Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (37 page)
With the tool of literacy at their disposal, and literary models from Antiquity and other neighboring cultures, the writers in these languages also developed art literature, which had previously been found only in the ancient civilizations. Japanese poetry, Chinese poetry, Arabic poetry, and English poetry, in particular, achieved levels of perfection rarely seen before or since. Along with the poetry went music, because poetry was always chanted or sung, not simply read.
51
Central Asian music spread to China, brought by whole orchestras that were sent or brought to Ch’ang-an. It soon completely replaced the earlier Chinese musical tradition and spread to Japan as well.
52
Because the literature was written, and writing was itself a highly developed art, calligraphy, the transmission of literature also involved the transmission of artistic styles and motifs. The Early Middle Ages was thus one of the most creative periods in history for poetry, music, and graphic art.
Political Weakness and Economic Decline
The caliphate under the Abbasids started out slightly smaller than it had been under the Umayyads due to the loss of Spain, which remained Umayyad. But the caliphate soon became even larger than before. It expanded deeper into Central Asia and southeastward into India, in both of which directions the Arabs encountered the Tibetans.
In the late eighth century, the Tibetans reconquered all of their lost territories from the Chinese and expanded further, extending their influence into the west as far as Kabul, into the north as far as Jungharia, and into the northeast all the way across the Ordos. By 790 the Chinese had withdrawn from what was left of their Tarim Basin realm, leaving East Turkistan to the Tibetans and Uighurs, who fought increasingly bitterly over it, with several cities changing hands more than once. By the 820s the Tibetans were firmly in control of the southern Tarim, while the Uighurs controlled Jungharia and the cities of the northern Tarim.
53
International commerce is generally thought to have been seriously hampered by the continuing warfare in Central Asia. This is unlikely. The Central Eurasian economy had thrived throughout the seventh and early eighth centuries despite constant warfare that was much more destructive. The cause of the depression that increasingly hurt the economies of the Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur empires, as well as others further afield, has not yet been determined, but certainly international commerce involving China was not helped by the Chinese massacre of Sogdian men, women, and children, and of anyone who looked even remotely non-Chinese, after the suppression of the An Lu-shan Rebellion. Those who survived attempted to hide their origins and became Chinese.
54
This could hardly have been beneficial to maintaining the international trade system.
Although the T’ang Dynasty had been restored, at least in name, and participated in international trade via the Uighur Empire in the north
55
and via the maritime routes from Canton in the far southeast, the Chinese ruling class and the T’ang government itself fell deep in debt to Uighur moneylenders in Ch’ang-an. The economic situation worsened in the early ninth century. The Chinese economy—which had never been fully monetized—came to depend increasingly on barter. Officials were paid in kind, not with money. The economic troubles of China, whatever their cause, had severe repercussions for all of eastern Eurasia because of China’s already immense population and the concomitant size of its total economy.
By the third decade of the ninth century, the war between the Tibetans on one side and the Uighurs and Chinese on the other had become unsupportable by all parties. The reason does not seem to be any sudden desire for peace, but rather the inability to continue to pay for war. The three nations made peace in 821–822. The Tibetans and Chinese erected bilingual treaty inscriptions, while the Uighurs reaffirmed their alliance with the Chinese via another dynastic marriage of a Chinese princess to the Uighur kaghan; they made a separate treaty with the Tibetans.
56
Peace finally reigned in most of Central Eurasia, but it came too late.
Collapse of the Early Medieval World Order
The worsening economic situation in most of Eurasia, aggravated or caused by climatic changes during the late 830s noted in Chinese sources,
57
continued to decline. In the West, too, there was a remarkable decline in commerce even within the caliphate. The reign of Hârûn al-Rashîd and the Central Asian period of the reign of al-Ma’mûn had been very prosperous, and large numbers of new silver dirham coins had been minted. But from 820 on there was a sharp drop in the number of new coins, and very few were minted for several decades.
58
Late in the 830s, internal dissension within the Uighur ruling clan—undoubtedly aggravated by the economic situation—caused one of the contenders to flee to the Kirghiz, the Uighurs’ sworn enemies. He led the Kirghiz armies through the Uighur defenses to the capital, where the Uighurs were taken by surprise and totally crushed in 840. The survivors fled in all directions. The Kirghiz were unable or unwilling to take control of the Eastern Steppe, and they did not replace the Uighurs with a new Turkic dynasty.
59
Instead, the steppe became increasingly dominated by Mongolic-speaking peoples migrating in from the east.
Some of the Uighur survivors fled into the western part of their realm, where they continued as what became a small kingdom based in Qocho and Beshbalik.
60
The majority, though, many thousands of them, fled to the frontier just north of the Ordos bend of the Yellow River at the end of 840, seeking assistance from their Chinese allies. According to one Chinese border official, their yurts covered the horizon: “From east to west for 60
li
I cannot see the end of them.”
61
Li Te-yü, the chief minister of Emperor Wu-tsung (r. 840–846), attempted to send the Uighurs back north, but that was an impossibility for them. He soon found out that they intended to stay where they were, hungry, demoralized, and dangerous. Moreover, they refused to submit to China, the normal procedure for refugees to be taken in. The refugees’ kaghan maintained an increasingly independent, belligerent stance, presumably in hopes of winning further help and concessions from the T’ang. Instead, his refusal to submit only caused the T’ang court to worry about a possible attack on China. The T’ang did send food and clothing, attempting to stave off any Uighur attack while they strengthened their forces in the north. Finally, the Chinese decided on drastic measures: in early 843 they sent in an army to attack the Uighur camps and slaughtered most of them.
62
With the full realization that the power of the Uighurs, their allies and rivals, had been destroyed, the Chinese became consumed with xenophobia. A month after the massacre of the Uighur refugees, the T’ang ruler suppressed Manichaeism in China. This entailed closing all Manichaean temples (which had been built at the behest of the Uighurs), confiscating their wealth, and executing Manichaean priests.
63
Finding that to be a profitable undertaking, similar measures increasingly began to be applied to Buddhism, which had already been suffering from persecution by the emperor and his adherents. The tragedy peaked in 845, when the T’ang confiscated the wealth of the Buddhist temples and closed most of the monasteries in China. The persecution was accompanied by much brutality, including massacres of monks and nuns.
64
This movement not only ended the power of Buddhism in China, it ended the T’ang as a distinctive, brilliant cultural period in Chinese history. Although the dynasty itself survived for more than a half century longer, with ever shrinking powers, it never recovered its lost prestige, power, wealth, or culture.
Charlemagne’s son and successor, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), though almost the antithesis of the great man his father had been, somehow managed to hold the Frankish Empire together. When he died in 840 his three sons fought over the succession. The civil war ended in 843 with the agreement known as the Oaths of Strasbourg, the text of which has been preserved in three languages, Old French, Old High German, and Latin. The nucleus of what became France was the realm of Charles the Bald, while Louis the German received territories that developed into Germany. Although Lothair is not mentioned, the part that fell to him, as the imperial heir, was the middle, which came to be called Lotharingia (now Lorraine). At the time it extended from northern Italy and southeastern France up to the North Sea and included the capital, Aachen.
The economic weakness in the Tibetan Empire forced the government to stop supporting the Buddhist monastic establishment, which had become large and very expensive. In 842 a tantric monk, Lhalung Dpalgyi Rdorje, assassinated the last emperor who ruled over a united Tibetan Empire, Khri U’i Dum Brtsan (Glang Darma, r. 838–842).
65
The imperial succession was contested, and the Tibetan Empire broke up. Some Central Asian parts of the realm, particularly in the northeast, survived longer than Tibet itself before the last remnant of the empire fell in 866.
The Byzantine Empire was capably ruled by the energetic Theophilos II (r. 829–842) until his death, at which point his wife Theodora, a devoted iconodule, took effective power as regent for her then three-year-old son Michael III (the Drunkard, r. 842–867). She instituted a religious revolution that restored icon worship throughout the empire and suppressed iconoclasm ruthlessly and thoroughly. With the increasing weakness of the peoples around them, the Byzantines recovered economically and politically, and gradually extended their influence into parts of the former Eastern Roman Empire.
The Arab Empire under al-Ma’mûn gave up direct control over most of its western Central Asian dominions, one of the richest and most populous parts of the empire, when he appointed Ṭâhir ibn al-Ḥusayn, one of the leaders of the caliph’s “second Abbasid revolution,” to the governorship of Khurasan. Ṭâhir and his successors thus functioned as the legitimate governing authority of Khurasan—and eventually even of Iran and part of Iraq—on behalf of the caliphs. Under Ṭâhir’s rule Arab Central Asia quickly became semi-independent; he minted coins with his own name on them, and his position became hereditary, developing into an autonomous Tahirid “dynasty.” Nevertheless, Western Central Asia remained Muslim and continued to grow (after the recession that began in the 820s), partly because of its inclusion in the vast Islamic world, but mainly due to the strength of the Central Asian local economy—which was solidly based on local agriculture and internal trade
66
—as well as to the continuing transcontinental commerce.
The central government in Baghdad came increasingly under the influence of the Islamicized Central Asian comitatus—the
shâkiriyya,
or
châkars.
67
The comitatus was passed on as a unit to the ruler’s successor and thus grew bigger, more powerful, more expensive, and more unreliable, until the caliphs fell into the hands of their guard corps and the increasingly hereditary government officials.
68
In 836 al-Mu’tasim (r. 833–842), the last caliph who ruled in more than name, moved the capital to Samarra (Sâmarrâ’),
69
about seventy-five miles north of Baghdad, purportedly to eliminate conflict between his comitatus and the people of Baghdad, but probably mainly in an attempt to remove himself from the murderous politics and social turmoil there. Upon his death he was succeeded by his son, al-Wâthiq (r. 842–847), who had little interest in governing and was not in much of a position to do it anyway. Although the government continued to exercise official sovereignty over much of the former Arab Empire, and indeed, the Abbasid Caliphate existed in name for centuries more, the death of al-Mu’taṣim in 842 marks the effective end of the Arab Empire as an actual state.
1
This is my slightly free translation of the last lines of the original, Nr. 496 = T III. MQ 17.39, q.v. Sieg et al. (1953: 307–308). Mallory (Mallory and Mair 2000: 273) gives the complete poem.
2
Actually, the church has sixteen sides on the outside, but the number of sides is reduced by piers to eight in the interior, giving it the effect of being circular outside and octagonal inside.
3
See Beckwith (1993); cf. above, the discussion of the Eastern Türk campaign against the Arabs in Samarkand.
4
Beckwith (1993: 111–124).
5
Tzitzak
is the Greek spelling of Old Turkic Č
i
č
äk
[t∫it∫εk] ‘flower’. She was baptized as a Christian and given the name
Eirênê
‘Irene’.
6
The one detailed study of the rebellion (Speck 1981) is concerned exclusively with religious issues. The causes of the rebellion should be investigated by Byzantinists familiar with the Arabic sources. On the Arab and Khazar wars, see Golden (2006).
7
The Abbasid Revolution was organized and led by merchants and men pretending to be merchants.
8
Shaban (1970).
9
Daniel (1979).
10
See de la Vaissière (2005a: 282).
11
These well-known, uncontested points indicate that there was more to the revolution than the political propaganda that dominates the source material and which has therefore received by far the bulk of modern historians’ attention.
12
The European historical terminology of kingdom versus empire, grounded in Roman and Byzantine practice, is irrelevant in the case of the Frankish kingdom, which was an empire according to modern terminology (cf. Scherman 1987: 258).
13
Bachrach (1977).
14
In view of the pan-Eurasian character of the mid-eighth century changes, it would seem worthwhile to investigate if any of these factors influenced or even impelled Pippin’s decision to depose the last Merovingian king.
15
Unfortunately, the major Old Tibetan historical source, the
Old Tibetan Annals,
is fragmentary just at this point and it is not possible to determine the exact cause and immediate outcome of the rebellion; see Beckwith (1983; 1993: 142).
16
For some of the problems hinted at by the sources, see endnote
73
.
17
Beckwith (1993: 139). It is popularly known as the Battle of Talas. One of the indirect results of the battle was the transmission of the technique of papermaking (a Chinese invention) to the Arabs in Samarkand by captive Chinese soldiers. One of the captives, Tu Huan, traveled on to the Arab capital. He eventually returned home and wrote the
Ching-hsing chi
‘Record of the Travels’, a work that is unfortunately lost. Some of the book survives as quotations in the
Tung tien
‘Comprehensive Treasury’, an encyclopedia written by the T’ang scholar Tu Yu, one of Tu Huan’s relatives.
18
Lu-shan is a Chinese transcription of his personal name in Sogdian,
RoX
š
an
‘the luminous’. The same word is the root of the name given to the famous Central Asian woman married to Alexander the Great, Roxana (Roxane).
19
His actual birth origin is uncertain; he was apparently adopted and raised by a Sogdian father and a Turkic mother (Beckwith 1993: 142 n. 212; Des Rotours 1962: 1–2; cf. de la Vaissière 2005a: 215–216; cf. Pulleyblank 1955).
20
On the An Lu-shan Rebellion and the Sogdian warrior-merchants in China, see de la Vaissière (2005a: 217–220) and Moribe (2005); on the warrior and the merchant in Sogdian culture, see especially Grenet (2005).
21
see endnote
25
; cf. de la Vaissière (2005a: 219; 2005b: 142–143).
22
See de la Vaissière (2005a: 217–220).
23
See Beckwith (1984b), where the discussion of the source of the plan should be modified to accord with the view presented here (at the time I wrote the article I did not know that the plan of the early, Parthian city of Ctesiphon had originally been circular); cf. endnote 28. Khâlid is said to have earlier been a
châkar
of an Umayyad caliph: “Barmak was brought before Hishām b. ‘Abd al-Malik in a body of 500
ch
ā
kars.
Hishām treated him with honour, increased his status and was favourably impressed with him. Barmak then became a Muslim” (de la Vaissière 2005b: 146–147, quoting Bosworth 1994: 274; Bosworth’s translation “slaves” for Arabic
shâkirî
—an Arabicized loanword from Central Asian
châkar
—is corrected here).
24
See Beckwith (1984b) for discussion and a translation of the account of the ritual in which the caliph laid out the city.
25
Beckwith (1993: 146).
26
Beckwith (1987b).
27
Like Abû Ja’far al-Manṣûr at Baghdad, Khri Srong Lde Brtsan laid out the plan of his symbolic complex in a ritual, carefully described down to details (see the translation in Beckwith 1984b), which is practically identical with the description of the ritual foundation of the original circular city of Rome by Romulus.
28
On historiographical problems in the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet, see Walter (forthcoming) and endnote 74.
29
Allsen (1997: 65). Similarly, the kaghan of the Khazars had a golden dome (Dunlop 1954: 98), apparently a yurt like the one belonging to the Uighur kaghan. The Tibetan emperor had a marvelous golden tent too, which held several hundred people (Demiéville 1952: 202–203; cf. Beckwith 1993: 168 n. 160). The Abbasid caliph had the equivalent, the Heavenly Dome of the Palace of Gold, under which was his throne, in the exact center of his circular-plan capital (Beckwith 1984b), and so did Charlemagne, emperor of the Franks, whose throne still sits under the great dome of his cathedral in Aachen. It seems that no one has ever done an in-depth study of these domes and why they were so important at this particular point in time across Eurasia. The Kereit khan’s court had “a sumptuous gold palace-tent (
ORDO
) with golden vessels and a special staff,” which was captured by Chinggis after his defeat of the Kereit (Atwood 2004: 296); cf. Dunlop (1954 n. 38). Allsen (1997: 13–15) describes in great detail the later medieval Mongol khans’ golden tents, which were lined with gold brocade
(nasîj)
.
30
See Beckwith (1991).
31
At the time, and for long afterward, it was the highest dome in Western Europe.
32
On the controversial date of the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism, see endnote
75
.
33
Dunlop (1954: 80–86).
34
see endnote 75. Many Jews had long lived in Khazar territory near the Black Sea, and many more immigrated there as refugees from persecution by the Byzantines.
35
See the extensive discussion and quotations in the prologue.
36
It certainly did not happen overnight, since “the already Judaized 10th century Khazar Qaghans were still buried with human sacrifices—as were also the Islamized early Ottoman rulers” (Peter Golden, per.comm., 2007).
37
A great deal has been written in the past couple of decades on the topic of the guard corps in the Arab Empire. Unfortunately, some scholars have not paid attention to what the sources tell us, unusually clearly, but instead pursue arguments based on modern nationalistic or other agendas. It is shown in some detail already in Beckwith (1984a) that the Arabs in Central Asia itself had adopted the local comitatus “as is” more than a century before the Abbasid caliphs did. On the change from the comitatus to the
ghulâm
system, de la Vaissière argues that the transition between the directly adopted form, the
shâkiriyya
(or
châkar)
system, and the developed
ghulâm
system, may have taken some time. See de la Vaissière (2005b, 2007), and Golden (2001, 2004).
38
Not long after the fall of the empire Tibetan spiritual leaders achieved political power and a kind of immortality through the system of recognized reincarnations, or
sprulsku
(typically spelled
tulku
as a loanword among English-speaking Buddhists).
39
See Beckwith (1993: 169–170 n. 174; 1983: 11 et seq.) and Uray (1961).
40
See the discussion of the Khazar comitatus by Golden (2002: 141–144; 2006).
41
Daniel (1979: 174–182), Shaban (1976: 47). He arrived there in 819.
42
On the “Indian Half-Century of Islam” in modern scholarship, see endnote
76
.
43
Fakhry (1983: 33–34, 213 et seq.). On the transmission of Central Asian Buddhist ideas to early Islam, see endnote
77
.
44
Fakhry (1983: 7–8), Sezgin (1978: 116 et seq.).
45
Vernet (1997: 1070). The word
algebra,
taken from part of the title, is Arabic
al-jabr
‘the restoration’.
46
On the scholarly controversy about foreign sources for early Arab linguistics, see endnote
78
.
47
Sezgin (1984: 43–54, 68).
48
Barthold, cited by R. Hillenbrand in Pedersen et al. (1986: 1136); cf. Litvinsky and Zeimal (1971). The
madrasa
spread rapidly across the Islamic world after the tenth century. See Makdisi (1981) on the Islamic
madrasa
and its spread to Western Europe as the
college.
The thrust of Makdisi’s argument appears to be correct, though much work is still needed on the details.
49
The Khazars, Bulgars, and other western Central Eurasians of the period also used runic scripts, which have not yet been fully deciphered. See Kyzlasov (1994) and Shcherbak (2001).
50
There are several Tibeto-Burman languages recorded in Old Tibetan alphabetic script, some of them in lengthy texts, such as the one published by Thomas (1948). Though the texts are easily legible, and a few scholars have worked on them in recent years (e.g., Takeuchi 2002), so far none of the languages themselves have been deciphered or identified for certain.
51
On the collapse or destruction of traditional arts in modern times, see
chapter 11
.
52
The “new” tradition, transmitted orally with little if any reference to the manuscript scores, survives to the present day as
gagaku,
Japanese classical orchestral court music, albeit changed in very many respects (most strikingly the tempos). See the important studies by Picken (1981, 1985–2000).
53
Beckwith (1993, 1987b).
54
De la Vaissière (2005a: 220 et seq.).
55
Beckwith (1991).
56
Szerb (1983).
57
Mackerras (1990: 342).
58
Noonan (1981/1998: 55–56), who notes, “relatively few dirhams from 820–49 appear in the hoards from European Russia perhaps because few were struck in the Islamic world” (Noonan 1981/1998: 79). In 869 the rate at which new coins were being minted rose once again.
59
Drompp (2005: 200–201).
60
Beshbalik was located near what is now Jimsar in northern East Turkistan. The Uighurs who fled into the northeastern part of the Tibetan Empire and settled there fared better. Their descendants remain there to this day as the Yugurs or ‘Yellow Uighurs’, the only direct survivors of the ancient Uighurs.
61
Drompp (2005: 42).
62
Dalby (1979: 664–665). See Drompp (2005) for details, including translations of the primarysource documents written by the chief minister Li Te-yü, who was in charge of the crisis and also of the suppression of foreign religions in China.
63
Weinstein (1987: 121).
64
Weinstein (1987: 121–128). The persecution is referred to as the Hui-ch’ang Suppression of Buddhism, after the Hui-ch’ang reign period (841–846) during which it took place. Wu-tsung’s successor immediately ceased the persecution and punished the main living perpetrators of it. However, despite his attempt to restore Buddhism, the religion never recovered institutionally in China, although thenceforth it flourished intellectually and spiritually even more than it had previously.
65
Although the kernel of the story rings true, and the name of the assassin appears to be historical, the tradition about the assassination of Glang Darma contains much that is symbolic and undoubtedly ahistorical. Nevertheless, extremely little is actually known about the political history of the late Tibetan Empire and even less about its aftermath. The whole period is in need of serious study. For the history of Buddhism in the empire and in the early postimperial period, see Walter (forthcoming).
66
Shaban (1976) notes that the Tahirids “were traditional rulers whose main concern was with the long established families in their regions. In other words, they contented themselves with enforcing the treaties of capitulation concluded at the time of the [Arab] conquest with the
dihq
ā
ns
there. As these
dihq
ā
ns
were by definition the big landowners it is possible to conclude that the economy was mostly based on agriculture.”
67
In most modern histories of the period they are usually referred to as Turks, but many were Sogdians or other Central Eurasians. See the prologue, Beckwith (1984a), and de la Vaissière (2007).