A Short History of the World (7 page)

A devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the early 540s marked the end of an age of splendour and the empire’s population became substantially diminished, with up to 50 percent of the population dying in a number of urban areas. Justinian himself is one of the lucky few who caught the plague but survived. Some historians believe that repeated instances of the plague over the following 200 years caused the death of up to 100 million people.
 

In addition to being weakened by plague and over-extending itself in the west, Byzantium was also constantly threatened in the east by Sassanid Persia – the only empire able to match its strength. A series of wars between the two empires in the early 7th century exhausted them both. Weak and exposed, the two powers were no match for the encroaching Muslims.

Muhammad: The Last Prophet (AD 570–632)

In AD 610, at the age of 40, a trader-turned-prophet from the town of Mecca, in Arabia, claimed he had seen visions of the Angel Gabriel while sleeping in a cave. Gabriel, he claimed, had told him to preach monotheism to the polytheistic Arab desert tribes. The existing religions of Christianity and Judaism, with which Muhammad had come into contact as a trader, also preached monotheism - the worship of one God.
 

Muhammad’s simple message of the oneness of God, social justice, charity, good works and the equality of all before God resonated with the poor. However, it angered the powerful merchant class in Mecca, who rejected his teachings and became actively hostile, since much of their revenue depended on the city’s pagan shrine, the Kaaba. An attack on the existing polytheistic Arab religion meant an attack on Mecca’s prosperity.
 

In AD 622, Muhammad was forced to leave Mecca and led an exodus of his followers to the town of Yathrib, which accepted his teachings and took on a new name, Madinat al-Nabi, the ‘town of the Prophet’, which is now shortened to Medina. Henceforth this exodus became known as the
Hijra
, or flight, and can be compared to the Exodus of the Hebrew tribes from Egypt under Moses as a turning point in the history of the Islamic religion. Eight years later, Muhammad marched on Mecca and subdued it and a large number of Arabian desert tribes turned to the new religion which they called Islam, or ‘submission to the will of God’.

When Muhammad died in AD 632, he left behind the nascent religion among a few tribes in the Arabian desert. Within a hundred years Muslim armies controlled territory from Spain in the west and Africa in the south, to Persia in the east, and had managed to subdue entire empires. Common explanations for the success of the Muslim armies include plague and war.
 

The plague that had ravaged both Sassanid Persia and Byzantium in the 6th century seems to have bypassed much of Arabia, possibly thanks to its deserts and lack of cities which gave less room for contagion. Muhammad had also introduced hygienic reforms to great effect. As for war, Persia and Byzantium had been so weakened by incessant battles with each other that they were unable to withstand conquering armies that were driven by religious zeal and attracted by the promise of a share in the spoils of war. Finally, many communities had become fed up with the corruption and taxes of the existing regimes and welcomed the invaders with open arms as a result.

However, the speed of the Islamic success hid underlying problems within the community: the failure of Muhammad to appoint a successor, or even establish a procedure by which a new leader might be chosen, resulted in differences of opinion as to who should succeed him. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, was passed over in favour of one of Muhammad’s closest friends, Abu Bakr, partly because Ali was considered too young to take on the role. This decision would later prove to be a major source of division across the Islamic community; one group became Ahl Al-Sunna, those who followed the Sunna, or way of the Prophet, while the followers of Ali launched Shi’at’Ali, or the party of Ali, thereafter known as the Shiites.
 

Upon Muhammad’s death Abu Bakr became caliph, or righteous heir, and determined that all Arabs in the Arabian peninsula acknowledge the leadership of the Muslim community, even if this should come about by force. He achieved his goal in an incredibly rapid two years. Having brought the tribes together, he directed them against outside enemies, and so began a bold series of campaigns from Dar al-Islam, or the ‘House of Islam’ into Dar al-Harb, or the ‘House of War’.

The Arab armies offered comparatively easy terms to those they defeated, especially to Jews and Christians, whom they termed ‘people of the Book’ and whom they permitted to worship freely. They also did not demand that people convert to Islam; Muslims were not required to pay taxes so this meant that a larger number of converts equalled less tax revenue, not more. Essentially, as long as people accepted the sovereignty of the Arabs and paid taxes, they could continue to govern themselves. Many of the conquered had also been oppressed by their previous rulers which meant that in many instances the invading armies were welcomed with open arms.
 

When the third caliph, Uthman, was murdered 22 years after the death of Muhammad, the followers of Ali saw this as a chance to proclaim Ali as caliph. However, Ali was assassinated and his son, Hasan, was persuaded by the existing Umayyad line to renounce his claims to the leadership. Having done so, Hasan was poisoned. His brother, Husayn, set out to seek power – an act that subsequently ended in his murder and the massacre of his followers, and exacerbated the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Over the next hundred or so years, Damascus, in present-day Syria, became the Islamic world’s capital, presided over by the Umayyad clan, under whose leadership Muslims conquered vast tracts of land. To the east, Muslim armies successfully invaded Sassanid Persia and Central Asia, and gradually gained followers as far as India. To the west, in AD 711, a small army of northern African Berbers under Arab leadership and motivated by the promise of booty, invaded the Visigoth territory of Spain and went on to conquer most of the Iberian peninsula within a decade. From that point on Spain became known as Al-Andalus – a peculiar hybrid of barbarian, Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture. The top of the Rock of Gibraltar, known then by its Latin name, Mons Calpe, was renamed after the Moor general, Tariq, as ‘Jabl Tariq’ (the Hill of Tariq), from where we get the name Gibraltar. It would take seven centuries for the Muslims to be driven off the peninsula entirely.
 

For many years the Islamic armies seemed unstoppable. A turning point in their expansion into north-west Europe came only in AD 732, when the king of the Franks, Charles Martel, otherwise known as ‘Charles the Hammer’, and a coalition of troops under his leadership, defeated an Umayyad invading army near Poitiers in France. While there is disagreement as to the size of this invading army, world history may have turned out very differently indeed had it not been defeated.

The Fall of the Umayyad Dynasty (AD 750)

Around that time things weren’t going too well for the Umayyads in Damascus either. With the wealth that the Umayyad Empire generated through trade and conquest came a decadent lifestyle that alienated the vast majority of its subjects and led to mounting opposition. Complaints had begun to be aired that the booty of conquest was being held in Damascus and not being disseminated to the men who carried out the actual fighting. Finally, the Umayyad Dynasty was dominated by Arabs while there was demand for an Islamic rule where all Muslims would be equally represented.

This disquiet offered a great opportunity for the non-Arab Muslim and Shiite dissenters to encourage an uprising. It was the efforts of the Umayyads to put down this uprising that led to their eventual downfall. Led by Abu l’Abbas al-Saffah, the great-great-grandson of the Prophet’s uncle, the dissenters rebelled, proclaimed Abu l’Abbas caliph and, in AD 750, having invited all the members of the Umayyad clan to a feast, slaughtered all of them except one, Abd ar-Rahman, the grandson of a former caliph. Abd ar-Rahman fled via Africa to Spain, where he defeated the governor of Al-Andalus, a supporter of l’Abbas, and established an independent emirate based out of Cordoba.
 

Early African Empires

From the 7th century, the Muslims also explored much of Africa, many centuries before the Europeans parcelled the continent up between them. Our knowledge of this continent’s history is hampered by an absence of written records. The lack of a major transport infrastructure, such as that created by the Romans and the Chinese, makes its history very disparate, and this is not helped by the lack of archaeological evidence. We do know, however, that the growth of Carthage stimulated trade across the desert, and that this trade grew further under the Romans, who named the continent Africa after a tribe living near Carthage called the Afri.
 

It was Muslims who introduced the camel in great quantities, which helped develop trade further and indirectly aided the growth of regional powers such as the great West African empires of Ghana,
²⁸
Mali and Songhai, between the 7th and the 16th centuries. Much of what we know about African states in the 14th century comes from the writing of Abu Abdalla Ibn Battuta, a famous 14th century explorer, who spent almost 30 years travelling through the Islamic world, including northern Africa, India, Central Asia, China and the Middle East.
 

The Chinese Century (AD 650 – 750)

While Europe was mired in darkness, China was very much at the forefront of civilisation on earth.
After the collapse of the Han Dynasty in AD 220, much of China was united again only in 581 under the Sui Dynasty. While, this dynasty was short-lived, it lay the foundations for one of the longest enduring empires in Chinese history and possibly the greatest empire of the medieval world – the Tang Dynasty
(618-907).

With enlightened and leadership and efficiently run and powerful armies that subdued its neighbours in the north and northwest, China thrived. Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and Persian cultures and religions were absorbed by the court and tourists and commerce flooded into the capital, Chang’an (modern day Xi’an), which rapidly became the largest city in the world. Such were the
advancements in art, literature and poetry that early 8th century China
is traditionally regarded as the Golden Age of Chinese history. It was also during this time that tea became established as the national drink of China. 

The Tang Dynasty suffered a number of natural disasters and,
like the Sui dynasty that preceded it,
eventually became less tolerant and more divided. It subsided into anarchy and eventually collapsed completely. 

The Islamic Golden Age (8th–11th Centuries)

In the Middle East, the new Islamic dynasty came to be known as the Abbasid Caliphate and is synonymous with the golden age of Islam. The Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdad and through trade with the East and through its agricultural wealth, the city soon became one of the richest cities in the world. It remained the political and cultural capital of the Islamic world from that time until the Mongol invasion in 1258.
 

Great wealth encouraged the Abbasids to support learning and the arts; under a succession of great caliphs in the 8th and 9th centuries – predominantly under the caliphs al-Mansur, al-Rashid, and al-Mamoun – significant efforts were directed towards gathering knowledge from around the world. This created the conditions for the great flowering of Muslim culture and intellectual achievement in the caliphate between the 9th and 11th centuries.
 

During this period Islamic lands were more open, cultured, sophisticated and richer than any kingdom in the West, where there remained a suspicion of learning that was not considered religious in essence. As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘
The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.
’
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The Abbasids encouraged a great interest in the writings of the ancient Greek world. Caliph al-Mamoun opened the Bayt al-Hikmah, or ‘House of Wisdom’, where scholars from different lands gathered and studied. Books on mathematics, meteorology, mechanics, astronomy, philosophy, medicine and many other subjects were translated into Arabic from Hebrew, Greek, Persian and other languages, thereby preserving the ancient classics that were of little or no interest to the barbarians in the West. In fact, a number of these works are known to us today only through Arabic translations.