Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams
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Название: Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History
Автор: Hugh Williams
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007411115
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Inevitably it sometimes broke down. The dynasties that ruled this great land did not succeed one another effortlessly, and the country succumbed to rebellion and disruption on many occasions. But it always grew, a growth that seemed to take it more into itself as it became stronger and bigger. Bureaucracy tends to dislike change – its very purpose is to preserve continuity – and this dependence on maintaining the status quo became typical of the way China chose to govern itself. Traders and travellers still managed to penetrate its heart, but their journeys were long and dangerous and the traffic always went in one direction. As Earl Macartney found to his cost a thousand years after the boom years of Chang’an, the Chinese did not feel the need to look much beyond their own immediate frontiers. No wonder he chose to describe the country as an ‘old, crazy first-rate Man of War’, overawing its neighbours merely by its ‘bulk and appearance’.
The name Chang’an means ‘long-lasting peace’. No doubt the Turks, Persians and Arabs who thronged its bazaars, ate in its restaurants and visited its brothels, thought that this pulsating hub of commerce would last forever. By the start of the ninth century, however, the great city was no more. The last Tang emperor was deposed by a warlord who moved his capital (physically – by dismantling many of the wooden buildings and floating them on barges down the river), to Luoyang 250 miles away. The dynasty that later came to power, the Sung, lost control of the Silk Route and turned to maritime expeditions for commercial gain.
It is extraordinary to think that when George Macartney visited China at the end of the eighteenth century, London, the stinking city and burgeoning hub of a great world empire, home to his king, George III, was still not as big, and perhaps not as well ordered, as the ancient city of Chang’an. China had shut its doors by then. Foreigners could no longer enjoy places like the great cosmopolitan crossroads where the Tang poet Lu Zhaolin had once described the progress of an imperial procession: ‘Chang’an’s broad avenues link up with narrow lanes, where one sees black oxen and white horses, coaches made of seven fragrant woods the dragon biting the jewelled canopy catches the morning sun, the phoenix disgorging dangling fringes is draped with evening clouds.’
As Chang’an died, so China’s wealth became all its own. In the centuries that followed, the empires of the west – Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and British – would grow rich from unashamed mercantilism. But China stayed behind its chosen boundaries, secure in its own customs and traditions, a parallel place of riches protected from the prying activities of the world beyond.
The Travels of Marco Polo 1271–95
At the age of seventeen, Marco Polo left Venice with his father and uncle and travelled along the Silk Route to China. He did not return for seventeen years. His account of his experiences became one of the most influential books published in Europe during the Middle Ages.
The poet James Elroy Flecker had a very English vision of the Orient. He did not like the East very much, even though he served as a diplomat in both Constantinople and Beirut. He preferred his own country and the manners and habits of the Edwardian age in which he lived. But when he died, at the age of thirty from tuberculosis, he left behind some of the most beautiful verses ever written about the world beyond the Eastern Mediterranean and the ancient silk routes that took traders on their long and dangerous journeys:
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where never more the rose of sunset pales And winds and shadows fall towards the West … … And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
Flecker’s poem, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’, written just before the First World War, created an image of the exotic that Europeans had enjoyed for centuries: hot sand, warm breezes, and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans loaded with cloths, spices and precious stones picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes. The city of Samarkand, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, stood in a fertile river valley where travellers stopped before the last difficult climb across the mountain ranges into China. ‘It is,’ said a tenth-century Iranian writer, ‘the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.’ This was the world that Marco Polo wrote about at the end of the thirteenth century. No wonder his account of his travels was one of the bestselling books of the Middle Ages.
An image of the exotic: hot sands, warm breezes and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes.
The use of the term ‘Silk Road’ came into existence in the nineteenth century just before Flecker was writing. It was used to describe the many different overland trading routes that linked the Mediterranean with China from the days of the ancient classical world until the medieval period. Some ran through central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir and northern India; others went through Iran and the Caucasus, sometimes passing north of the Caspian and Black Seas. A third journey started in India after the traders had reached it by sea. Silk was not the only merchandise that travelled along these trading channels, but because it was light, beautiful and easy to carry, it was always one of the most highly prized imports from the east into Europe. The Romans are believed to have first seen the splendour of silk in the banners of the Parthians who defeated them at the battle of Carrhae in Turkey in 53 BC. Pliny the Elder, who composed his observations on natural history more than a hundred years later, believed that it came from the leaves of trees that had been soaked in water.
The existence of these long commercial highways had a profound effect on the people who passed through them: ideas, technology, fashion and disease also travelled along their path. Empires grew on their back as warlords decided to exploit their commercial potential. The Khazar Empire, which became a great power in the ninth and tenth centuries, developed from the farming communities on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in what is the modern state of Dagesthan. Today it is still a place of enormous ethnic diversity whose people speak Caucasian, Turkish or Iranian languages. Religions, too, found the converts they wanted. Christianity, Islam and Judaism bred easily in this world of constant exchange, although following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD it was Islam that predominated. Inevitably there were times when trade fell away as wars and power struggles made the overland routes too dangerous. But there were also long periods of comparative peace and prosperity, the last of which coincided with the growth of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. His army sacked and looted Samarkand in 1220 and he then went on to establish control over a huge area of China and Central Asia. It was just after this time that Marco Polo made his famous journey.
Marco Polo went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before.
Marco Polo was not the first European to penetrate the heart of Asia but he went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before. Two Franciscan priests, Giovanni di Piano Carpini and Guillaume de Rubrouck, had at separate times in the middle of the thirteenth century travelled to the capital of the Mongol Khan in Karakorum as emissaries from the Pope. Guillaume de Rubrouck described his journey in great detail, recalling at one point how he decided to walk barefoot as was the custom in his order, and how his feet froze as a result. ‘The cold in these regions is most intense,’ he said. In winter the frost never thawed, ‘but with СКАЧАТЬ