THE STORY OF MAN

AN INTRODUCTION TO 150,000 YEARS

CARROLL & GRAF                       2007

PART IX

 

Chapter 14: Europe After Rome

Chapter 15: The World in 1095

The Christian Europe that Pope Urban called to arms in November 1095 was very different from the empire over which Constantine had ruled 700 years earlier. One striking difference was the absence of large cities. It was not just that there was no great city like Rome to provide a focus and model. There were few towns anywhere deserving of the name of city. The population of the more northerly regions had increased as the descendants of earlier invaders had cleared new lands with their heavy ploughs. But in the southern lands, numbers had still not recovered from centuries of famine, disease and warfare. Only one Christian settlement – Constantinople, with a population of around 100,000 – retained a semblance of the Roman empire’s glory. Two others, Toledo in Spain and Palermo in Sicily – both former Muslim cities – had around 20,000 inhabitants, and Venice had maybe 10,000. No other Christian settlement approached this size. Both Christendom and ‘pagan’ northern Europe were lands of villages and small towns. And despite the continued influx of new people’s from the east, such had been the depredations of famine, war and plague that Europe’s population was smaller than it had been a thousand years before.

Sad though this comparison may seem, this is not how things appeared to educated Europeans of the time, who were chiefly conscious of the progress they had made over two or three centuries. New land had been brought into cultivation, and agricultural practices improved, in the 10^th and 11^th centuries. For those looking back on these changes, the conquest of the wilderness and the huge increase in agricultural productivity were sources of wonder, and more than a little pride.

• It was not only their technological progress that made these 11^th century Christians feel more secure than their great-grandfathers.
• For nearly 6 six centuries, Europe had been assailed by wave after wave of invasion.
• By the end of the 11^th century, not only had the pressure of attacks abated, Europe now had a formidable defence in the form of the heavily armoured knight, equipped with sword and battleaxe.

One European country – England – had just experienced an invasion that would have a profound effect. In 1066, a dispute over the succession to the English throne had brought an army under William, Duke of Normandy across from France. After a victory at Hastings, on the south coast, he was enthroned as King William I. The country was parcelled out among his comrades in arms, whose descendants gave England a French-speaking aristocracy for the next 300 years. By 1095, under William’s rule, England, despite its still modest population of around a million, had been transformed from a European backwater into a power of the first rank.

• ‘Christendom’ was a religious entity, not a political one. The ‘empire of Islam’ was in many ways Christendom’s mirror image. It, too, was a community of faith, not a political entity.
• The territory of Islam contained many great cities, such as Cordoba, Alexandria and Baghdad, whose opulence Christendom could only dream of, and in which science was pursued at a level unmatched anywhere.

At the other end of Eurasia, China was enjoying a peaceful and prosperous period, once again united under a strong dynasty, the Sung. The country had at last made good the population losses of the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th centuries. Having fallen from some 65 million in the 1^st century to barely 30 million at the end of the 5^th, the population had stuck at that level, the imperial census still registering a population of 30 million as late as 845. Now, just 250 years later, it exceeded 80 million.

• Despite this massive increase in population, living standards had not fallen. On the contrary, they had continued to rise.
• This was probably the first time in the history of the world that a sustained increase in population over such a wide area had been accompanied by a continuing rise in the general standard of living.
• An important element in the creation of this prosperity was the invention of paper money. Paper money allowed taxes to be collected in cash rather than in goods or services.
• The creation of a paper-money economy – the world’s first – not only provided a lubricant that eased commercial transactions, it also acted as an incentive to put idle hours to productive use.

Another significant factor was the low cost of transport over much of the country. Sailing barges on China’s great rivers could be correspondingly large, and wind cost nothing. The resulting carriage costs were a fraction of what they were in countries forced to rely on land transport. The east-west river routes were linked together by the north-south Grand Canal, completed in 611. This unique network of wide, navigable waters gave easy access to something like 50 million of the country’s 80 million people. It offered economies of scale to merchants and manufacturers alike, and provided a strong incentive towards specialization and the division of labour. The result was a commercialised pattern of output and exchange and a volume of production and consumption such as the world had never known. Travellers returning to other lands had difficulty in obtaining a hearing for their tales of the wonders they had seen, in what was beyond question the wealthiest and most cultured country in the world.

• The country’s coke-fired furnaces in the year 1078 produced 125,000 tons of iron. This was almost as much as would be produced in the whole of Europe 600 years later.

None of this economic growth could have happened without a matching increase in food production. This was made possible by the introduction of a new variety of rice that could be grown on land that received little summer rain. Even more importantly, it enabled farmers to harvest two crops a year from irrigated land that had formerly yielded only one.

• Across the sea in Japan, no such transformation of the economy had occurred. The country’s population in 1095 was much as it had been in the year 500, around 4 to 5 million.
• A century and a half of peace, and reduced exposure to Chinese influences, had created space for a cultural flowering of extraordinary proportions.
• Two of their books – The Tale of Genji, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon – still stand as masterpieces, not just of Japanese, but of world literature, 900 years after they were written.
• Unknown to these people of Asia, and cut off from their wealth and diseases, the native people’s of Australia continued in their traditional way of life. The population of the entire continent probably numbered no more than a million, with 200 languages.
• The settled regions of Central and South America were now home to something like 20 million people; half as many again as there had been in the year 500.
• Only in the highland regions of the Yucatan peninsular did Mayan cities such as Chichén Itzá continue to prosper.
• North of central Mexico, most people still lived by gathering and hunting. But they had a new weapon – the bow and arrow – that transformed the lives of the millions of native Americans whose standard of living depended on their ability to bring down fast-moving prey, and their number had increased accordingly.
• Where the boundaries of present-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, the farming people of the Anasazi culture lived in communal apartment houses with up to 1000 rooms.
• They had added beans to their farming repertoire, and had domesticated the turkey. Later still they had learned to cultivate cotton, and by 1095 they were producing pottery and textiles of outstanding quality.
• In the woodland areas where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers met, another complex of cultures – the Mississippian – had spread across the valley floors.
• At the close of the 11^th century, the largest of the Mississippian towns, Cahokia, just east of present-day St Louis, was home to around 20,000 people.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, the population had been increasing for the best part of a thousand years but the population was scattered, and this part of Africa had few towns, even small ones, and no cities.
• Much of the increase in Africa’s population came about from the adoption of settled agriculture, but some was the result of the occupation of new lands by pastoral nomads.

Humanity had negotiated a dangerous corner. For nearly a thousand years, plague, war and famine had wrought havoc across the length and breadth of Eurasia. From a low point of around 200 million around the year 500, numbers had at last begun to recover. Only in South-west Asia were numbers still substantially lower than they had been a thousand years before. In Europe and India, the population was almost back to first-century levels. In China, in southern Africa and in the Americas, people were thicker on the ground than ever. The future was looking good for the human species. The population of the world, at 300 million, was at record levels. Technology had already delivered much, and could no doubt deliver more. As they contemplated their situation, the more fortunate members of this extravagantly successful species could have been forgiven for thinking they really were masters of the universe.

Chapter 16: Riding the Roller-coaster: The European Experience

Chapter 17: The Scourge of Asia

Chapter 18: Riding the Roller-Coaster: The Asian Experience

Chapter 19: The World in 1455