Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ were two important rebellions by slaves before the one led by Spartacus in 70 AD. Both took place in Sicily where increasing numbers of slaves were brought from abroad to work on agricultural estates. The first started in Enna in 135 BC when Eunus, a Syrian fire-breathing entertainer who claimed to have prophetic powers, rebelled against an opulent landowner called Damophilus. His 400 men joined forces with 5,000 slaves led by Cleon, a horse-breeding slave. The rebellion engulfed half the island and became organised enough to resist several local governors until 132 BC, when the Roman army under the Consul Piso defeated it. In 104 BC a group of thirty slaves killed their wealthy landowning masters at the prosperous city of Halicyae near the modern town of Marsala. Their numbers spread spontaneously until they had a force of about 20,000 operating across a wide geographical area. Their leaders, Salvius and Athenion, became ‘slave kings’ and Salvius assumed the name ‘Tryphon’ after one of the rulers of the Seleucid Empire that succeeded Alexander the Great. The unplanned proliferation of their numbers sowed the seeds of the rebels’ downfall. They found it too demanding and ultimately impossible to control such a large army. They were defeated when Rome committed adequate resources to defeat them in a full-scale battle under Consul Aquillus in 100 BC. Slaves were imported from many different countries and lacked common customs and attitudes. Their main purpose in rebellion was to take revenge against their owners and taste freedom. Beyond that they had little to sustain them.

      By the following year, 72 bc, the slaves were able to travel over large parts of southern Italy, carrying out raids and attracting recruits. New commanders were put into the field against them, but none was able to defeat the rebels. This persuaded the Roman authorities to take a very serious step. The two consuls for that year – Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus – were despatched to quash the rebel forces once and for all. The consuls were the highest military and civilian authorities in the Roman Republic, elected on an annual basis by the Senate. The Romans obviously felt that Spartacus and his army represented a serious threat to the security of the state. This time the Roman army scored a quick victory. One of Spartacus’s principal lieutenants, a Gaul called Crixus (the name means ‘curly-headed’ in Latin) with 3,000 slaves under his command, became separated from the main army. He was pursued, defeated and killed by the consul Gellius on a rocky promontory near Foggia on the Adriatic coast in Apulia.

       Spartacus’s attempt to be liberated expressed a hope understood by all people who wanted to be free.

      Spartacus began to move north. Gellius came after him from the south while Lentulus tried to bar his way from the northern end. Spartacus defeated them both and then won another victory, this time over the commander of the Roman forces in Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus. This battle took place at Mutinae, near what is today Modena, nearly 400 miles north of the gladiator school from which Spartacus had originally escaped. The commanders of the Roman forces were recalled in disgrace, but Spartacus, instead of taking his army out of Rome and across the Alps, now turned south and began to make his way back to the area from which he had originally come. Another army, bigger than any of the others, was sent after him. Its commander was Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men in the whole history of Rome and a politician and general of overwhelming influence and ambition. His army was paid for out of his personal fortune and when its first attack against Spartacus failed, Crassus decided to instil discipline by using ‘decimation’. The army was divided into groups of ten and drew lots for one of them to be killed. The chosen victim was then clubbed or stoned by the nine others. In 71 BC, in far southwest Italy, Crassus succeeded in driving the rebel slaves into a position where he could finally defeat them. Spartacus was killed. Six thousand recaptured slaves were crucified along the Via Appia into Rome – a warning to others about what would happen to those who defied the authority of the Republic. Crassus was awarded with an ovation.

      Spartacus almost certainly knew that he could not destroy the institution of slavery. His rebellion was not an attempt to change the system. He just wanted to be free, probably to get home to the country from which he had originally come and lead a life where he did not belong to someone else. That is why his rebellion has become an enduring symbol of freedom. Spartacus could never have won, but in his attempt to be liberated, however briefly, from the bonds of slavery he expressed a hope understood by all people who want to be free.

      Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is probably the most famous novel about slavery ever written. It had an enormous impact when it was first published in America in 1852 because it explained the lives of slaves in human terms. Its style may now seem sentimental, but its message is still strong and clear. Reading it more than a hundred and fifty years after it was written awakens a spirit of anger and astonishment at how civilised men and women could rub along with a system of such iniquity. In one scene a trader, ferrying his slave cargo down river to the South, sells a baby to another man without the mother’s knowledge. When she finds out she is distraught. ‘The trader,’ writes Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘had overcome every humane weakness and prejudice … The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practised; but he was used to it … ‘ The passage ends with the words: ‘You can get used to such things, too, my friend.’ Written 2,000 years after the Spartacus rebellion it is a sobering reminder of how slavery has endured throughout the history of mankind.

       CHAPTER 2

       The Burning of Jan Hus 1415

      Jan Hus was a priest and teacher from Bohemia, which today forms the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 1415 the Catholic Church condemned him to be burned at the stake for his heretical views. He was one of the first Europeans to die in the struggle for liberty of thought.

      When I was at school I was encouraged to view the world more widely through the debates and lectures organised by the Masaryk Society. It had been founded by a headmaster shortly after the Second World War in an effort to bring his traditional public school into the twentieth century. He named it after one of the most remarkable men in modern European history – Thomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was born in 1850, in a small town called Hodonin about 170 miles south-east of Prague. He began his working life as a teacher and philosopher, became the leader of his country in exile during the First World War and succeeded to its presidency when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918. ‘We can judge nations, including our own, quite impartially,’ he once said. ‘We need not worship the nation to which we belong.’ This careful, rational approach to nationhood was founded on his deep love for his country and its history. He understood where his people had come from and how they had been shaped by events. They might have suffered as possessions of an empire but their desire to be free remained. It had been with them for 500 years, ever since Jan Hus had gone to his death rather than renounce his beliefs.

      By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the administration of the Catholic Church in Europe had begun to enter the long, slow period of decline that would lead to the Reformation a hundred years later. To those who governed the Church the signs of decay were barely visible. The idea of any secession from its teachings was unthinkable. Christianity led from Rome had enjoyed triumphant progress ever since the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, had, in 313 ad, ordered that persecution was to cease and Christianity tolerated. Having captured the Roman Empire, Christianity spread across Europe, its influence thwarted only in the Middle East where, after the death of Mohammed in 632, Islam became the preferred religion. At the end of the eleventh century, the papacy began a series of crusades against Islam in an attempt to take back control of places it believed were central to its religious authority. Ultimately they failed. By the time Jan Hus began to explain his interpretation of the Scriptures, Christian influence was largely contained within Western Europe, blocked from further expansion by the presence СКАЧАТЬ