Debt (46 page)

As for the religious movements: it would be easy enough to write them off as escapist, as promising the victims of the Axial Age empires liberation in the next world as a way of letting them accept their lot in this one, and convincing the rich that all they really owed the poor were occasional charitable donations. Radical thinkers almost invariably do write them off in this way. Surely, the willingness of the governments themselves to eventually embrace them would seem to support this conclusion. But the issue is more complicated. First of all, there is something to be said for escapism. Popular uprisings in the ancient world usually ended in the massacre of the rebels. As I’ve already observed, physical escape, such as via exodus or defection, has always been the most effective response to oppressive conditions since the earliest times we know about. Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes—who did so, effectively, by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own utopian communities.
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Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic city-states of northern India were all eventually stamped out by the great empires (Kautilya provides extensive advice on how to subvert and destroy democratic constitutions), but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public assemblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.
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Buddhist monasteries are still called
sangha
, the ancient name for such republics, and continue to operate by the same consensus-finding process to this day, preserving a certain egalitarian democratic ideal that would otherwise have been entirely forgotten.

Finally, the larger historical achievements of these movements are not, in fact, insignificant. As they took hold, things began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent. Slavery faded as an institution, to the point at which, by the Middle Ages, it had become insignificant or even nonexistent across most of Eurasia. Everywhere too, the new religious authorities began to seriously address the social dislocations introduced by debt.

IF THE AXIAL AGE
saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.

Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires. Eventually, new states formed, but in these new states, the nexus between war, bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their own sake were no longer celebrated as the end of all political life. At the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trade to the organization of local markets, came to fall increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities. One result was a widespread movement to control, or even forbid, predatory lending. Another was a return, across Eurasia, to various forms of virtual credit money.

Granted, this is not the way we’re used to thinking of the Middle Ages. For most of us, “Medieval” remains a synonym for superstition, intolerance, and oppression. Yet for most of the earth’s inhabitants, it could only be seen as an extraordinary improvement over the terrors of the Axial Age.

One reason for our skewed perception is that we’re used to thinking of the Middle Ages as something that happened primarily in Western Europe, in territories that had been little more than border outposts of the Roman Empire to begin with. According to the conventional wisdom, with the collapse of the empire, the cities were largely
abandoned and the economy “reverted to barter,” taking at least five centuries to recover. Even for Europe, though, this is based on a series of unquestioned assumptions that, as I’ve said, crumble the moment one starts seriously poking at them. Chief among them is the idea that the absence of coins means the absence of money. True, the destruction of the Roman war machine also meant that Roman coins went out of circulation; and the few coins produced within the Gothic or Frankish kingdoms that established themselves over the ruins of the old empire were largely fiduciary in nature.
¹
Still, a glance at the “barbarian law codes” reveals that even at the height of the Dark Ages, people were still carefully keeping accounts in Roman money as they calculated interest rates, contracts, and mortgages. Again, cities shriveled, and many were abandoned, but even this was something of a mixed blessing. Certainly, it had a terrible effect on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. Roman Gaul, for instance, had been a network of cities, connected by the famous Roman roads to an endless succession of slave plantations, which were owned by the urban grandees.
²
After around 400 ad, the population of the towns declined radically, but the plantations also disappeared. In the following centuries, many came to be replaced by manors, churches, and even later, castles—where new local lords extracted their own dues from the surrounding farmers. But one need only do the math: since Medieval agriculture was no less efficient than ancient agriculture (in fact, it rapidly became a great deal more so), the amount of work required to feed a handful of mounted warriors and clergymen could not possibly have been anything like that required to feed entire cities. However oppressed Medieval serfs might have been, their plight was nothing compared with that of their Axial Age equivalents.

Still, the Middle Ages proper are best seen as having begun not in Europe but in India and China, between 400 and 600 ad, and then sweeping across much of the western half of Eurasia with the advent of Islam. They only really reached Europe four hundred years later. Let us begin our story, then, in India.

I left off in India with Aśoka’s embrace of Buddhism, but I noted that ultimately, his project foundered. Neither his empire nor his church
was to endure. It took a good deal of time, however, for this failure to occur.

The Mauryans represented a high watermark of empire. The next five hundred years saw a succession of kingdoms, most of them strongly supportive of Buddhism. Stupas and monasteries sprang up everywhere, but the states that sponsored them grew weaker and weaker; centralized armies dissolved; soldiers, like officials, increasingly came to be paid by land grants rather than salaries. As a result, the number of coins in circulation steadily declined.
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Here too, the early Middle Ages witnessed a dramatic decline of cities: where the Greek ambassador Megasthenes described Aśoka’s capital of Patna as the largest city in the world of his day, Medieval Arab and Chinese travelers described India as a land of endless tiny villages.

As a result, most historians have come to write, much as they do in Europe, of a collapse of the money economy; of commerce becoming a “reversion to barter.” Here too, this appears to be simply untrue. What vanished were the military means to extract resources from the peasants. In fact, Hindu law-books written at the time show increasing attention to credit arrangements, with a sophisticated language of sureties, collateral, mortgages, promissory notes, and compound interest.
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One need only consider how the Buddhist establishments popping up all over India during these centuries were funded. While the earliest monks were wandering mendicants, owning little more than their begging bowls, early Medieval monasteries were often magnificent establishments with vast treasuries. Still, in principle, their operations were financed almost entirely through credit.

The key innovation was the creation of what were called the “perpetual endowments” or “inexhaustible treasuries.” Say a lay supporter wished to make a contribution to her local monastery. Rather than offering to provide candles for a specific ritual, or servants to attend to the upkeep of the monastic grounds, she would provide a certain sum of money—or something worth a great deal of money—that would then be loaned out in the name of the monastery, at the accepted 15-percent annual rate. The interest on the loan would then be earmarked for that specific purpose.
⁵
An inscription discovered at the Great Monastery of Sanci sometime around 450 ad provides a handy illustration. A woman named Harisvamini donates the relatively modest sum of twelve
dinaras
to the “Noble Community of Monks.”
⁶
The text carefully inscribes how the income is to be divided up: the interest on five of the dinaras was to provide daily meals for five different monks, the interest from another three would pay to light three lamps for the Buddha, in memory of her parents, and so forth. The inscription
ends by saying that this was a permanent endowment, “created with a document in stone to last as long as the moon and the sun”: since the principal would never be touched, the contribution would last forever.
⁷

Some of these loans presumably went to individuals, others were commercial loans to “guilds of bamboo-workers, braziers, and potters,” or to village assemblies.
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We have to assume that in most cases the money is an accounting unit: what were really being transacted were animals, wheat, silk, butter, fruit, and all the other goods whose appropriate rates of interest were so carefully stipulated in the law-codes of the time. Still, large amounts of gold did end up flowing into monastic coffers. When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn’t simply disappear. In the Middle Ages—and this seems to have been true across Eurasia—the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age–style coinage system back into circulation—invariably, to fund some project of military expansion—often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 ad, who is said to have appointed an officer called the “Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods.” According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.
⁹
He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty—and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

For the most part, then, the gold remained sacrosanct, laid up in the sacred places—though in India, over time these were increasingly Hindu ones, not Buddhist. What we now see as traditional Hindu-village India appears to have been largely a creation of the early Middle Ages. We do not know precisely how it happened. As kingdoms continued to rise and fall, the world inhabited by kings and princes became increasingly distant from that of most people’s everyday affairs. During much of the period immediately following the collapse of the Mauryan empire, for instance, much of India was governed by foreigners.
¹⁰
Apparently, this increasing distance allowed local Brahmins to begin reshaping the new—increasingly rural—society along strictly hierarchical principles.

They did it above all by seizing control of the administration of law. The Dharmaśāstra, law-codes produced by Brahmin scholars between roughly 200 bc and 400 ad, give us a good idea of the new vision of society. In it, old ideas like the Vedic conception of a debt to gods, sages, and ancestors were resuscitated—but now, they applied only and specifically to Brahmins, whose duty and privilege it was to stand in for all humanity before the forces that controlled the universe.
¹¹
Far from being required to attain learning, members of the inferior classes were forbidden to do so: the Laws of Manu, for instance, set down that any Sudra (the lowest caste, assigned to farming and material production) who so much as listened in on the teaching of the law or sacred texts should have molten lead poured into their ears; on the occasion of a repeat offense, have their tongues cut out.
¹²
At the same time Brahmins, however ferociously they guarded their privileges, also adopted aspects of once-radical Buddhist and Jain ideas like karma, reincarnation, and
ahimsa
. Brahmins were expected to refrain from any sort of physical violence, and even to become vegetarians. In alliance with representatives of the old warrior caste, they also managed to win control of most of the land in the ancient villages. Artisans and craftsmen fleeing the decline or destruction of cities often ended up as suppliant refugees, and, gradually, low-caste clients. The result were increasingly complex local patronage systems in the countryside—
jajmani
systems, as they came to be known—where the refugees provided services for the landowning castes, who took on many of the roles once held by the state, providing protection and justice, extracting labor dues, and so on—but also protected local communities from actual royal representatives.
¹³

This latter function is crucial. Foreign visitors were later to be awed by the self-sufficiency of the traditional Indian village, with its elaborate system of landowning castes, farmers, and such “service castes” as barbers, smiths, tanners, drummers, and washermen, all arranged in hierarchical order, each seen as making its own unique and necessary contribution to their little society, all of it typically operating entirely without the use of metal currency. It was only possible for those reduced to the status of Sudras and Untouchables to have a chance of accepting their lowly position because the exaction of local landlords was, again, on nothing like the same scale as that under earlier governments—under which villagers had to support cities of upwards of a million people—and because the village community became an effective means of holding the state and its representatives at least partially at bay.