In the 1500s western Europeans took increasingly to the seas.
With an expansionist Islam astride the land routes to the East, they had little other choice. Against eastern Europe, the Muslim Ottoman Turks presented the greatest threat.1 Descended from central Asian nomadic, pastoral peoples, who as allies of the Mongols had been swept southward into Persia and westward into Arabic-speaking lands, under the tribal leader Osman (b. 1259, emir 1299–1326) they had reached the northwest corner of Anatolia.
After the death of Osman they founded the Ottoman Empire in which Turkish became the dominant language. In 1345 they crossed from Asia into Europe. From Gallipoli they infiltrated the Balkans, conquering Bulgaria as they went. A century later in 1453, under Sultan Mehmet II (1451–81), they captured Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire which had been founded as a second Rome by Constantine the Great a thousand years before.
Islam’s2 invasion of Europe long pre-dates the appearance of the Ottomans. As early as the eighth century the Arabs had built an empire that stretched from Mecca and Medina in Arabia west-ward to the Atlantic, and eastwest-ward to the China Sea. By the ninth century the Arabs controlled the trade from Europe to Persia, India and China. Long before the European age they had bound the Eurasian world together. Laying down the groundwork of a world economy which Europe would later restructure, they knew far more about China and Africa than Europeans did at that time.
Helped by the power of prophesy, by the fire of faith, by the call to brotherhood, as well as by the prowess in arms, no faith spread as quickly as Islam. In AD 711 the Muslim general Tarik ibn Ziyad, having crossed from Ceuta in Morocco to Gibraltar,
8
began a Muslim occupation of Spain that was to last almost 800 years.
Wherever they spread, the Arabs stamped the unity and culture of Islamic life upon the areas they conquered. Almost all the languages of the Muslim world have borrowed heavily from Arabic, which (as Greek had done earlier and Latin would do later) provided a bridge between East and West. Muslim cities, such as Baghdad in Iraq (immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights) or Córdoba in Spain, experienced an extraordinary burst of creative activity and became centres of scientific, artistic and philo-sophical learning. The Arab philosophers Ibn Hazm (994–1064) and Ibn Rushd (known as Averroës, 1126–98), and the leading Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, Maimonides (1135–1204), who wrote in Arabic, were all sons of Córdoba. Under Abd al-Rahman (who in AD 732 crossed the Pyrenees and captured Bordeaux) and his successors, Córdoba, boasting 500 mosques, 300 public baths, 70 libraries and lamp-lit streets, became one of the great cultural centres of Europe. While the Arabs and other Muslims in Spain were creating buildings of breathtaking beauty and estab-lishing libraries that far surpassed anything the Europeans possessed, the leaders of Christian Europe were only just learn-ing to write their names.
The Arab world was the conduit through which passed the ideas of East and West. It was through an Arab window that the West first saw the East. In translating and diffusing the learning of the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Persians and the Hindus, Islam made available to the West the heritage of antiquity. Arabic contributions to the sciences and the arts (including business and finance) were crucial to later western developments. Before 1500 many of the classical Greek and Arab scientific works had been translated into Latin, increasingly the language of Christendom.
Not least, the Islamic empire helped to transfer superior Chinese technology to the West. Muslim Spain, as well as Italy, was the cradle of Europe’s Renaissance during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Christian victory over the Marinids (Muslim Berbers from Fez in Morocco) at Salado in Spain in 1340 brought to an end the long history of the Arab-Berber invasion of the Spanish penin-sula. It was not until 1492 that the last Muslim outpost was crushed in Granada by the armies of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile (united in 1469). Henceforth, the Arab light dimmed.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had encouraged the militarily inclined Ottoman Turks to expand in Europe. In the 1520s, under Suleiman the Magnificent (b. 1495, reigned 1520–66), parts of the Balkans and Hungary (the Battle of Mohács, 1526) were overrun;
Vienna was threatened in 1529 (Map II). Western resistance on land, and Islamic defeat at sea by a Spanish fleet at Lepanto in 1571, stemmed the Muslim advance. Having helped to destroy Islam’s hold on the eastern Mediterranean, Venice became the most powerful state south of the Alps.
In 1687, at the second Battle of Mohács, the Turks were defeated before Vienna. Although Ottoman power had probably reached its zenith before then, it was not until the continuous and exhaust-ing defensive wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against Venice, Austria, Poland, Russia and Persia had reduced the Ottomans’ possessions in Europe by half, that the Islamic tide in Europe was turned. Within a century the Ottomans passed from the offensive to the defensive. A humiliating peace with the Holy League (Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia) followed in 1699 (the Treaty of Karlowitz), whereby the Turks surrendered most of Hungary. This was the turning point in Ottoman fortunes.
So great were the Ottoman Turks’ military reverses in the last half of the eighteenth century that Turkey became known as the
‘sick man of Europe’.
By then the military prowess, the pragmatic creativity, the vitality and the remarkable leadership of earlier times – all of which had enabled them to match the material and intellectual accomplish-ments of the West – had declined. The rigidity of Muslim thought, its refusal to accept new ways and new ideas, coupled with an incompetent, despotic, centralized rule, had also stifled the earlier interest in the human and physical world. Incessant wars, palace intrigues, widespread corruption and loss of will did the rest. The fact that Suleiman I, the Magnificent, under whose rule the Ottoman Empire reached its height, should have been followed by Selim II, the Sot (b. 1524, reigned 1566–74) – and Selim was only one of the 13 incompetent leaders who followed Suleiman – demonstrates the decline of Ottoman leadership. The wonder is that the conglomeration of people that the Ottomans ruled should have been held together for as long as they were. By provid-ing a constant military challenge to the West, as well as by barrprovid-ing the land routes to the East, the Turks (like the Arabs before them) had played a pivotal role in the unfolding of western history.
An Asian-dominated World11
THE OTTOMAN, SAFAVID AND MOGUL EMPIRES
Matching the glory of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s was that of Persia (Iran), where the Safavid dynasty, the first national dynasty in many centuries, was founded in 1501 by Shah Ismail I (1487–1524). Descended from a long line of militant Shi’ite Muslims, Ismail declared himself the legitimate leader of Islam; the Shi’a faith became the religion of the state.3 (Persia had been under Sunni Muslim control since the Arab invasions of the seventh century.) Shi’ism was attractive to the Turkmen and other tribes-men who had joined Ismail in seizing Azerbaijan from the Otto-mans in the northwest. They then defeated the Uzbeks in the northeast. The charge of heresy so intensified the discord between Persia and its Sunni neighbours that warfare between them was common throughout the sixteenth century. In 1514 Ismail was defeated by the Ottomans at Chaldiran, but kept control of the greater part of Persia, as did his successor Shah Tahmasp I (b. 1513, reigned 1524–76) (Map II).
Persia’s fortunes improved under the strong leadership of Shah Abbas I (b. 1571, reigned 1587–1629). Between 1603 and 1612 he recovered Tabriz from the Ottomans, recaptured all of northwest Persia, took Erivan and won a decisive victory against the Turks near Lake Urmia. Fostering trade and industry, he encouraged the English and Dutch East India trading companies to establish branches in Persia. In 1622 the English assisted Abbas to seize the island of Ormuz from the Portuguese, thus gaining trading privileges there. Abbas’ conquest of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan was followed in 1623 by the seizure of Baghdad. With great splen-dour a new capital was established at Isfahan.
Alas, the reign of Abbas the Great was followed by that of Shah Safi, the Weak (reigned 1629–42), who having been raised in the harem, lacked political and military experience. Helped by Safi’s ineptitude, the Ottoman Turks reconquered large parts of Persian territory. Azerbaijan fell to them in 1635. The final blow to the Safavids, however, came from the Ghilzai Afghans in the East.
In 1722 the Afghan ruler Mir Mahmud overcame the Persian army and took Isfahan. The Safavid empire collapsed in 1723; the last of the Safavids was deposed in 1736.
The Afghan victory was the signal for Russia and Turkey to seize whatever Persian territory they could. They were prevented from dismembering Persia entirely only by the appearance of the powerful leader Nadir Shah (b. 1688, reigned 1736–47). Nadir, a Sunni Turk, succeeded in holding Persia’s predators at bay. In a
series of battles he routed the Afghans, Turks and Russians. In 1739 he carried his wars of conquest across Afghanistan into Mogul India, where he sacked and looted Delhi. His brutal efforts to reinstate Sunnism in Persia ended with his assassination in 1747.
His death was followed by political divisions and civil war. Only in 1750, with the establishment of the Zand dynasty, was an element of stability restored. In 1794 Persia was again thrown into disruption by an internal struggle for power. For much of the nineteenth century, Persia became a pawn of Russian–British rivalry in central and eastern Asia.
Another great Muslim empire – the Mogul4 Empire of India – was founded in 1526 by Babar (1483–1530), who had invaded India from Afghanistan. Babar’s victory over the much more powerful Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526 was for the eastern wing of Muslim power what the victory at Mohács on the Danube (also in 1526) was for the Ottomans. With these victories Islam extended from Morocco in the west and Austria in the north, through the Safavids of Persia, to the centre of India.
Babar laid the foundations of a dynasty that lasted over three centuries. Within four years he had conquered the greater part of Hindustan. His followers extended their power and their reli-gion across most of the subcontinent. The reign of his grandson Akbar the Great (b. 1542, reigned 1556–1605), who renewed and consolidated Mogul rule, is considered a golden age in India’s past. There had never been – so it was said – an Indian empire of its like for two thousand years. A benevolent despot, Akbar is remembered for the synthesis and the unity he achieved throughout the Indian subcontinent between Hindu and Islamic cultures. His religious tolerance was matched by his fairness in assessing taxes and his astuteness in establishing a centralized government. Following the death of Akbar’s successor Jahangir (b. 1569, reigned 1605–27), who had neglected his duties for a self-indulgent life at court, further extensions of Mogul rule were made by Shah Jahan (reigned 1627–58). Like his Muslim prede-cessors, he encouraged the arts and the building of palaces and mosques; the Taj Mahal at Agra was built as a mausoleum for his wife.
The turning point in Islam’s fortunes in India came with the accession to power of Aurangzeb (b. 1618, reigned 1658–1707), whose attempts to consolidate power – a very difficult thing to
do at all times in India – were undone by rebellions, political infighting and wars. His efforts forcibly to convert Hindus to Islam aroused widespread hostility. Following his death, the Mogul Empire began to disintegrate. Henceforth, harried by Marathas, Sikhs and Persians, as well as by Europeans (Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, British and French), there was a steady decline in Mogul power – a decline accelerated by internal weaknesses and the rigid and unchanging outlook of the Mogul elite.
With the collapse of the Mogul Empire in the eighteenth century, the purely commercial attitude of European traders in India ceased to be tenable. Increasingly, and often unwillingly, they were drawn into the country’s political conflicts and intrigues. The British, who had established their first trade factory near Bombay in 1612, are said to have conquered India ‘in a fit of absence of mind’.
With the British victory over the Nawab of Bengal and the French at Plassey in 1757, over the Dutch at Chinsura in 1759, and over the titular Mogul emperor at Buxar in 1764, Britain’s supremacy in Bengal and later the whole of India was ensured (Maps V and VI). In 1786 the first British Governor-General of India was appointed.
The most populous and powerful empire in Asia in the 1500s was the Ming Empire (1368–1644) of China,5 which in 1368 had overthrown the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty (1260–1368).6 Coming from central Asia in the early years of the thirteenth century, the Mongol armies (under the leadership of Temujin [Genghis Khan, c.1162–
1227] and the khans who followed him), had swept like a pesti-lence southward into northern China and India, westward into northern Persia and eastern Europe, and eastward to Japan. Until 1368 China was under Mongol rule.
If Mongol rule sat ill with the Chinese, it was not only because the Mongols had laid waste to so much of China, but also because the Chinese considered themselves a superior people. The world, seen from the Chinese bell tower, was always subservient; mankind was one family, of whom they were the head. The emperor, the Son of Heaven, was the father of the world’s family.
China’s basic strength in the 1500s lay not in its age (the Chinese empire had been founded in 221 BC), its power, its widespread empire (under the Mings China extended its rule into Mongolia and central Asia; they also reconquered Vietnam), its numbers or the richness of its land, but in its ancient culture and
civiliza-tion. Europeans visiting China at this time never doubted China’s claims to cultural pre-eminence. China was a acquisitive, non-hereditary, secular, centralized society, in which men of humble origin could rise to the summit of power.
Whereas in Europe and Asia the tie that bound men together and often gave them their strength was religion, in China the tie was civilization. The Chinese were concerned not so much with their relations with God as with their relations with their fellow men. The reigning religions in China in 1500 – Confucianism7 (not a religion so much as a system of order), Taoism (the Way) and Buddhism – were seen as intermediaries in the manifold relations between men, and between emperor and subjects. Confu-cianism stands at the opposite pole to Christianity in its view of the human being. It required no supernaturalism for its moral-ity, no doctrine of original sin, no idea of creation as the single act of one god and no threat of eternal damnation. An individual need not feel inner guilt but outer shame; the greatest shame was any act that brought shame to one’s family and ancestors.
Confucianism (proclaimed China’s state doctrine in 136 BC) was particularly successful among the early Chinese because it provided them with a viable perception of order in the individual, in the family, in society and in the world. With Taoism, Confucianism provided the foundations from which Chinese culture is spiri-tually derived. The cornerstone of Confucian teaching was the sanctity of the family. Respect for family and for the past is what respect for the person came to mean in the West. Harmony, stability and continuity were what mattered. What was just or unjust was what was socially harmonious or disharmonious.
Since the visit of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo to China in the thirteenth century, China’s wealth had impressed foreign observers as much as its culture. Yet China has never been a commercial civilization. The Chinese mandarinate system and the agrarian self-sufficiency of the Chinese people inhibited the rise of a merchant class, which, for most of Chinese history, was regarded as parasitical. Although the merchant’s lot improved during the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279), and there was probably much more internal and foreign trade and commercialism than western scholars have allowed, the market has not played the pivotal role in Chinese history that it came to play in the West or the Islamic Middle East. Except during the Yuan dynasty, founded by Kublai Khan (1257–1294), trade – foreign and domestic
– was not allowed to change the empire’s economic, cultural and intellectual institutions. Agriculture was the right and proper source of wealth. The goal of Confucian harmony, based as it was on the land, the family and the scholar-gentry, was preferred.
China’s official attitude towards the merchant class did not hinder its technological development. In the first 14 centuries of Christian Europe, many Chinese inventions were adopted by the Europeans without knowing where they came from. These inven-tions included gunpowder, the maritime compass, silk, paper and porcelain. It is doubtful if the West had much to teach China in agrarian or industrial techniques before the eighteenth century.
Until the nineteenth century China’s agrarian standards were unmatched.
In particular, the Chinese excelled in shipbuilding technology.
In the fifteenth century they possessed the world’s greatest sea-going fleet – large enough, had they willed it, to have blocked European expansion into Asian waters. The Chinese passed to the Arabs (who subsequently brought the ideas to Europe) the techniques of watertight bulkheads, stern-post rudders and navi-gational aids such as the compass. Unlike the European single-masted vessels, which could sail only downwind, their multiple-masted vessels – which influenced changes in the West – could sail into the wind. Long voyages were now feasible.
Between 1403 and 1433, in order to show their flag and impress distant lands with Chinese supremacy, seven great naval expe-ditions were sent by the Mings from China into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and Africa (Map I). The first voyage began in 1405 with more than 60 large vessels (up to 440 feet long and 186 feet across), 255 smaller vessels and a crew of about 28,000 men.8 Contrast this with Columbus’ three ships and crew of 90.
Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria, measured 117 feet long. In 1433, roughly 70 years before da Gama rounded the Cape of South Africa, the Chinese (having done some trade, and collected giraffes and other exotica) returned home to continue their traditional policy of isolation.
In sharp contrast to the Europeans who would follow them, the Chinese expeditions sought neither conquest nor trade. No overseas territories were acquired; no colonies established. The Mings’ show of force in 1407 in the Malacca Strait and against Annam were two of the few attempts at naval conquest. In 1433, having shown their flag and satisfied their curiosity, the Chinese
returned to China and shut their door. The expeditions were never resumed. Henceforth the Chinese were concerned with enemies in the interior of Asia and political rivalries at court. China remained closed until it was forced open by the West in the nine-teenth century. By then China had lost its ascendancy. The domi-nation of the mandarin class, and the Confucian world view that
returned to China and shut their door. The expeditions were never resumed. Henceforth the Chinese were concerned with enemies in the interior of Asia and political rivalries at court. China remained closed until it was forced open by the West in the nine-teenth century. By then China had lost its ascendancy. The domi-nation of the mandarin class, and the Confucian world view that