Why the West Rules--For Now (64 page)

GUNS, GERMS, AND CAST IRON

When Eastern social development had fallen before, from the first until the fourth century
CE
, it had been part of a Eurasia-wide paradox. The sharp rise in social development in the first millennium
BCE
had effectively shrunk the distance between the cores, and a handful of travelers, traders, and raiders had created overlapping zones of contact across the steppes and Indian Ocean. This Old World Exchange was a consequence of rising development but also generated the forces that would undermine development, and when the Western core failed to break through the hard ceiling around forty-three points, the horsemen of the apocalypse dragged down both cores.

By the ninth century Eastern development had recovered enough to set off a Second Old World Exchange. Merchants, missionaries, and migrants crossed the steppes and Indian Ocean, again building overlapping zones of contact (
Figure 8.4
). By Genghis Khan’s boyhood years, traders were already carrying not just luxuries such as spices and silk but also bulk foods across the Indian Ocean in quantities even Romans would have envied, and from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Majapahit in Java, cosmopolitan merchant cities were flourishing.

The Mongol conquest of the steppes brought stability to a second East-West artery, and Khan Ögödei, eager to turn the new capital he built at Karakorum into a worthy imperial metropolis, reportedly lured merchants there by paying 10 percent over whatever price they asked for their goods. He “
would sit
,” the Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote, “every day, after he finished his meal, on a chair outside his court, where every kind of merchandise that was to be found in the world was heaped up in piles.”

Along with merchants came clerics, drawn by the Mongols’ relaxed attitudes about religion. “
Just as God
gave different fingers to the hand,” Ögödei’s successor told a Christian, “so He has given different ways to men.” Curious about these ways, in 1254 the khan decided to stage a public debate among Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Only in Karakorum could this have happened.

A great crowd gathered to watch the learned doctors, but the experiment was not a success. Following Mongol traditions, the contestants were served fermented mares’ milk between rounds of debate,
and as the day wore on, their arguments lost focus. Their dialectical skills blunted by alcohol, the Christians lapsed into singing hymns. The Muslims responded by chanting Koranic verses, and the Buddhists withdrew into silent contemplation. Eventually, too drunk to go on, the Christians and Muslims followed their example.

Figure 8.4. The Second Old World Exchange: eight overlapping zones of trade and travel that carried progress and disaster from one end of Eurasia to the other

Despite the failure of interfaith dialogue, Westerners kept coming. Muslim traders carried Eastern goods to Caffa in Crimea, selling them there to Italians, who not only sold them on to north Europeans (Chinese silk first showed up in French markets in 1257) but also followed the goods back to their source. Marco Polo’s uncles left Caffa in 1260 and kept moving until they reached Beijing, then made a second trip, with young Marco in tow, in 1274. Missionaries followed, and in 1305 a Christian friar who had just arrived in Beijing could boast that the steppe route was faster and safer than the sea route.

The First Old World Exchange had strung a few gossamer-thin threads end-to-end across Eurasia, but the Second spun a real web, with enough people moving across it to make the centuries after 1100 the first true age of technological transfer. This worked almost entirely to the advantage of the backward West. Something so seemingly obvious as the wheelbarrow, invented in China around the first century
CE
, made it to Europe only around 1250, and horse collars, used in China since the fifth century
CE
, arrived there about the same time.

By far the most important technological transfer, though, was cheap cast-iron tools. These appeared in China in the sixth century
BCE
and were common by the first. Arabs knew about cast iron by the eleventh century
CE
, but Europeans not until 1380. If you have ever tried moving earth without iron picks and shovels you will know what a difference this made. Once when I was a graduate student on an excavation in Greece the key to our storeroom went missing and we had to start digging without our collection of iron tools. Soil seems remarkably hard and heavy when you approach it like a pre-1380 European. I can vouch that the Second Old World Exchange revolutionized Western energy capture.

So, too, its information technology. Chinese artisans first made paper from mulberry bark in 105
CE
, and wood-pulp paper was common by 700. Arabs learned of paper around 750 (reputedly by capturing Chinese papermakers in central Asia) but Italians only started buying it from them after 1150 and making their own in 1276. By then
Chinese publishers had been using engraved woodblocks to print paper books for five centuries and using movable type for two centuries; Europeans only borrowed or reinvented woodblocks around 1375 and movable type around 1430. Chinese and Indian innovations in rigging and steering also moved west, passing through Arab hands into the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century.

Along with ancient technologies such as the wheelbarrow, Westerners also picked up the newest advances. The magnetic compass, first mentioned in a Chinese text in 1119, had reached Arabs and Europeans by 1180, and guns moved even faster. During the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of China, Eastern craftsmen learned how to make gunpowder oxidize quickly enough that it would explode, not just burn, and started using this nasty new trick to propel arrows from bamboo tubes. The oldest known true gun—a foot-long bronze tube found in Manchuria that could fire lead bullets—probably dates to 1288. In 1326, barely a generation later, a manuscript from Florence described a brass gun, and illustrations painted in a manuscript from Oxford the next year show two crude but unmistakable cannons. The first known Arabic use of guns came soon after, in a war in Spain in 1331. Most likely western Europeans learned about guns directly from Mongols on the steppes and then taught Spanish Muslims. It took another generation, until 1360, for these loud new weapons to work their way back to Egypt.

Over the next few centuries guns would change much in the West, but even so, the most important commodities being moved around in the Second Old World Exchange, as in the First, were germs. “
Civilization
both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague that devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” wrote the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. “It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.” The Black Death
*
had arrived.

The plague probably evolved in Inner Asia and spread along the Silk Roads. One Arabic scholar (who himself died of it) said it began on the steppes around 1331, and in that same year an epidemic raged along the middle Yangzi Valley, reportedly killing nine people out of ten.
We cannot know if this was the same bacillus that devastated Eurasia over the next two decades, but a plague mentioned on Mongolian tombstones in 1338 and 1339 almost certainly was. In 1340 we lose sight of it for a few years; then—abruptly—it was everywhere at once. Sickness gripped China’s east coast in 1345, and the next year a Mongol army brought the plague to Caffa in Crimea,
*
the very city from which Marco Polo’s uncles had departed for Beijing nearly a century before. The Second Old World Exchange had come full circle.

In 1347 merchants carried the pestilence to every harbor in the Mediterranean. From England to Iraq the classic symptoms of bubonic plague showed up—“
Swellings appeared
suddenly in the armpit or the groin, in many cases both,” a French chronicler recorded in 1348, “and were infallible signs of death.” A pneumonic mutation, spread by coughing, was even deadlier. “
People spat
bits of blood, and one was covered with blotches and died,” a poet in Damascus bluntly commented. He died of plague in 1363.

Author after author describes graveyards too full to accommodate more corpses, priests dropping dead while reading the last rites, and entire villages emptied. “
The souls of men
have become very cheap,” another Damascus poet observed. “Each soul is worth but a kernel”—a gruesome pun on the word “
habbah
,” meaning both “kernel of grain” and “pustule,” the bubonic plague’s first symptom.

By 1351 the disease had killed a third or even half of all westerners, working its way from the Mediterranean to the fringes of Muscovy, whence it raced back to China. That year the “
green-eyed Christian[s]
” whom the emperor recruited from Inner Asia to fight rebels brought the plague with them. It killed half the army and then ravaged China every year until 1360. We cannot calculate the death toll, but it was clearly horrendous.

There is no good time for something like the Black Death to visit humanity, but it is hard to think of a worse time than the 1340s. The balmy Medieval Warm Period had drawn to a close, ushering in what
climatologists often call the Little Ice Age. From Norway to China, glaciers grew. The Denmark Strait, separating Greenland and Iceland, regularly froze after 1350. Norsemen abandoned their settlements on Greenland and polar bears wandered across the ice bridge to Iceland, which was now cold enough for them. The Baltic Sea froze in 1303 and again in 1306–1307; in 1309–1310 the river Thames in temperate England iced over too. Between 1315 and 1317 it rained so much in northwest Europe that crops rotted in the ground and—a truly astonishing detail—it got too muddy for knights to fight.

With harvests failing and loved ones dying, it was hard not to conclude that God was sending a message. In China endemic banditry turned into religious revolt, directed mainly against the Mongol occupiers. As the alien emperor amused himself with pleasure boats and orgies, messianic cult leaders announced that the Buddha was returning to right the world’s wrongs and usher everyone into Paradise. By 1350 the empire was disintegrating.

We know rather little about events in the old Western core in Iraq, whose Mongol rulers were every bit as incompetent as those in China, but in Egypt and Syria the plague may have strengthened Islam. Clearly not everyone bought the official line that the plague was meant to punish only infidels (for believers, death from it was a mercy and a martyrdom)—the chronicler al-Wardi, for instance, wrote, “
We ask God’s for giveness for our souls’ bad inclination
; the plague is surely part of His punishment,” and vendors of magical defenses had a field day—but the most popular responses by far were mass prayer sessions, processions to the tombs of holy men, and tougher laws against alcohol and moral laxity.

Things looked much grimmer to many Christians. Not only did God seem to be punishing them—“
My mind reels
as I prepare to write of the sentence that divine justice, in its infinite mercy, meted out to men,” one Italian lamented—but the church itself also seemed to be coming apart. In 1303 a French king had had the pope himself beaten up and thrown in prison, and soon thereafter the papal court relocated to Avignon in France, where it became a byword for corruption and decadence. One pope even made it illegal to say that Jesus had been poor. Eventually some cardinals decamped back to Rome and elected a counterpope, who squabbled with the Avignon pope over every conceivable issue; and for a few debilitating years after 1409 there were actually three rival popes, all claiming to be God’s vicar on earth.

Since the church had failed them, people took matters into their own hands. The most creative were the Flagellants:

Stripped to the waist
, they gathered in large groups and bands and marched in procession through the crossroads and squares of cities and good towns. There they formed circles and beat upon their backs with whips, rejoicing as they did so in loud voices and singing hymns … Many honorable women and devout matrons, it must be added, had done this penance with whips, marching and singing through towns and churches like the men.

Others favored more traditional remedies such as massacring Jews, even though (as one of the popes pointed out in 1348) Jews were dying as fast as Christians. But nothing worked, and social development in the Western core around the Mediterranean fell as fast in the great plague delivered by the Second Old World Exchange as it had done during the plagues delivered by the First. No wonder the end seemed nigh.

DIFFERENT RIVERS

History looked to be repeating itself. In the first century
CE
Western social development had risen to a hard ceiling around forty-three points, strained against it, and set off a centuries-long, Old World–wide collapse. Eleven hundred years later, Eastern social development rose to the same level and set off similar disasters. Had von Däniken’s aliens from outer space been orbiting Earth again in 1350 they might well have concluded that human history was locked in a series of boom-and-bust cycles, bouncing against an unbreakable hard ceiling.