. The T’ang treated all other religions, including even Buddhism, increasingly severely, despite the fact that a number of T’ang rulers were practicing Buddhists.

Similarly, the Byzantine Empire, which was otherwise rigidly orthodox throughout most of its history, officially supported one or another heterodox doctrine, most notably and longest Iconoclasm, for more or less the entire early medieval period. The government enforced its views with torture and murder, especially under the long reign of Constantine V in the eighth century.

The Late Central Eurasian Culture Complex