Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
The growth of trade and industry was matched by a growth in the prosperity, size and influence of the merchant class, so that some historians even refer to it as a ‘bourgeoisie’. Twitchett writes that by the late Sung period there was ‘a wealthy, self conscious urban middle class with a strong sense of its own identity and its own special culture’.
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What is more, there was an important shift in the attitude of the state towards the merchants. Previous dynasties had seen the merchants ‘as a potentially disruptive element’ and kept them ‘under constant supervision’.
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Curfews had prevented anyone going on the streets of the cities after nightfall, markets had been confined to walled city areas under tight state supervision, and merchants’ families had been barred from positions in the state bureaucracy. Now many of these restrictions fell into disuse. By the early 11th century one high official could complain of the lack of ‘control over the merchants. They enjoy a luxurious way of life, living on dainty foods of delicious rice and meat, owning handsome houses and many carts, adorning their wives and children with pearls and jade, and dressing their slaves in white silk. In the morning they think about how to make a fortune, and in the evening they devise means of fleecing the poor’.
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The new urban rich began to use their economic power to exert influence over the imperial bureaucracy:
The examination system now became a route by which increasing numbers of men from outside the circle of great families could enter the higher levels of the imperial government…The new bureaucrats were increasingly drawn from the families who had benefited most from the commercial revolution…the rich merchants and the wealthy landowners.
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Only a few hundred men would pass the national examinations,
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but they were the apex of a huge system. By the 13th century there were some 200,000 students in government schools and thousands more in private and Buddhist schools, all of whom dreamed of getting to the top. A good number came from merchant families.
Lost centuries
The merchants were still far from running the state, even if they were an increasingly important pressure group. Most large-scale production was still under state control, even when profitable activities—such as operating state-owned ships—were contracted out to merchants. The state itself was run by bureaucrats trained as scholarly officials, whose ideal was the country gentleman.
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This was also the ideal for the merchant’s son who obtained an official position. The result was that, just as the Sung Empire was reaching its peak, new signs of crisis began to appear.
What historians usually call ‘neo-Confucianism’ was the dominant ideology within the state. It stressed the need for rulers and administrators to follow an orderly routine, based upon mutual respect, which attempted to avoid both the violent actions of aristocratic warrior classes and the ruthless profit-making of merchants. It set the tone of the studies to be undertaken by anyone who aspired to a post in the state bureaucracy and it suited a conservative social layer whose ideal was a life of scholarly leisure rather than the hurly-burly of ruthless competition and military turmoil.
It also accorded with the approach of the early Sung emperors. They blamed the collapse of the previous T’ang Dynasty on expensive policies of military expansionism, so they cut the size of the army and relied on bribery to buy peace from border states. This approach was expressed through semi-religious notions about the harmony of nature and society. But it contained a rational, pragmatic core. It was a way out of the long years of crisis that had gone before.
Many Western writers have concluded that the dominance of neo-Confucianism blocked the path of capitalist advance in China. They have seen its hostility to ‘the spirit of capitalism’ as keeping Chinese society stagnant for millennia. Others have emphasised the ‘totalitarianism’ which supposedly stopped Chinese economic development.
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But, as we have seen, in the Sung era Chinese society was far from stagnant. Non-Confucian ideas (Buddhist, Taoist and Nestorian) not only existed but were found in print. And officials who in theory stood for Confucian pieties in practice behaved very differently. Patricia Ebrey, for instance, has shown how a widely distributed Sung advice manual for the gentleman class, Yüan Ts’ai’s
Precepts For Social Life
contradicted many neo-Confucian tenets. The writer ‘assumed one’s goal in business was profit’, and expressed ‘business-like attitudes’, so that ‘those fully committed to…neo-Confucianism would have to abstain from most of the activities [he]…describes’.
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There was a gap between the prevalent neo-Confucian ideology and the activities of the merchant class. But it was a gap that class could tolerate so long as the economy was growing and it was becoming richer and more influential—just as the first European capitalists hundreds of years later were prepared to work with monarchic states and accept their official ideologies so long as these did not impede the making of money.
The peculiarity of China which weakened the ability of the merchants and wealthier tradesmen to transform themselves into a full-blown capitalist class was material, not ideological. They were more dependent on the officials of the state machine than was the case in 17th and 18th century Europe. For the state officials were indispensable to running a major means of production—the massive canal networks and irrigation works.
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This gave the Chinese merchants little choice but to work with the state machine,
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even though that state was absorbing an enormous proportion of the surplus and diverting it from productive use—spending it on the luxury consumption of the court and the top officials, and on bribing the border peoples.
This was a period of great prosperity for the gentry-officials and the rich merchants alike.
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It was also a period of grinding poverty for the peasants. In the 11th century Su Hsün wrote:
The rich families own big chunks of land…Their fields are tilled by hired vagrants who are driven by whips and looked upon as slaves. Of the produce of the land, half goes to the master and half to the tiller. For every landowner there are ten tillers…The owner can clearly accumulate his half and become rich and powerful, while the tillers must daily consume their half and fall into poverty and starvation.
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The ‘Confucian’ ethics of the gentry-officials certainly did not extend to those who toiled for them. Yüan Ts’ai’s
Precepts For Social Life
refers to peasants and artisans as ‘lesser people’, speaks of ‘perversity on the part of servants, their tendency to commit suicide’, suggests how they should be beaten, and advises treating them as domesticated animals.
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The historian John Haegar writes, ‘By the end of the southern Sung, much of the countryside had been impoverished by the same forces which had sparked the agricultural and commercial revolution in the first place’.
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But before any symptoms of internal crisis could mature—and any clash of interests between the merchants and the officials come to the fore—an external crisis tore the state apart. In 1127 an invasion from the north cut China in half, leaving the Sung in control only of the south. In 1271 the whole country fell to a second invasion.
The first invasion did not fundamentally alter conditions in the north. The conquerors, the Jürchen, were a people already organised in a state patterned on Chinese lines and ran their half of China, the Chin Empire, with Chinese-speaking officials. Effectively there were two Chinese empires for almost 150 years.
The second invasion was much more serious. It was by Mongol armies which had spread out from their central Asian homeland in the previous century to rampage west to central Europe and south into Arabia and India, as well as east into China and Korea. Mongol society was dominated by military aristocrats who owned vast nomadic herds. They were superb horsemen and had the wealth to acquire up to date armour and armaments. The result was a military combination that few armies could withstand.
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But they had little administrative structure of their own. For this they depended upon the services of peoples they had conquered.
In China the Mongol rulers called themselves the Yüan Dynasty and relied upon sections of the old officialdom to run the empire. But, not trusting them, they kept key positions in their own hands and contracted out the profitable business of collecting taxes to Muslim merchants from central Asia, backed up by military detachments. This broke apart the social arrangements that had resulted from—and further encouraged—a level of technological and economic advance such as the world had never known.
The economic problems that had been slowly growing in the Sung years, especially the impoverishment of the countryside, now came to the fore. Prices began to rise from the 1270s onwards. The poverty of the northern peasantry was made worse by the further spread of big estates.
Chinese society continued to be advanced enough to amaze foreigners. It was the Mongol court in Beijing that so impressed the Italian traveller Marco Polo in 1275. The vast stretch of the Mongol presence from one end of Eurasia to the other also played an important part in spreading knowledge of Chinese technical advances to the less advanced societies of the west. But China itself had lost its economic dynamism, and the poverty of the peasantry caused repeated revolt, often led by religious sects or secret societies—the ‘White Lotus’, the ‘White Cloud’, the ‘Red Turbans’. Finally, the son of an itinerant agricultural worker who was a Red Turban leader, Chu Yüan-chang, took the Mongol capital Beijing and proclaimed himself emperor in 1368.
There was a steady recovery from the devastation of the last Mongol years under the new empire, known as the Ming. But there was no recovery of the economic dynamism. The early Ming emperors consciously discouraged industry and foreign trade in an effort to concentrate resources in agriculture, so that they were less developed in the early 16th century than they had been in the 12th. In the meantime, other parts of Eurasia had learned the techniques the Chinese had pioneered, and had begun to build flourishing urban civilisations of their own—and armies and navies to go with them.
The collapse of the Roman Empire in western Europe was not the end of the empire as such. Emperors who described themselves as Romans still reigned in the city of Constantinople (present day Istanbul) 1,000 years after the Goths sacked Rome. The empire today is usually called Byzantium, but the emperors and their subjects regarded themselves as Romans, although their language was Greek. Through much of that 1,000 years the splendour of Constantinople—with its luxurious royal palaces, its libraries and public baths, its scholars acquainted with the writings of Greek and Roman antiquity, its 300 churches and its magnificent St Sophia cathedral—stood out as the one redoubt of culture against the poverty, illiteracy, superstition and endless wars that characterised the Christian lands of the rest of Europe.
Even in the 12th century, when western Europe was reviving, Constantinople’s population was greater than that of London, Paris and Rome combined. The city fascinated the elites of the neighbouring Muslim empires, although ‘Baghdad, Cairo and Cordova [Cordoba] were each larger and more populous than Constantinople’.
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Yet Byzantine civilisation added very little to humanity’s ability to make a livelihood or to its knowledge in those 1,000 years. In every sphere it relied on advances already known to the old Roman Empire—and already known to the Greeks of the 5th century BC.
St Sophia cathedral,
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completed in the mid-6th century, was the most magnificent building in Europe at the time. But it also marked the end of any advance by Byzantine architects.
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The innovative techniques employed were not used again, and later architects did not know how to keep it in full repair. Byzantine literature was characterised by a deliberate rejection of originality, with ‘a striving to emulate the style of classical models and to serve scrupulously a set of pedantic rules…No literary value was attached to originality of content, freedom of invention, or freedom in the choice of subject matter’.
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The obsession with imitating the past meant the language of official society was the ‘classic’ Greek of 1,000 years before, not the very different version employed in the life of the city: ‘When making a formal speech, the orator would shrink from referring to any object in everyday use by its familiar name’.
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Byzantine art was characterised by ‘a process of continuous limitation’ until it became nothing more than propaganda, either for the imperial power or for the church.
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There were a few advances in technology. Alchemists stumbled upon new methods for handling metals, although ‘scientific mineralogy was all but destroyed by the superimposition of occult practices’.
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There were improvements in the manufacture and handling of glass, and a microscrew permitted accurate measurements. There were improvements in writing materials, particular with the acquisition of knowledge from China on how to make paper. The ‘Byzantines knew several simple machines (levers, rollers, cog wheels, wedges, inclined planes, screws and pulleys) which were used mainly as parts…of capstans, treadwheels, scooping machines, weightlifters and catapults’.
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Yet these advances seem to have been employed only in two limited fields—to provide luxuries for the ruling class (such as a mechanical singing bird made by Leo the Mathematician for the royal court) and for military purposes. Even in the military field, the Byzantines advanced very little beyond the knowledge acquired in Alexandria a millennium earlier.
There was not even a limited advance in science. A few manuscripts survived which detailed the discoveries in mathematics and astronomy of Greek Alexandria, but only a handful of scholars ever took them seriously. Mainstream thinkers relied on interpretations of the Book of Genesis in the Bible for their understanding of the physical world and saw the world as flat, not round.
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Above all, there seems to have been virtually no advance in the techniques used to gain a livelihood by the vast majority of the population who worked on the land. ‘The methods and instruments’ of cultivation ‘showed little or no advance on ancient times’.
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Tilling was still performed by a light plough pulled by oxen, fields were not manured systematically, and the harnesses employed until the 12th century choked animals so that two horses could only pull a load of about half a tonne—several times less than is possible with modern harnesses. The result was that however hungry the peasants were, the surplus available to maintain the state and provide for the luxuries of the ruling class did not grow. This simple fact lay at the basis of the stagnation of so much of the rest of Byzantine society. It had survived the crisis which destroyed the old Roman Empire in the west. But no new ways of producing had emerged and no new class which embodied those new ways. So it could not escape the same pressures which had led to the great crisis of the west in the 5th century.
The empire had survived in the east, basically because this was the area of most abundant agriculture. After Constantinople became the imperial capital in 330, successive emperors were able to keep control of Asia Minor, Syria, the Balkans and the all-important grain-producing Nile Valley—which now supplied the needs of Constantinople as it had previously supplied Rome. The economies of the empire’s provinces were in the hands of large local landowners, running virtually self contained estates, which in Egypt ‘came to resemble miniature kingdoms, equipped with police, courts of justice, private armies and elaborate postal and transport services’.
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But the imperial army was sufficiently powerful and tightly enough organised to keep them providing the funds the empire needed.
This structure virtually collapsed barely 50 years after Justinian’s final attempt to reconquer the west and the completion of St Sophia in the 6th century. The armies, the spate of public building and the luxuries of the court and church depended on all the wealth of the empire draining to the top. The continued impoverishment of the peasants and discontent among the less wealthy inhabitants of the provincial cities led to ‘savage clashes between rival factions in all the cities of the empire’.
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The empire and the church alienated vast numbers of people by their attempts to impose religious conformism. The bishops, ‘backed by the violence of the monks’, ensured ‘Paganism was brutally demolished’ by attacks on temples.
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There were repeated attacks on the Jews and bloody persecution of adherents of the ‘Monophysite’, ‘Arian’, and Nestorian interpretations of Christianity (which, between them, had near-majority support). There was little support for the empire when it was attacked in the early 7th century by Persian and then Arab-Islamic armies in Syria and Egypt, and by Slav peoples in the Balkans. It was reduced to a rump consisting of Constantinople itself and part of Asia Minor, with a few towns, a much reduced population in the capital, and a general decay in the level of literacy and learning.
The truncated empire was just able to survive because its rulers reorganised the economy so as to provide for its defence. They attempted to dismantle the large estates and to settle whole armies as smallholding peasants in frontier areas. This system, they believed, would provide them both with militias to defend the empire and with a sure tax base.
They were able to hold the core of the empire intact in this way and even, by the 10th century, to recover some of the Balkan lands inhabited by the Slavs. But they could not overcome the basic weaknesses of the system, and Constantinople was in decline again by the mid-11th century. The empire rested on an inbuilt contradiction. The aim was to build an independent peasantry which could be taxed. But taxation continually drove the peasants to abandon the land to those who were wealthier and more powerful.
The smallholding peasants faced ‘the annual invasion of a cruel and rapacious body of tax collectors, accompanied by a posse of soldiers…Defaulters were summarily flogged and their goods distrained’.
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Sometimes they would be jailed and tortured—and in 12th century Cyprus hungry dogs were set on them. Yet even in the best of times they lived on the edge of insolvency. It only required a bad harvest for the most industrious peasants to be forced to sell their land and flee. So peasants could end up welcoming subordination to some powerful landowner as a form of ‘protection’. Significantly, when there was a peasant rising in 932, it was led by an imposter who claimed to be the son of a great aristocratic family.
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The imperial bureaucracy did succeed in preventing the urban masses ever organising independently. The merchants and artisans were organised into guilds under state control, which rigorously limited their profits. This ‘delayed the growth of a strong native bourgeoisie’,
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so that when openings for trade did emerge they were taken up by foreign merchants whose activities increased the weaknesses of the empire.
A class of free wage labourers could not develop either, because of the persistence of slavery in the cities. From the 9th to the 11th centuries, ‘the great victories…flooded the markets with cheap human merchandise. It was not until the hard facts of military defeat, closed markets and declining wealth had stopped the sources of slaves in the 12th century that slavery began to die out and give the free worker…economic power’.
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The other side of the splendour of Constantinople and the wealth of its rulers was the poverty of masses of its inhabitants. Vast numbers lived in squalid tenements or huts, with many sleeping outdoors even in the coldest winters. But, lacking an independent economic base, the poor could not act as an independent force. They could cause brief mayhem by rioting. But even their bitterness was all too easily manipulated by groups with very different interests to their own. So the huge ‘Nike’ riot early in Justinian’s reign, which went on for a fortnight and led to the burning of half the city, was utilised by aristocratic forces opposed to Justinian’s taxes on them. From then on emperors were careful to provide cheap grain for the urban masses, and riots were normally in favour of the emperor and against his enemies.
There was even an institutionalised form of rioting which deflected the urban masses from raising class demands of their own. This was the organisation into rival Green and Blue ‘factions’ of groups of spectators at the various games in the Hippodrome arena. Several hundred youths from each side would occupy special seats, dressed in elaborated clothes in their own colours, cheering and booing appropriately and coming to blows, which would, on occasions, lead to large-scale bloodshed and rioting. Troops would sometimes have to be used to restore order, but the sponsorship of the factions by various dignitaries, including the emperor and empress, ensured that far from endangering the empire the system merely served to let off steam.
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It was only when the system of providing cheap corn broke down in the 12th century that riots reflecting the class interests of the urban dwellers began to occur. Interestingly, it was then that various ‘guilds’ and associations of artisans and tradesmen played a role.
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Byzantium survived as a last bastion of Graeco-Roman culture because the imperial bureaucracy was run by a layer of literate Greek speakers. But it was a group that lived off the production of others rather than contributing to or organising it. It therefore prided itself on its remoteness from the material world, and was afraid of any class emerging whose closeness to production might lead to it diverting some of the surplus into its own pockets. It is this which explains the sterile, pedantic character of Byzantine culture. It also explains the strength of superstitious and magical beliefs among all social groups. The priests were usually at least half-illiterate, and their message relied upon simplified stories of the saints, tales of miracles, and faith in the magic of holy relics. Where Paganism had provided people with local gods, Christianity now provided them with local patron saints. The cult of the mother goddess became the cult of the Virgin Mary. Fertility rights became Shrove Tuesday carnivals and Easter ceremonies.
Along with the superstition went the most barbaric practices. By the 8th century ‘we find mutilation of the tongue, hand and nose as part of the criminal system…The church approved of this because the tongueless sinner still had time to repent’.
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In the cities the austere moralism of the church meant there was ‘rigorous seclusion of women. No respectable woman ever appeared in the streets unveiled’.
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But there was also prostitution on a massive scale.
The fundamental weakness of Byzantine civilisation was shown early in the 13th century when Constantinople fell to a band of thugs and adventurers from Europe. The participants in the Fourth Crusade found the city a better prize than their intended destination of Jerusalem. They pillaged it and then ruled it as a feudal kingdom. They were driven out in 1261, but the renewed Byzantine state was a pale reflection of its former self and finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
A certain sort of civilisation had been preserved for 1,000 years. But the only contact of the supposedly cultivated ruling class with the masses who did the work was via the tax collector on the one hand and the barely literate rural priests on the other. Such a civilisation could be no more than a living fossil, passing on the achievements of one epoch to another, but adding nothing itself.
No class capable of revolutionising society and giving a free rein to the forces of production had ever developed in Graeco-Roman society. The Dark Ages were the result in western Europe; 1,000 years of sterility were the result in the Balkans and Asia Minor.