Dear Barry,
In a 1992 postscript of epic sweep and grandeur to his 1987 The Tibetan
Empire in Central Asia, Christopher I. Beckwith is at pains to compare
the Carolingians favourably with other civilizations. But we know that
the Carolingian emergent-core-area around Aachen was a new-ish Growth
Area, only beginning to get the technical development necessary to put
it into full production as "Champion" agriculture, the three-field system,
heavy plow, horse collar, watermills, and other characteristic elements
of the Mediaeval technical complex.
To make the Carolingians look relatively good, Beckwith makes the
Byzantines look relatively bad. He tells us that the Byzantines were,
during the seventh and eighth centuries, an economic backwater. That
the new trade routes went *around* the Byzantine empire, as if this
was an economic no-go zone, of little profitable prospect.
Beckwith makes no mention of disease and relative population changes.
Remarkably few people do, actually. I cannot, for this reason, recall
where, it must have been years ago, I first (and last) read that the
Plague of Justinian spread everywhere in the Eurasian landmass "except
East Asia." I recall the words "except East Asia" very vividly, however.
One of the minority of historians who do mention the aftereffects of
the Bubonic Plague is Warren Treadgold, who dates, in his book title,
The Byzantine Revival: 780-843. This is, actually, later than the period
Beckwith finds most interesting, that is, seventh and eighth centuries;
but Treadgold says that the demographic effect of Plague recurrences was
such as to preclude politico-military resurgence before those dates.
Beckwith is important because he specifically mentions that his work
was of interest, between 1987 and 1992, to "the world systems historians,"
specifically mentioning Andre Gunder Frank, The Centrality of Central Asia.
What, therefore, is Beckwith trying to do, and are we getting out of his
book what we should?
In my opinion, he is trying to make the Turkish expansion of the sixth
century analogous to the Mongol expansion of the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. This makes him disposed to see a spread of development, at a
very high level, all along the immense swath of territory into which people
speaking Turkic and related languages spread, and to contiguous regions.
These regions include the Tibetans and Iranians of central Asia. (I have
already mentioned, but failed to cite Beckwith as my source, two generals
of the Tang dynasty in China who were offspring of mixed Iranian [Sogdian]
and Turkish marriages.) Narrowing this still-vast subject matter down,
Beckwith concentrates on the Tibetan empire of the seventh and eighth
centuries. Which he finds remarkably advanced technically, producing
iron chain-mail armour and suspension bridges, for example, superior
to those of the Chinese. (Though the Chinese may not have admired the
Tibetan chain mail armour because they used plate armour and mass-
produced cast-iron, the latter trick the Europeans were still very
far from turning.)
Is there some reason not considered by Beckwith why the trade routes
out of Asia might have avoided or gone around the rump Byzantine Empire?
What about, say, the fact that, thanks to a commercial espionage expedition
sent by Justinian, in or about the year 555, to either Sri Lanka or Central
Asia, the stories vary, the Byzantines had obtained silkworm eggs,
consequently were the only state outside China which had its own domestic
silk industry at this time.
What is silk? A sideline industry of East Asian peasants, whereby, for
about 3,000 years, women fed silkworm larvae mulberry-tree leaves. The
larvae pupate, and the material of the cocoons is unwound by these same
women into fibers. This is raw silk. It is tedious, tiresome, labour-
intensive work. The direct producers of raw silk almost never wear finished
silk. They wear hemp, or marijuana. There is a bronze-age Chinese character
meaning both "textile" and "crazy" or "stoned." As did European peasants,
Near Eastern peasants (sackcloth, as with ashes), and wherever. By the
time of the Plague of Justinian, silk had been the principal export, for
hundreds of years, of China, in the year 542 divided into three states,
Eastern Wei, Western Wei, and Liang in the Yangzi valley to Sichuan and
points south to Vietnam.
Anyone predicting imminent unification of China in 542 would have
been as crazy as anyone denying the prospect of Justinian's unifying the
disparately governed territories formerly under the sway of a single state.
The census records of the Han dynasty give us a population of about
sixty million. The Roman empire we can estimate at about sixty million.
Then came the smallpox-measles pandemics of the second and third centuries,
which rendered, for example, the western part of the Roman Empire, in the
crudest possible terms, too sparse to make money for the state and support
urban life for the ruling elite. The elite either had to ruralize, by
fortifying itself in the countryside, recruiting its private gangs of
nasties and bullyboys, and collect small incomes in bits and pieces over
huge properties, or go out of business where there was just to much *agres
vacantes* to make money out of. These conditions were not as severe in
the previously more densely populated eastern part of the Roman Empire,
which henceforth recovers farthest and fastest.
In China, where I am on less sure ground, I believe the Northwest was
more like the west of the Roman Empire, and the eastern part of North
China may have been more like the east of the Roman Empire, in terms of
elite exploitation patterns, but the crisis was as severe at one end of
Eurasia as it was at the other. By the earlier part of the Tang dynasty,
the population was still between fifty and sixty millions. Meanwhile,
Europe had taken it on the chin from the Plague of Justinian, so the
population was even lower; and here even guesswork fails me. We should
recognize why the seventh century is the worst in terms of written
documentation of any century since Classical Antiquity. There were
fewer people. There was generalised labour shortage.
Now, back to those women feeding mulberry-tree leaves to silkworm larvae.
When the ultimate consumers dwindle in numbers and purchasing power, can
they adjust for diminution in the income formerly paid them in the form
of pieces of copper by a merchant penetrating the back areas on behalf of
a chain of purchasers ultimately leading to the export route? Yes, they
can feed more mulberry leaves to more silkworm larvae; or ultimately, they
may find some other sideline. The latter is likelier if the landlord forces
them to than if there is no landlord or the landlord does not. This is what
is happening. Ultimately, very ultimately, the prospects, possibilities, and
profits of commerce react back upon the sort of elite which will dominate
society politically, culturally, and militarily, as well of course as
economically. Does society come to be morally and mentally dominated by
pedigreed bluebloods, thuggish warlords, or refined gentlemen who have
studied all sorts of irrelevant matter for years in order to become the
sort of scholars entitled to become magistrates. Making precise connection
between peasant women feeding silkworms and why China "went supernova,"
exhibiting an orgy of militarism even by comparison with the Han era in
the past or the Song to come, is difficult if not impossible. We don't
know how determined *everything* is, that is to say, by something. Even
testosterone explains a little bit, for example. Empress Wu had a more
sensible foreign policy than did Taizong or Xuanzong, before and after.
Personality explains a little bit. But it still takes imagination, which
must often be dead wrong, to get beyond such things.
these are causes and what are effects? Recall Shakespeare's line, in
Macbeth, about the executed Thane of Cawdor: "Nothing about his life
became him as did leaving it." Then recall the Princess An Lo, calmly
sitting before her mirror in Chang'an, painting the huge mothwing-shaped
eyebrows which were the fashion in the early eighth century, until she
was beheaded. When your time is up, get killed with style and grace,
without making any trouble. Which is deemed to have excused all manner
of featherbrained living before that. And if the privileged class does
not have privileges, what's the sense of having a privileged class. Why
does this happen, as it is obviously not necessary. Tang dynasty China
was a place where it happened, and had been happening for centuries,
when competent government was not possible. In the Tang period, it was
possible but not permitted. A revolution took place against that sort of
thing, replacing hereditary privilege with hereditary transmission of
property mediated by holding of magistracies by competitive examinations,
abetting the accumulation of hereditary property. Why did China have the
sort of government it did when it did, and who knew what choices there
were? How direct an influence, if any, on this is the profitability of
international trade?
The Tang system was spectacularly bad. Xuanzong, in prorated terms,
wasted the time of more people on more idiotic public rituals than any
Chinese ruler before Mao Zedong. While raising very large armies with
very little results, in relative terms, to show for it: The pattern of
Tang warfare was slow but steady gains at terrible cost, against
outnumbered enemies. At times, the gains were faster than at others;
but winning streaks were followed by losing streaks. Xuanzong lost
everything he himself *and his predecessors* had won. One of the
principal legitimating devices of privileged bluebloods is service
as military officers. The Tang version were so poor at this that
the antimilitarist reaction associated with the destruction of the
bluebloods ensured the Song regime (960-1279, with North China lost
in 1126) could not defend the country.
Or am I making something out of nothing, as this is what I am on principle
always trying to do.
Daniel A. Foss