Res Novae Romanae: A Revolution of the Third Century TL
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Thanks, Archangel!
Cont.:
To the East and North-East of Bactria, the advent and, ultimately, settlement of the Haythela among the tribes of the Paropamisadae, Muztagh and Simeru mountains changed the ethnical, political and cultural make-up of the region permanently. The ethnic groups we still encounter in this region and the polities which endured throughout the early Hydrodynamic Age in those quarters all stem from this time period – from the mixture between Haythela and indigenous groups in some places, from the hostile reaction of other indigenous groups and their consolidation against the intruders in other places, and from successful replacements of the previous inhabitants by Haythela groups in yet other places.
Separated from each other by permanently snow-capped mountains and very rugged terrain, yet also connected through ancient, geographically determined trade routes, which soon recovered from the convulsions of the Haythela invasion, different states formed in each of the major valleys. Yet, they shared a considerable set of common features.
All of the new mountain valley states were, on the one hand, tribal kingdoms:
On the other hand, all these mountain kingdoms underwent the same religious and cultural transformation – some earlier, others later. Its roots lay in the close symbiosis of the armed guild caravans, who traversed the territory, and the Buddhist monasteries which were their accomodations, refuges and outposts of the civilized culture of their homelands when on their long, arduous and dangerous journeys. Here, during the years of confusion, a new Buddhist philosophy which later traced its origins back to a mythical figure named Bodhzarm {6], fell on extremely fertile ground: Zān [7]. Zān monks were less strictly confined to their monastery; they were allowed to pursue a wide variety of occupations; and although they, too, like all Buddhist sects, held the study of an ample canon of texts in high esteem, they put even greater emphasis on a wide variety of physical training methods, which were both meditations and martial arts. Especially the latter aspect made this path attractive for young men from less fortunate backgrounds – both from the Dardic lands in the South and from among the local population. In the Dardic republics, employment in the military service had quickly become dependent either on one´s belonging to the right varna (in the countryside), or on being able to afford the expensive training required by the guilds for their own exclusive armed forces. In the mountain kingdoms, on the other hand, the small military forces were exclusively recruited in accordance with clan membership and noble social status. The Zān monasteries, on the other hand, soon featured very defiant circles of men. As the cost of all other military services became increasingly difficult to afford, especially merchants which were not so well integrated into the Dardic guild network relied more and more on these monks as companions on their voyages from one monastery to another. The monasteries, in turn, thrived on the “donations” received in exchange for these services, and were very willing to admit adequate new novices regardless of their social background.
Ironically, although this entire trend was primarily caused by the chaos brought about by the advent of the Haythela or White Huns in the region in the 13th century, from the early 14th century onwards, more and more individuals from a discernibly White Hunnic background joined the ranks of these Zān sanghas. Sarvastivada, the Buddhist school which had previously dominated this region, became increasingly restricted to the wealthier and more sophisticated urban societies of Dardic towns like Sagala and Suryanagar, or of Khotana and Keriya, where the rustic customs of the Zān sanghas were frowned upon.
This relative disregard for an allegedly less civilized cult of strange mountain-dwellers dramatically changed, of course, when the Tuyuhun-based Emperors of Northern China, who styled themselves as the Yan Dynasty, gave their official support to the Zān school of Buddhism in the 14th century.
From this emancipation of the mountain monasteries from Dardic hegemony on, both the precarious balance (which often got disturbed, leading to political conflicts and crises in the mountain kingdoms) between the two pillars of power - the monasteries and the kings` governments - within the mountain kingdoms was established, and their foreign policy of swinging between alliances with the Dardic Republics, Bactria, the Chigils and the Yan Empire, with which they managed to preserve their independence from either bloc, became customary.
[1] Alay valley
[2] Badakhshan
[3] Tashkurgan
[4] Murghab / Bartang and later Panj river valleys
[5] Burashaski
[6] Bodhidharma
[7] roughly Chan / Dyana / Zen Buddhism
To be continued.
Cont.:
To the East and North-East of Bactria, the advent and, ultimately, settlement of the Haythela among the tribes of the Paropamisadae, Muztagh and Simeru mountains changed the ethnical, political and cultural make-up of the region permanently. The ethnic groups we still encounter in this region and the polities which endured throughout the early Hydrodynamic Age in those quarters all stem from this time period – from the mixture between Haythela and indigenous groups in some places, from the hostile reaction of other indigenous groups and their consolidation against the intruders in other places, and from successful replacements of the previous inhabitants by Haythela groups in yet other places.
Separated from each other by permanently snow-capped mountains and very rugged terrain, yet also connected through ancient, geographically determined trade routes, which soon recovered from the convulsions of the Haythela invasion, different states formed in each of the major valleys. Yet, they shared a considerable set of common features.
All of the new mountain valley states were, on the one hand, tribal kingdoms:
- the Kumud or Haumod Kingdom of Vaksh [1] in the North
- the Shugni Kingdom of Badakh [2] in the West
- the Haylichu, who took over the Kingdom which was known to the Greco-Bactrians as Byltai, to the Dards as Puli and to the Chinese as Wulei, which watched over the greatest stone fortress of Hwanda [3] at a crossroads in the centre of the region,
- the Amurga Kingdom in the name-sake valley [4] between Badakh and Hwanda
- and the purely indigenous Kingdom of the Kaspir [5], who had fled from the Haythela to the extreme East, where Zhang Zhung was their new neighbor across the mountain peaks.
On the other hand, all these mountain kingdoms underwent the same religious and cultural transformation – some earlier, others later. Its roots lay in the close symbiosis of the armed guild caravans, who traversed the territory, and the Buddhist monasteries which were their accomodations, refuges and outposts of the civilized culture of their homelands when on their long, arduous and dangerous journeys. Here, during the years of confusion, a new Buddhist philosophy which later traced its origins back to a mythical figure named Bodhzarm {6], fell on extremely fertile ground: Zān [7]. Zān monks were less strictly confined to their monastery; they were allowed to pursue a wide variety of occupations; and although they, too, like all Buddhist sects, held the study of an ample canon of texts in high esteem, they put even greater emphasis on a wide variety of physical training methods, which were both meditations and martial arts. Especially the latter aspect made this path attractive for young men from less fortunate backgrounds – both from the Dardic lands in the South and from among the local population. In the Dardic republics, employment in the military service had quickly become dependent either on one´s belonging to the right varna (in the countryside), or on being able to afford the expensive training required by the guilds for their own exclusive armed forces. In the mountain kingdoms, on the other hand, the small military forces were exclusively recruited in accordance with clan membership and noble social status. The Zān monasteries, on the other hand, soon featured very defiant circles of men. As the cost of all other military services became increasingly difficult to afford, especially merchants which were not so well integrated into the Dardic guild network relied more and more on these monks as companions on their voyages from one monastery to another. The monasteries, in turn, thrived on the “donations” received in exchange for these services, and were very willing to admit adequate new novices regardless of their social background.
Ironically, although this entire trend was primarily caused by the chaos brought about by the advent of the Haythela or White Huns in the region in the 13th century, from the early 14th century onwards, more and more individuals from a discernibly White Hunnic background joined the ranks of these Zān sanghas. Sarvastivada, the Buddhist school which had previously dominated this region, became increasingly restricted to the wealthier and more sophisticated urban societies of Dardic towns like Sagala and Suryanagar, or of Khotana and Keriya, where the rustic customs of the Zān sanghas were frowned upon.
This relative disregard for an allegedly less civilized cult of strange mountain-dwellers dramatically changed, of course, when the Tuyuhun-based Emperors of Northern China, who styled themselves as the Yan Dynasty, gave their official support to the Zān school of Buddhism in the 14th century.
From this emancipation of the mountain monasteries from Dardic hegemony on, both the precarious balance (which often got disturbed, leading to political conflicts and crises in the mountain kingdoms) between the two pillars of power - the monasteries and the kings` governments - within the mountain kingdoms was established, and their foreign policy of swinging between alliances with the Dardic Republics, Bactria, the Chigils and the Yan Empire, with which they managed to preserve their independence from either bloc, became customary.
[1] Alay valley
[2] Badakhshan
[3] Tashkurgan
[4] Murghab / Bartang and later Panj river valleys
[5] Burashaski
[6] Bodhidharma
[7] roughly Chan / Dyana / Zen Buddhism
To be continued.
Last edited:
Last Installment, part nine
Cont.:
The Dawn of the Hydrodynamic Age
From the earliest stages of civilization onwards, water has no longer only been used for drinking, washing, and watering plants – its kinetic energy was harnessed, too, for example when the flow of the Nile drove wheels which lifted buckets of water to a higher position from where it could be used for the irrigation of the fields of ancient Egypt.
But while the harnessing of water power was not invented in the Hydrodynamic Age, it was intensified and perfected to such an extent that the consequences revolutionized economies and societies worldwide.
While Hellenic engineers had come up with a great number of technological innovations – from the noria over the water-powered water-lifting screw to water-powered presses and saw mills –, their widespread implementation only set off in the context of a slave-free economy in the Confederacy in the 11th and 12th centuries, from where it initially spread rather slowly to other parts of Europe, Eran and India. The total power of all watermills installed can be guessed to have multiplied by the factor 50 or even 100 between the years 1000 and 1250 (to which a similarly fast growth in the smaller segment of windmills can be added), which is why the period is often called “the proto-hydrodynamic age”.
Most historians agree that a number of additional innovations in the four decades between 1230 and 1270 contributed to the tipping from mere quantitative growth to qualitative changes. The majority of these inventions and improvements concerned machinery for carding and for weaving textiles which proved adaptable to water-powering.
Water-powered spinning wheels, invented in Anatolia more than a century earlier, had spread across the Mediterranean. Like the other water-powered devices mentioned above, they had made (in this case, mostly women`s) lives easier, freed up time and made certain products from certain producers cheaper. But they had not created massive surplus output which would, once it found an outlet market, sweep away all competitors.
This changed once all the constituent processes of cloth production could be mechanized. The first complete textile mills of the 1270s appeared – not surprisingly – in Anatolia. The considerable investment was undertaken by Phokos of Ephesos, one of the richest oligarchs of his time who commanded over an impressive commercial fleet, which could now deliver his huge quantities of cloth across the entire Mediterranean world without exercising too much of a downward pressure on cloth prices in any single market.
But Phokos did not remain alone for long. Other oligarchs across Anatolia, Achaia and Italy followed suit over the next decade, and now cloth prices did drop, while the prices of wool went through the roof. The dynamics were so massive that even a lot of synergeia, which had pursued rather conservative investment policies in the past, were forced to invest their wool gains into building up textile mills in order to stay in the cloth market at all.
In the towns, tailors` guilds began financing ship voyages for the sale of their unbeatably cheap clothes and other products in foreign places. Their members, once among the poorer strata of urban craftsmen, experienced a surge in earnings for a few years, before more new apprentices and sinking clothes prices even far abroad put an end to the tailors` boom.
The Early Hydrodynamic Age was a time of turbulent change, of ups and downs, which no longer only concerned a few merchants, but large swaths of the population, too. The rising wool prices, for example, inspired massive specialisations in Gallo-Roman Britain and among its Hibernian, Frisian and Iutian neighbors, where investment in the complex technology was unthinkable, but the land was well suited to a few more sheep. North-Western Europe replaced Central Anatolia as the continent`s main sheep pasture. But while in Lycaonia and Cilicia shepherds and textile mill workers owned and ran their businesses together under the synergeion system, which facilitated comparatively smooth shifts of focus from one occupation to another without major social frictions, Western Europe, where the specialization took place within privately owned and hierarchically framed latifundia, was hit hard when new innovations in the early 14th century brought machinery for the carding of cotton fibres, which was easier and thus cheaper than the respective process for wool. When cotton replaced wool in hundreds of textile mills across the Mediterranean within a few years, the North-West was thrown back upon subsistence economy. India and Wagadu, as well as the Libyans who carried the cotton from the latter to the Mediterranean coast, profited greatly from this shift, on the other hand.
After two decades of hesitation, the military administration of the Roman Empire, which had survived a few severe political crises, finally saw the writing on the wall. When it did, though,
it did not leave things half-done. Designs were studied, military workforce was given new tasks, and textile mills were planned and built in adequate places (along rivers in mountainous terrains, near pastures) in record time.
The textile industry was the major pioneer of hydrodynamic production, but by far not the only one. Building its machinery required a lot of high-quality wrought iron. In the 1300s, the first trompes were built by Dalmatian engineers near waterfalls, where the falling water compressed air in a cavern, from where it was released to fuel larger bloomeries which produced more sponge iron. Nearby, water-powered hammers cleaned and improved the sponge iron into wrought iron on the same premise.
With more and more demand for waterpower, engineers began developing more and more efficient power-generating devices like the overshot wheel in the early 14th and the backshot wheel in the later 14th century.
Not all the important innovations of the Early Hydrodynamic Age concerned water-powered machinery, though, and not all of them were made by citizens of the Confederacy and the Roman Empire. Heavier ploughs and improved crop rotations had already been used in Gaul and Western parts of Germania in the 12th century. Their Eastward spread was responsible for massive improvements in agricultural output.
While such agricultural innovations contributed to population growth, the horrible pandemies around 1300 and, once again, in the 1360s and in the 1390s, reduced population levels. The massive increases in trade between East and West and an increased urbanization helped spread diseases which broke out in one corner of Eurasia across much of the landmass. The regions best connected to the new cargo flows were hit hardest. Egypt, for example, lost more than half of its population due to the plagues of the 14th century; the Aegean islands, Greece, Anatolia, Italy, Africa, Hispania, and Himyar also experienced losses of roughly a third of their population. Central Asia, India and China suffered, too, while the more isolated Germanic, Slavic, Uralic and Turkic tribes were mostly spared.
More world-wide trade not only brought diseases and profits for merchants, though. They also transported ideas from one part of the world to another, leading to an increased cross-fertilisation between West and East in many fields, from mathematics and philosophy over medicine and chemistry to technology. Although contact increased, it was still limited by many obstacles in the Early Hydrodynamic Age, i.e. the time period between 1250 and 1500 AUC, which is why quite a few crucial innovations made in the Mediterranean or in China appeared in the other corner of the continent only after a century or more. This was the case with the European invention of the trompe, but also with the contemporary Chinese innovations of hydraulicking (which was used, for example, to obtain kaolin for porcelain production) and of woodblock press printing.
Dynamics in the West: Self-Made Men
In spite of the rise of Mazdakist Eran, secessions from the Confederacy, the growth of the Gallo-Roman sphere of influence etc., most of which at least partly preceded it, the Hydrodynamic Revolution did not immediately overturn political structures. Its socioeconomic dynamics caused long-term changes in the political landscape, though, which would show clearly in the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially in the Confederacy and its successor states, it gave rise to the new cultural prototype of the self-made man. Individual economic ascent to the very top had occurred in various previous Greco-Roman times, too. Until the end of the principate, though, it had mostly been through political machinations, and it had ultimately meant the acquisition of property or similar claims to valuable land. The homines novi who had managed to become rich did whatever they could to assimilate, emulating the culture, customs and concepts of older landed families, heaping upon themselves the same sort of magisterial and senatorial honors even though the latter had largely lost any practical political relevance. When land ownership was radically redistributed in the Roman Revolution at the time of the Confederacy`s establishment, a period of comparative social equality ensued in the 11th century, followed by the rise of new oligarchs In the 12th century, who based their wealth on commerce rather than land ownership. Although a new economic elite had arisen, it continued to fight an uphill battle against the cultural models of its time, which stressed equality and attacked usury. The trading oligarchs of the proto-hydrodynamic age had attempted to become factional leaders in the isonomic institutions of the Confederacy; they had formed collegia which represented their interests; yet still they faced mostly skepticism beyond their immediate clientelage networks, and their role in society was generally not viewed in a very favourable perspective.
With Phokos of Ephesos, Eurymachos of Phazemon and others like them, this began to change. The new class of industrial oligarchs enjoyed a different reputation, which may be attributed to general sociocultural changes of the time, or to the contemporary view that they were not just grabbing something or profiting from their connections, but really changed the world everybody lived in, pushing its boundaries farther, providing cheaper and better products by enabling the greatest ideas of creative geniuses to materialize. (The association with engineers and scientists was mutually beneficial: they bestowed some of their untarnished reputation on the enterprising oligarchs, while enjoying great economic benefits, too, the likes of which had not been available in publicly or privately funded academiae or museia, let alone in the military hierarchy of the Roman Empire, where scientists and engineers enjoyed a high status, but one which simultaneously required them to live the spartanic lives of soldiers.)
The image of self-made men who went ahead and changed the world – when in truth many came from families of old money and what they really did was invest and collect returns – begin to stick towards the end of the 13th century, and it changed the political equilibrium of the Confederacy profoundly. Industrial oligarchs openly engaged in the new professional political institutions of the more centralized Confederacy and were more successful in this endeavor. Although their power was still checked by the collegialisti and socialisti factions, they managed to influence Confederal policies in their interests – which ranged from sanctioning strategic land conversions with or without the consent of local comitia to the enforcement of access to foreign markets –, especially once both latter factions began to show tendencies of inner oligarchisation, too: on the Councils and on the top tiers of federal administration, the few very wealthy craftsmen and representatives of highly successful synergeia were dramatically overrepresented.
These trends towards oligarchisation changed the Confederacy. By strengthening the detachment of Alexandria`s inner circle of political leadership from the rest of the territory, it contributed to the two great political crises of the 14th and 15th centuries, in which the Confederacy fell apart each time, each time followed by years of internecine warfare between the successor states, ultimately ending in reunification. They also committed the Eastern Mediterranean and its states to policies which supported the economic developments – while in neighbouring Eran, where the only oligarchisation tendencies which could be observed were of a more clerical, theocratic nature, fewer efforts were made to support the technological developments, causing Eran to lag decades behind its neighbours by the end of the 14th century.
But they did not only change the Confederacy. In the civic plagae of the Roman Empire, the 11th and 12th centuries had been socially extremely conservative times, where, under the shield of the mighty military state but not directly a part of its machinery, nothing much changed – an era in which architecture and poetry and a few philosophical disciplines blossomed, but which was otherwise marked by stagnation. As the Hydrodynamic Revolution gathered momentum in Dalmatia, it did not change much about the enormous chasm between the rich and the poor, but it imbued parts of the Dalmatian, and later also the Northern Italian, aristocracy – those who were part of the new economic success story – with fresh self-confidence. With this self-confidence came political ambition – an ambition which would no longer accept to subordinate itself to the rigid, deindividualising discipline of the army. The “rebirth” of republican ideals, growing criticism of an alleged mismanagement of the military government and even attempts to establish more friendly relations with the (politically no longer radical) Confederacy among parts of the upper classes in the Empire`s South mostly stemmed from these roots and were, for quite a long time, limited to this social group. Herein lay more seeds of the Empire`s ultimate downfall. It would take them a long time to grow into any real political danger, though, for the new industrial elites shied away, for understandable reasons, from forming an alliance with the dissatisfied underclass (who often worked for them), preferring to swallow their discontent rather than risking political landslides which might threaten their wealth and status.
In the Gallo-Roman Empire, on the other hand, capital-intensive investment in technology only strengthened the position of the already extremely independent and powerful domini clarissimi, or at least many of them. Nobody else but them was able to build mills, and they were able to dictate the conditions under which they would operate and be operated almost arbitrarily. The quest for waterpower favoured some regions over others, though, and it would become a driving motive behind many aristocrats` engagements in Rygia, Sygnia and Moria.
Dynamics in the East: The Rise of Industrialist States
The advent of the Hydrodynamic Revolution in the second half of the 13th century caught the two great centres of power in Eurasia`s East – India and China – in situations which could not be more different. In both regions, it gave rise to a certain type of state and to specific political agendas whose similarities and parallels cannot be overlooked, though.
When the Hydrodynamic Revolution unfolded in the Eastern Mediterranean, the guild-dominated city states were at their zenith on the Indian subcontinent. In fluctuating alliances, they had defeated the Gupta Empire, the Mazdakist Army of the Light, and the invasion of the White Huns. Enriched by a trade whose terms they were able to collectively bargain highly favourably up to the 1270s, powerful, self-confident and ambitious, most of the coast-and-valley city states had begun to expand, conquering, acquiring or otherwise contractually binding larger and larger swathes of their hinterlands to their authority. Of the traditional dynasties, countless smaller ones lost all their power, their rajas being reduced to marginal ceremonial roles under de facto supreme authority of the city ayats, which, in turn, kept vigilant eyes on each other, preventing the rise of any single city state to dangerous heights by forming short-lived counter-alliances whose armies “freed” the hinterland of any city which threatened to become too powerful, or by imposing embargos on it etc. The Kalabhra dynasty was wiped out in a joint military effort of eleven Dravidian city states in 1262. Only the Gupta and the Vakataka Empires were still standing – albeit shrunk in size and weakened by prolonged wars against each other.
When the first waves of cheap woolen clothes arrived in the port towns of the subcontinent, they threatened India`s own cotton-, silk- and jute-based textile crafts. Consequently, a large number of city states imposed high protectionist tariffs on Western textile imports. When textile exports had grown into an important political issue in the Confederacy two decades later, the Proarchoi for Foreign Matters (confederal magistrates in sole charge of a single ministry – the result of another constitutional reform which abolished the generalist Vicarii) began to pursue more interventionist policies in India, imposing retaliative tariffs against protectionist city states and supporting their free-trade neighbours e.g. with Confederal military assistants who operated Syrian Fire weapons, which were soon diversified for use on ships, on mobile battlefield devices and in the defense of fortified positions.
Soon, Muziris led a coalition of Southern Indian city states and Barygaza another coalition of Western Indian city states in their fights against the Confederacy`s subcontinental allies. Hostilities continued for almost a decade – a decade which not only financially exhausted the guild-backed governments, but which had also brought large mercenary armies, whose members no longer had any traditional ties to specific guilds, as a new factor into the subcontinent`s political game.
The military leaders of these mercenary armies were in a position which gave them plenty of political opportunities – nauseatingly many, in the view of many ayat members. Afraid that these mercenary leaders might develop political ambitions and aspirations to convert themselves into maharajas, urban magistrates attempted to rotate and replace them.
But the lure was too great. In 1315 AUC, Kanaikkai, a man of unknown social background but apparently from Cheralam, was a skilled and extremely successful general of the largest mercenary army in South India. He had just defeated an army which defended the pro-free-trade city of Kameripatna [1] and was besieging this leading city of the anti-Muziris alliance in the South, when the city council of Muziris dismissed him from their service. Kanaikkai refused to be fired. His army followed him loyally, when he switched his allegiance and struck a deal with the city council of Kameripatna. It changed his position from mercenary leader to serathipathi, marshal of the army – the army of a polity whose character and borders were open and undefined yet.
Kanaikkai shaped his state into something unprecedented in the region. He was well-informed about what went on in distant places, and he soon developed a vision of a pan-Dravidian state which would not have to hide from Western influences or be manipulated by them, but used them for its own purposes and built its own strength on them. Within six years, Kanaikkai conquered seven city states on the subcontinent`s Southern tip. He left the nikkamam-controlled city councils in place, but curbed their autonomy. The hinterlands which these cities had formerly controlled were in part restored to local self-rule by manram (village councils) in exchange for tax payments, in part allotted to his veterans. Especially on the latter estates, Kanaikkai supported policies of investment in efficient methods of cultivating cotton, which was just turning into a cash crop, and in watermills.
Kanaikkai continued Kameripatna`s policy of good relations with the Confederacy and extended it to all the cities he conquered. While wildly unpopular with certain guilds, allowing the import of cheap textiles and cheap alcohol from the Mediterranean was rather popular with the wider urban populace, and in exchange, Kanaikkai obtained preferential terms for the sale of Dravidian cotton on board of merchant ships sailing under his own flag, but escorted by Confederal vessels endowed with Syrian Fire in critical areas. When the Confederacy fell apart for the first time a few years later, Kanaikkai was able to hire Egyptian weapon engineers with the necessary know-how of Syrian Fire operation. When Kanaikkai built up his own navy with these weapons, Mediterranean diplomats and spies finally realized that their ally had become unsettlingly powerful and independent, but now it was too late – Kanaikkai`s navy was not only able to defeat any of its neighbours and rivals; it would also hold its ground against any (necessarily small) navy Egypt, Asia, Sicily or any other of the Confederacy`s successor states could send against him on such a long journey past the equally inimical Mazdakist Eran.
Kanaikkai promised much to many people – the restoration of village self-rule to rural clans and tribes, good payment and glory to his soldiers, better living conditions to the more marginalized townfolk, respect for the old traditions and ways (so looked down upon in the past by both Kalabhras and predominantly Jainist and Buddhist urban patricians) to Dravidian priests and the few remaining members of the pre-Kalabhran dynastic families; loyal alliance to Alexandria (and to Pergamon and Syracuse, too), and a self-confident Bharatan stance to other city states from farther up North which considered entering into agreements with Kanaikkai, whose powerful navy could help carry their own products onto new markets. What he ultimately did, though, was support against staunch resistances any and each initiative which would innovate the country`s economy and make its products more competitive and its citizens wealthier. Necessarily, this was accompanied by the build-up of a rational bureaucratic administration which used the same Tamil variety across the heterogeneous territories, oversaw the construction of roads, regulated milling rights, struck coins which carried the marshal`s political messages, and levied taxes, contributing to a quick monetarisation even of the rural hinterlands.
At Kanaikkai`s death in 1353, his Southern Indian state reached from Kankhipedon [2] to Tyndis. Although it fell apart soon after the death of its founder, the industrialist administration and development model endured under various successor states in the South and permeated to the North, spearheaded by cotton cultivation and mill-building. In some regions, city states adapted to this trend and transformed themselves into territorial states in which the guilds retained some degree of influence. Elsewhere, new Kanaikkai-inspired empires sprung up, while yet elsewhere, old ruling dynasties experienced a rebirth as modern and modernizing state leaders.
The 14th century transformed India`s political and socioeconomic landscape profoundly. While it was by no means an age of blossoming poetry, theological sophistication or high philosophical flights, and it even was a century of warfare and conflicts, it was also the period where the foundations were laid for the expansion of India`s Seven Great States into South-East Asia and East Africa and their ascent into global powers which could not measure their strength with China, but which were clearly at least on a par with Eran and the states of the Mediterranean.
[1] Kaveripattinam
[2] Kanchipuram
To be continued with a last glimpse on China.
Cont.:
The Dawn of the Hydrodynamic Age
From the earliest stages of civilization onwards, water has no longer only been used for drinking, washing, and watering plants – its kinetic energy was harnessed, too, for example when the flow of the Nile drove wheels which lifted buckets of water to a higher position from where it could be used for the irrigation of the fields of ancient Egypt.
But while the harnessing of water power was not invented in the Hydrodynamic Age, it was intensified and perfected to such an extent that the consequences revolutionized economies and societies worldwide.
While Hellenic engineers had come up with a great number of technological innovations – from the noria over the water-powered water-lifting screw to water-powered presses and saw mills –, their widespread implementation only set off in the context of a slave-free economy in the Confederacy in the 11th and 12th centuries, from where it initially spread rather slowly to other parts of Europe, Eran and India. The total power of all watermills installed can be guessed to have multiplied by the factor 50 or even 100 between the years 1000 and 1250 (to which a similarly fast growth in the smaller segment of windmills can be added), which is why the period is often called “the proto-hydrodynamic age”.
Most historians agree that a number of additional innovations in the four decades between 1230 and 1270 contributed to the tipping from mere quantitative growth to qualitative changes. The majority of these inventions and improvements concerned machinery for carding and for weaving textiles which proved adaptable to water-powering.
Water-powered spinning wheels, invented in Anatolia more than a century earlier, had spread across the Mediterranean. Like the other water-powered devices mentioned above, they had made (in this case, mostly women`s) lives easier, freed up time and made certain products from certain producers cheaper. But they had not created massive surplus output which would, once it found an outlet market, sweep away all competitors.
This changed once all the constituent processes of cloth production could be mechanized. The first complete textile mills of the 1270s appeared – not surprisingly – in Anatolia. The considerable investment was undertaken by Phokos of Ephesos, one of the richest oligarchs of his time who commanded over an impressive commercial fleet, which could now deliver his huge quantities of cloth across the entire Mediterranean world without exercising too much of a downward pressure on cloth prices in any single market.
But Phokos did not remain alone for long. Other oligarchs across Anatolia, Achaia and Italy followed suit over the next decade, and now cloth prices did drop, while the prices of wool went through the roof. The dynamics were so massive that even a lot of synergeia, which had pursued rather conservative investment policies in the past, were forced to invest their wool gains into building up textile mills in order to stay in the cloth market at all.
In the towns, tailors` guilds began financing ship voyages for the sale of their unbeatably cheap clothes and other products in foreign places. Their members, once among the poorer strata of urban craftsmen, experienced a surge in earnings for a few years, before more new apprentices and sinking clothes prices even far abroad put an end to the tailors` boom.
The Early Hydrodynamic Age was a time of turbulent change, of ups and downs, which no longer only concerned a few merchants, but large swaths of the population, too. The rising wool prices, for example, inspired massive specialisations in Gallo-Roman Britain and among its Hibernian, Frisian and Iutian neighbors, where investment in the complex technology was unthinkable, but the land was well suited to a few more sheep. North-Western Europe replaced Central Anatolia as the continent`s main sheep pasture. But while in Lycaonia and Cilicia shepherds and textile mill workers owned and ran their businesses together under the synergeion system, which facilitated comparatively smooth shifts of focus from one occupation to another without major social frictions, Western Europe, where the specialization took place within privately owned and hierarchically framed latifundia, was hit hard when new innovations in the early 14th century brought machinery for the carding of cotton fibres, which was easier and thus cheaper than the respective process for wool. When cotton replaced wool in hundreds of textile mills across the Mediterranean within a few years, the North-West was thrown back upon subsistence economy. India and Wagadu, as well as the Libyans who carried the cotton from the latter to the Mediterranean coast, profited greatly from this shift, on the other hand.
After two decades of hesitation, the military administration of the Roman Empire, which had survived a few severe political crises, finally saw the writing on the wall. When it did, though,
it did not leave things half-done. Designs were studied, military workforce was given new tasks, and textile mills were planned and built in adequate places (along rivers in mountainous terrains, near pastures) in record time.
The textile industry was the major pioneer of hydrodynamic production, but by far not the only one. Building its machinery required a lot of high-quality wrought iron. In the 1300s, the first trompes were built by Dalmatian engineers near waterfalls, where the falling water compressed air in a cavern, from where it was released to fuel larger bloomeries which produced more sponge iron. Nearby, water-powered hammers cleaned and improved the sponge iron into wrought iron on the same premise.
With more and more demand for waterpower, engineers began developing more and more efficient power-generating devices like the overshot wheel in the early 14th and the backshot wheel in the later 14th century.
Not all the important innovations of the Early Hydrodynamic Age concerned water-powered machinery, though, and not all of them were made by citizens of the Confederacy and the Roman Empire. Heavier ploughs and improved crop rotations had already been used in Gaul and Western parts of Germania in the 12th century. Their Eastward spread was responsible for massive improvements in agricultural output.
While such agricultural innovations contributed to population growth, the horrible pandemies around 1300 and, once again, in the 1360s and in the 1390s, reduced population levels. The massive increases in trade between East and West and an increased urbanization helped spread diseases which broke out in one corner of Eurasia across much of the landmass. The regions best connected to the new cargo flows were hit hardest. Egypt, for example, lost more than half of its population due to the plagues of the 14th century; the Aegean islands, Greece, Anatolia, Italy, Africa, Hispania, and Himyar also experienced losses of roughly a third of their population. Central Asia, India and China suffered, too, while the more isolated Germanic, Slavic, Uralic and Turkic tribes were mostly spared.
More world-wide trade not only brought diseases and profits for merchants, though. They also transported ideas from one part of the world to another, leading to an increased cross-fertilisation between West and East in many fields, from mathematics and philosophy over medicine and chemistry to technology. Although contact increased, it was still limited by many obstacles in the Early Hydrodynamic Age, i.e. the time period between 1250 and 1500 AUC, which is why quite a few crucial innovations made in the Mediterranean or in China appeared in the other corner of the continent only after a century or more. This was the case with the European invention of the trompe, but also with the contemporary Chinese innovations of hydraulicking (which was used, for example, to obtain kaolin for porcelain production) and of woodblock press printing.
Dynamics in the West: Self-Made Men
In spite of the rise of Mazdakist Eran, secessions from the Confederacy, the growth of the Gallo-Roman sphere of influence etc., most of which at least partly preceded it, the Hydrodynamic Revolution did not immediately overturn political structures. Its socioeconomic dynamics caused long-term changes in the political landscape, though, which would show clearly in the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially in the Confederacy and its successor states, it gave rise to the new cultural prototype of the self-made man. Individual economic ascent to the very top had occurred in various previous Greco-Roman times, too. Until the end of the principate, though, it had mostly been through political machinations, and it had ultimately meant the acquisition of property or similar claims to valuable land. The homines novi who had managed to become rich did whatever they could to assimilate, emulating the culture, customs and concepts of older landed families, heaping upon themselves the same sort of magisterial and senatorial honors even though the latter had largely lost any practical political relevance. When land ownership was radically redistributed in the Roman Revolution at the time of the Confederacy`s establishment, a period of comparative social equality ensued in the 11th century, followed by the rise of new oligarchs In the 12th century, who based their wealth on commerce rather than land ownership. Although a new economic elite had arisen, it continued to fight an uphill battle against the cultural models of its time, which stressed equality and attacked usury. The trading oligarchs of the proto-hydrodynamic age had attempted to become factional leaders in the isonomic institutions of the Confederacy; they had formed collegia which represented their interests; yet still they faced mostly skepticism beyond their immediate clientelage networks, and their role in society was generally not viewed in a very favourable perspective.
With Phokos of Ephesos, Eurymachos of Phazemon and others like them, this began to change. The new class of industrial oligarchs enjoyed a different reputation, which may be attributed to general sociocultural changes of the time, or to the contemporary view that they were not just grabbing something or profiting from their connections, but really changed the world everybody lived in, pushing its boundaries farther, providing cheaper and better products by enabling the greatest ideas of creative geniuses to materialize. (The association with engineers and scientists was mutually beneficial: they bestowed some of their untarnished reputation on the enterprising oligarchs, while enjoying great economic benefits, too, the likes of which had not been available in publicly or privately funded academiae or museia, let alone in the military hierarchy of the Roman Empire, where scientists and engineers enjoyed a high status, but one which simultaneously required them to live the spartanic lives of soldiers.)
The image of self-made men who went ahead and changed the world – when in truth many came from families of old money and what they really did was invest and collect returns – begin to stick towards the end of the 13th century, and it changed the political equilibrium of the Confederacy profoundly. Industrial oligarchs openly engaged in the new professional political institutions of the more centralized Confederacy and were more successful in this endeavor. Although their power was still checked by the collegialisti and socialisti factions, they managed to influence Confederal policies in their interests – which ranged from sanctioning strategic land conversions with or without the consent of local comitia to the enforcement of access to foreign markets –, especially once both latter factions began to show tendencies of inner oligarchisation, too: on the Councils and on the top tiers of federal administration, the few very wealthy craftsmen and representatives of highly successful synergeia were dramatically overrepresented.
These trends towards oligarchisation changed the Confederacy. By strengthening the detachment of Alexandria`s inner circle of political leadership from the rest of the territory, it contributed to the two great political crises of the 14th and 15th centuries, in which the Confederacy fell apart each time, each time followed by years of internecine warfare between the successor states, ultimately ending in reunification. They also committed the Eastern Mediterranean and its states to policies which supported the economic developments – while in neighbouring Eran, where the only oligarchisation tendencies which could be observed were of a more clerical, theocratic nature, fewer efforts were made to support the technological developments, causing Eran to lag decades behind its neighbours by the end of the 14th century.
But they did not only change the Confederacy. In the civic plagae of the Roman Empire, the 11th and 12th centuries had been socially extremely conservative times, where, under the shield of the mighty military state but not directly a part of its machinery, nothing much changed – an era in which architecture and poetry and a few philosophical disciplines blossomed, but which was otherwise marked by stagnation. As the Hydrodynamic Revolution gathered momentum in Dalmatia, it did not change much about the enormous chasm between the rich and the poor, but it imbued parts of the Dalmatian, and later also the Northern Italian, aristocracy – those who were part of the new economic success story – with fresh self-confidence. With this self-confidence came political ambition – an ambition which would no longer accept to subordinate itself to the rigid, deindividualising discipline of the army. The “rebirth” of republican ideals, growing criticism of an alleged mismanagement of the military government and even attempts to establish more friendly relations with the (politically no longer radical) Confederacy among parts of the upper classes in the Empire`s South mostly stemmed from these roots and were, for quite a long time, limited to this social group. Herein lay more seeds of the Empire`s ultimate downfall. It would take them a long time to grow into any real political danger, though, for the new industrial elites shied away, for understandable reasons, from forming an alliance with the dissatisfied underclass (who often worked for them), preferring to swallow their discontent rather than risking political landslides which might threaten their wealth and status.
In the Gallo-Roman Empire, on the other hand, capital-intensive investment in technology only strengthened the position of the already extremely independent and powerful domini clarissimi, or at least many of them. Nobody else but them was able to build mills, and they were able to dictate the conditions under which they would operate and be operated almost arbitrarily. The quest for waterpower favoured some regions over others, though, and it would become a driving motive behind many aristocrats` engagements in Rygia, Sygnia and Moria.
Dynamics in the East: The Rise of Industrialist States
The advent of the Hydrodynamic Revolution in the second half of the 13th century caught the two great centres of power in Eurasia`s East – India and China – in situations which could not be more different. In both regions, it gave rise to a certain type of state and to specific political agendas whose similarities and parallels cannot be overlooked, though.
When the Hydrodynamic Revolution unfolded in the Eastern Mediterranean, the guild-dominated city states were at their zenith on the Indian subcontinent. In fluctuating alliances, they had defeated the Gupta Empire, the Mazdakist Army of the Light, and the invasion of the White Huns. Enriched by a trade whose terms they were able to collectively bargain highly favourably up to the 1270s, powerful, self-confident and ambitious, most of the coast-and-valley city states had begun to expand, conquering, acquiring or otherwise contractually binding larger and larger swathes of their hinterlands to their authority. Of the traditional dynasties, countless smaller ones lost all their power, their rajas being reduced to marginal ceremonial roles under de facto supreme authority of the city ayats, which, in turn, kept vigilant eyes on each other, preventing the rise of any single city state to dangerous heights by forming short-lived counter-alliances whose armies “freed” the hinterland of any city which threatened to become too powerful, or by imposing embargos on it etc. The Kalabhra dynasty was wiped out in a joint military effort of eleven Dravidian city states in 1262. Only the Gupta and the Vakataka Empires were still standing – albeit shrunk in size and weakened by prolonged wars against each other.
When the first waves of cheap woolen clothes arrived in the port towns of the subcontinent, they threatened India`s own cotton-, silk- and jute-based textile crafts. Consequently, a large number of city states imposed high protectionist tariffs on Western textile imports. When textile exports had grown into an important political issue in the Confederacy two decades later, the Proarchoi for Foreign Matters (confederal magistrates in sole charge of a single ministry – the result of another constitutional reform which abolished the generalist Vicarii) began to pursue more interventionist policies in India, imposing retaliative tariffs against protectionist city states and supporting their free-trade neighbours e.g. with Confederal military assistants who operated Syrian Fire weapons, which were soon diversified for use on ships, on mobile battlefield devices and in the defense of fortified positions.
Soon, Muziris led a coalition of Southern Indian city states and Barygaza another coalition of Western Indian city states in their fights against the Confederacy`s subcontinental allies. Hostilities continued for almost a decade – a decade which not only financially exhausted the guild-backed governments, but which had also brought large mercenary armies, whose members no longer had any traditional ties to specific guilds, as a new factor into the subcontinent`s political game.
The military leaders of these mercenary armies were in a position which gave them plenty of political opportunities – nauseatingly many, in the view of many ayat members. Afraid that these mercenary leaders might develop political ambitions and aspirations to convert themselves into maharajas, urban magistrates attempted to rotate and replace them.
But the lure was too great. In 1315 AUC, Kanaikkai, a man of unknown social background but apparently from Cheralam, was a skilled and extremely successful general of the largest mercenary army in South India. He had just defeated an army which defended the pro-free-trade city of Kameripatna [1] and was besieging this leading city of the anti-Muziris alliance in the South, when the city council of Muziris dismissed him from their service. Kanaikkai refused to be fired. His army followed him loyally, when he switched his allegiance and struck a deal with the city council of Kameripatna. It changed his position from mercenary leader to serathipathi, marshal of the army – the army of a polity whose character and borders were open and undefined yet.
Kanaikkai shaped his state into something unprecedented in the region. He was well-informed about what went on in distant places, and he soon developed a vision of a pan-Dravidian state which would not have to hide from Western influences or be manipulated by them, but used them for its own purposes and built its own strength on them. Within six years, Kanaikkai conquered seven city states on the subcontinent`s Southern tip. He left the nikkamam-controlled city councils in place, but curbed their autonomy. The hinterlands which these cities had formerly controlled were in part restored to local self-rule by manram (village councils) in exchange for tax payments, in part allotted to his veterans. Especially on the latter estates, Kanaikkai supported policies of investment in efficient methods of cultivating cotton, which was just turning into a cash crop, and in watermills.
Kanaikkai continued Kameripatna`s policy of good relations with the Confederacy and extended it to all the cities he conquered. While wildly unpopular with certain guilds, allowing the import of cheap textiles and cheap alcohol from the Mediterranean was rather popular with the wider urban populace, and in exchange, Kanaikkai obtained preferential terms for the sale of Dravidian cotton on board of merchant ships sailing under his own flag, but escorted by Confederal vessels endowed with Syrian Fire in critical areas. When the Confederacy fell apart for the first time a few years later, Kanaikkai was able to hire Egyptian weapon engineers with the necessary know-how of Syrian Fire operation. When Kanaikkai built up his own navy with these weapons, Mediterranean diplomats and spies finally realized that their ally had become unsettlingly powerful and independent, but now it was too late – Kanaikkai`s navy was not only able to defeat any of its neighbours and rivals; it would also hold its ground against any (necessarily small) navy Egypt, Asia, Sicily or any other of the Confederacy`s successor states could send against him on such a long journey past the equally inimical Mazdakist Eran.
Kanaikkai promised much to many people – the restoration of village self-rule to rural clans and tribes, good payment and glory to his soldiers, better living conditions to the more marginalized townfolk, respect for the old traditions and ways (so looked down upon in the past by both Kalabhras and predominantly Jainist and Buddhist urban patricians) to Dravidian priests and the few remaining members of the pre-Kalabhran dynastic families; loyal alliance to Alexandria (and to Pergamon and Syracuse, too), and a self-confident Bharatan stance to other city states from farther up North which considered entering into agreements with Kanaikkai, whose powerful navy could help carry their own products onto new markets. What he ultimately did, though, was support against staunch resistances any and each initiative which would innovate the country`s economy and make its products more competitive and its citizens wealthier. Necessarily, this was accompanied by the build-up of a rational bureaucratic administration which used the same Tamil variety across the heterogeneous territories, oversaw the construction of roads, regulated milling rights, struck coins which carried the marshal`s political messages, and levied taxes, contributing to a quick monetarisation even of the rural hinterlands.
At Kanaikkai`s death in 1353, his Southern Indian state reached from Kankhipedon [2] to Tyndis. Although it fell apart soon after the death of its founder, the industrialist administration and development model endured under various successor states in the South and permeated to the North, spearheaded by cotton cultivation and mill-building. In some regions, city states adapted to this trend and transformed themselves into territorial states in which the guilds retained some degree of influence. Elsewhere, new Kanaikkai-inspired empires sprung up, while yet elsewhere, old ruling dynasties experienced a rebirth as modern and modernizing state leaders.
The 14th century transformed India`s political and socioeconomic landscape profoundly. While it was by no means an age of blossoming poetry, theological sophistication or high philosophical flights, and it even was a century of warfare and conflicts, it was also the period where the foundations were laid for the expansion of India`s Seven Great States into South-East Asia and East Africa and their ascent into global powers which could not measure their strength with China, but which were clearly at least on a par with Eran and the states of the Mediterranean.
[1] Kaveripattinam
[2] Kanchipuram
To be continued with a last glimpse on China.
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Last Installment, part ten
Cont.:
Compared to India, China was exposed to significantly less Western influence. Still, around the middle of the 13th century, i.e. before the onset of the Hydrodynamic Revolution, influences coming from a Westward direction were clearly felt in both Chinese Empires. The cities in the Eastern reaches of Northern Wei were swarming with Sogdian, Khotanese and Dardic merchants, while Liang`s Southern ports saw more and more goods from India. Both emperors – Xuanwu of Northern Wei and Wu of Liang – were devout followers of Buddhism, the religion which gained more and more ground in Chinese society, with new cave temples and monasteries springing up every year.
Hostile reactions by conservative forces were discernible, too. The old aristocratic circles who carried this sentiment were severely weakened both in the North, where Tuoba had taken their place and began copying elements of the culture of Huaxia, as the Chinese called their own civilization, and in the South, where wars and infights had greatly thinned out the aristocracy.
The floodgates for the next wave of social transformation would be opened by the constellation of conflicts which had arisen in Northern China throughout the first half of the 13th century. The Chigils and their Sogdian supports had long pressed Xuanwu`s father, Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei, to take action against the Rouran, who not only plundered Wei`s Northernmost regions, but also threatened the trade (or at least Chigil and Sogdian control over it!) on the Silk Road along the Northern rim of the Tarim basin, but Xiaowen had been reluctant.
In 1253, though, under the impression of aggravating Rouran raids, Xuanwu decided to accept the invitation of Xaqan Chülük of the Chigils to a joint offensive against the Rouran.
In Khotana and among its Tuyuhun overlords, the alliance between the Chigils and Northern Wei was viewed with great concern. Khotana had become incredibly wealthy from its middleman position between the Dardana Sanyukta Gana and the two Chinese Empires, and their new overlords, the Tuyuhun, had used the resources (both material and, even more importantly, human) they were able to draw from their position for building up a rather modern army and a certain degree of bureaucratic administration centered around the Kingdom`s growing capital at Fuqi, the first real city in the history of the Xianbei tribes which formed the ruling elite of Tuyuhun or A-Zha.
Its King, Murong Fulianchou, the first Tuyuhun ruler who massively patronized Buddhism both in its long-standing strongholds like the Tarim Basin oases and in the more traditional core of the kingdom, now feared to become pinched between the Chigil Xaqanate and Northern Wei. He mobilized his assorted Xianbei armies, Khotanese and Qarqanese auxiliaries and an impressive number of mercenaries from the mountains of the South and West, and entered an alliance with Yujiulü Nagai of the Rouran.
The Battle of the Dzungarian Gates in 1253 was a turning point in East Asian history. Among other things, it marked the beginning of the end of Northern Wei. When Chülük realized that their offensive would not be able to break through, the Chigil forces withdrew from the battlefield, leaving the army of Xuanwu`s general Gao Zhao alone and caught between Yujiulü Nagai`s forces pressing from the North and Murong Fulianchou`s army attacking from the South. After heavy losses and a hurried and humiliating Eastward flight of the remnants of the Northern Wei army through the Yellow River`s narrow valley, where they were harassed by more Tuyuhun forces, Northern Wei power was weakened and Emperor Xuanwu`s authority was thoroughly undermined. Among the Tuoba military aristocracy, large parts of which had always remained skeptical of Xiaowen`s and Xuanwu`s sinicization and bureaucratization policies anyway, various attempted assassinations were plotted, and Xuanwu escaped some of them only by sheer luck. In retaliation, he had entire families of the nobility put to the sword. In the North, the Rouran pillaged with ever more impunity, while in the West, Murong Fulianchou adapted new ideas he had received from his Western vassals and mercenaries into a careful and cunning plan.
The situation in Northern Wei did not escape Wu of Liang´s attention, either, of course. Up to the first half of the 13th century, the North had always been militarily more powerful than China`s South. Now, the balance had tipped. In 1258, Liang armies led by General Xiao Hong dealt Northern Wei forces a decisive blow just North of Luokuo. Soon after, Rouran hordes poured in from the North in what may have been a coordinated or maybe even a conicidental two-pronged attack. Threatened on two fronts, Northern Wei power over the Northern Chinese plains began to collapse. Liang forces swept through almost unmolestedly and laid siege to Luoyang, until, apparently after internal rebellion, chaos and bloodshed, Yuan Xi, the Prince of Xianyang, surrendered the Northern Wei capital to Liang.
With the fall of Luoyang, Liang had not conquered all of the former Northern Wei territory, though. In many places, especially in the North-East, Tuoba princes held out for several years, often declaring themselves kings. And their rule did not always end in Liang conquest, as China`s other neighbours were not idle, either. The old capital Pingcheng fell to the Rouran in 1263. Here, the Rouran khagan Yujiulü Chounu declared himself Emperor Yinzong of the new Liao dynasty. In the West, Murong Fulianchou had quickly seized the opportunity and secured the Four Circuits [3] for the Tuyuhun in 1258 already, and in 1259, he captured the entire string of trading cities and fortresses between Dunhuang and Zicheng and crowned his conquests with one of the former imperial Han capitals, Chang´an. Like Yujiulü Chounu, Murong Fulianchou assumed the title of huangdi or emperor, too, from this moment on calling himself Emperor Yishi of Yan.
The collusion of Liao / Rouran, Yan / Tuyuhun and Liang in the downfall of the Northern Wei did not serve as a model for future interaction, though. On the contrary, the three empires waged war against each other intermittently all throughout the rest of the 13th century.
The reasons why Yan emerged triumphant from this long struggle are manifold. Some clearly lie in the weaknesses which plagued their rivals: the Liao dynasty could not base itself on the support of all former members of the Rouran confederacy – a large group in the West broke off, forming the Gaoche Confederacy –, and in Goguryeo, it had a rather strong enemy to its East. The Liang, in their turn, suffered from agrarian rebellions caused by famines on the Northern Chinese plains, which were in turn caused by draughts resulting from the colder and drier climate of the late 13th century, as well as from continuing aristocratic infights and Wu`s weak successor, Jianwen.
Yan, on the contrary, was able to destroy the major threat to his power from the West. Forging an alliance with the Gaoche and diversifying his own mostly cavalry-based army with a large conscripted Chinese infantry, he defeated the Chigils in two major battles which caused the disintegration of the Xaqanate. Yan incorporated Kashyar into his empire, which now stretched very far along the Silk Road, while the Northern route of the Tarim Basin and the Tokharian kingdoms of Kucha, Karaxahr and Turfan came under Gaoche overlordship.
But other, perhaps even more important reasons lie in the policies pursued by Yishi in his long reign, and during the equally long reign of his successor Huizong of Yan. When Yishi built up his imperial bureaucracy, he did not simply copy the structures he found in the district and prefecture administrations of the North-Eastern parts of his realm. Espousing strong Buddhist convictions, he added quite a few canonical texts of this religion to the previously purely Confucian contents of the exams in which imperial magistrates were chosen in much of China ever since the days of the Great Han. When this provoked indignation and protest from Han traditionalists, Yishi reacted by going a couple of steps further, diversifying the curriculum to include much of the knowledge which was considered important in the different parts of his far-flung and heterogeneous empire, e.g. mathematics and astronomy in the Indian tradition. Increasingly, exams became difficult intellectual challenges instead of fig-leaves for legitimizing the installation of aristocratic offsprings as regional governors. The administrative abilities of this group proved superior to others, and so Yishi and later Huizong extended the exam requirement onto virtually every position in the middle and higher administrative apparatus, which began to grow to proportions not seen since Han times.
But the Yan emperors did not only rely on a rational bureaucracy. Their polity had long thrived on controlling commerce, so when hydrodynamic innovations in the Far West lead to increasing trade volumes, but less positive and even negative trade balances for the Yan empire`s productive Eastern provinces, the Yan emperors and their administration took measures which did not have to heed the demands of powerful guilds, as was the case in India. China-proper brought forth porcelain of increasingly good quality, the likes of which could not be found anywhere else in the world. The export of these items along the Silk Road had begun – but the early Yan emperors saw that there was plenty of room for expansion. In contrast to the approaches of Han times, Yan emperors did not begin by regulating production. Especially Yishi thought this was a merchant`s job, and while he considered merchants to be of great importance, he also thought of his imperial administration as having more solemn duties than that. Instead, Yishi thought that spreading the knowledge of the latest techniques as far as possible throughout his empire was key to improving and increasing porcelain production. As a result, he had his administration initiate craft schools in various cities. Innovative artisans who chose not to keep their knowledge secret anymore and instead teach others what they knew were rewarded by the imperial administration with trading privileges (exporting one`s products towards the West along the Silk Road usually required high safety fees; artisans who engaged in teaching were rewarded with lower rates or even full exemptions).
When agrarian rebellions broke out in Liang at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, Huizong waited for Liang to become weakened enough, then marched in and annexed province after province between the Yellow River and the Yangtse as far as the Taipingyang [4], reducing Liang to the very South and causing the dynasty´s collapse and replacement with the Chen. At his death, the second emperor of Yan left behind a vast and powerful empire. Its neighbours, from the Yarlung, Zhangzhung and Chen in the South to the Liao and Gaoche in the North and various smaller polities in the West were much weaker than Yan and, with the exception of Chen, all of them paid tribute to Yan.
When Huizong was succeeded by a series of less capable and sometimes short-lived emperors, the administrative and economic innovations endured. The bureaucracy proved capable of innovating on its own, as was the case with the invention of woodblock printing of imperial edicts for exact reproduction and distribution throughout the far-flung empire, or of essential texts for the imperial exams which were made available in public libraries where candidates prepared themselves for the big tests. It maintained a good collection of taxes, so that Yan`s granaries were always well-filled and even major draughts did not lead to such dramatic famines as might have caused agrarian revolts.
The climate of technological innovation filtering in from the West and multiplied by targeted subsidies and institutions like the artisan schools led to first careful steps towards a domestic waterpowered textile industry in Yan`s old mountainous heartland, where every brook and stream was dammed and used for milling in the 14th century. China`s most important contribution to the Hydrodynamic Age, which it entered a little belatedly, though, was hydraulic mining, which was increasingly used in the Eastern provinces to gain kaolin, an important raw ingredient for porcelain.
Targeted state support for the porcelain industry and for a modernization of the domestic textile industry as well as for mining and iron production continued and spread Southward even after the collapse of the Yan dynasty towards the end of the 14th century, with the framework provided by administrations which adopted and continued Yishi`s new approaches under the rule of various dynasties, and the actual work, the inventions and the commerce being carried out by a growing and growingly self-confident group of industrial tycoons and their wage workers. Philosophical influences filtering in from the West along the Porcelain Road, as the Silk Road soon came to be called, and down through all layers of society, not the least among them Buddhism, helped relativise Confucian skepticism towards commercial activity. Emperors capable of strategic thought seized on the opportunity of increasingly unstable social hierarchies to further enhance their centralized power and shape society through edicts and legal codes according to the visions they had of how Huaxia should develop. When emperors were weak or internecine wars weakened or removed centralized control, the forces of tradition would resurge temporarily – but by the end of the 14th century, it was clear that China had irrevocably embarked on its journey of modernization and would soon come to lead the world of the Middle and Late Hydrodynamic Age.
[3] Sichuan
[4] Pacific Ocean
In two weeks` time, I´ll finish this last installment with a) a few alt-althist thoughts, b) the promised map for around 1300 AUC / 550 CE and c) a few authorial reflections on my first timeline.
Cont.:
Compared to India, China was exposed to significantly less Western influence. Still, around the middle of the 13th century, i.e. before the onset of the Hydrodynamic Revolution, influences coming from a Westward direction were clearly felt in both Chinese Empires. The cities in the Eastern reaches of Northern Wei were swarming with Sogdian, Khotanese and Dardic merchants, while Liang`s Southern ports saw more and more goods from India. Both emperors – Xuanwu of Northern Wei and Wu of Liang – were devout followers of Buddhism, the religion which gained more and more ground in Chinese society, with new cave temples and monasteries springing up every year.
Hostile reactions by conservative forces were discernible, too. The old aristocratic circles who carried this sentiment were severely weakened both in the North, where Tuoba had taken their place and began copying elements of the culture of Huaxia, as the Chinese called their own civilization, and in the South, where wars and infights had greatly thinned out the aristocracy.
The floodgates for the next wave of social transformation would be opened by the constellation of conflicts which had arisen in Northern China throughout the first half of the 13th century. The Chigils and their Sogdian supports had long pressed Xuanwu`s father, Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei, to take action against the Rouran, who not only plundered Wei`s Northernmost regions, but also threatened the trade (or at least Chigil and Sogdian control over it!) on the Silk Road along the Northern rim of the Tarim basin, but Xiaowen had been reluctant.
In 1253, though, under the impression of aggravating Rouran raids, Xuanwu decided to accept the invitation of Xaqan Chülük of the Chigils to a joint offensive against the Rouran.
In Khotana and among its Tuyuhun overlords, the alliance between the Chigils and Northern Wei was viewed with great concern. Khotana had become incredibly wealthy from its middleman position between the Dardana Sanyukta Gana and the two Chinese Empires, and their new overlords, the Tuyuhun, had used the resources (both material and, even more importantly, human) they were able to draw from their position for building up a rather modern army and a certain degree of bureaucratic administration centered around the Kingdom`s growing capital at Fuqi, the first real city in the history of the Xianbei tribes which formed the ruling elite of Tuyuhun or A-Zha.
Its King, Murong Fulianchou, the first Tuyuhun ruler who massively patronized Buddhism both in its long-standing strongholds like the Tarim Basin oases and in the more traditional core of the kingdom, now feared to become pinched between the Chigil Xaqanate and Northern Wei. He mobilized his assorted Xianbei armies, Khotanese and Qarqanese auxiliaries and an impressive number of mercenaries from the mountains of the South and West, and entered an alliance with Yujiulü Nagai of the Rouran.
The Battle of the Dzungarian Gates in 1253 was a turning point in East Asian history. Among other things, it marked the beginning of the end of Northern Wei. When Chülük realized that their offensive would not be able to break through, the Chigil forces withdrew from the battlefield, leaving the army of Xuanwu`s general Gao Zhao alone and caught between Yujiulü Nagai`s forces pressing from the North and Murong Fulianchou`s army attacking from the South. After heavy losses and a hurried and humiliating Eastward flight of the remnants of the Northern Wei army through the Yellow River`s narrow valley, where they were harassed by more Tuyuhun forces, Northern Wei power was weakened and Emperor Xuanwu`s authority was thoroughly undermined. Among the Tuoba military aristocracy, large parts of which had always remained skeptical of Xiaowen`s and Xuanwu`s sinicization and bureaucratization policies anyway, various attempted assassinations were plotted, and Xuanwu escaped some of them only by sheer luck. In retaliation, he had entire families of the nobility put to the sword. In the North, the Rouran pillaged with ever more impunity, while in the West, Murong Fulianchou adapted new ideas he had received from his Western vassals and mercenaries into a careful and cunning plan.
The situation in Northern Wei did not escape Wu of Liang´s attention, either, of course. Up to the first half of the 13th century, the North had always been militarily more powerful than China`s South. Now, the balance had tipped. In 1258, Liang armies led by General Xiao Hong dealt Northern Wei forces a decisive blow just North of Luokuo. Soon after, Rouran hordes poured in from the North in what may have been a coordinated or maybe even a conicidental two-pronged attack. Threatened on two fronts, Northern Wei power over the Northern Chinese plains began to collapse. Liang forces swept through almost unmolestedly and laid siege to Luoyang, until, apparently after internal rebellion, chaos and bloodshed, Yuan Xi, the Prince of Xianyang, surrendered the Northern Wei capital to Liang.
With the fall of Luoyang, Liang had not conquered all of the former Northern Wei territory, though. In many places, especially in the North-East, Tuoba princes held out for several years, often declaring themselves kings. And their rule did not always end in Liang conquest, as China`s other neighbours were not idle, either. The old capital Pingcheng fell to the Rouran in 1263. Here, the Rouran khagan Yujiulü Chounu declared himself Emperor Yinzong of the new Liao dynasty. In the West, Murong Fulianchou had quickly seized the opportunity and secured the Four Circuits [3] for the Tuyuhun in 1258 already, and in 1259, he captured the entire string of trading cities and fortresses between Dunhuang and Zicheng and crowned his conquests with one of the former imperial Han capitals, Chang´an. Like Yujiulü Chounu, Murong Fulianchou assumed the title of huangdi or emperor, too, from this moment on calling himself Emperor Yishi of Yan.
The collusion of Liao / Rouran, Yan / Tuyuhun and Liang in the downfall of the Northern Wei did not serve as a model for future interaction, though. On the contrary, the three empires waged war against each other intermittently all throughout the rest of the 13th century.
The reasons why Yan emerged triumphant from this long struggle are manifold. Some clearly lie in the weaknesses which plagued their rivals: the Liao dynasty could not base itself on the support of all former members of the Rouran confederacy – a large group in the West broke off, forming the Gaoche Confederacy –, and in Goguryeo, it had a rather strong enemy to its East. The Liang, in their turn, suffered from agrarian rebellions caused by famines on the Northern Chinese plains, which were in turn caused by draughts resulting from the colder and drier climate of the late 13th century, as well as from continuing aristocratic infights and Wu`s weak successor, Jianwen.
Yan, on the contrary, was able to destroy the major threat to his power from the West. Forging an alliance with the Gaoche and diversifying his own mostly cavalry-based army with a large conscripted Chinese infantry, he defeated the Chigils in two major battles which caused the disintegration of the Xaqanate. Yan incorporated Kashyar into his empire, which now stretched very far along the Silk Road, while the Northern route of the Tarim Basin and the Tokharian kingdoms of Kucha, Karaxahr and Turfan came under Gaoche overlordship.
But other, perhaps even more important reasons lie in the policies pursued by Yishi in his long reign, and during the equally long reign of his successor Huizong of Yan. When Yishi built up his imperial bureaucracy, he did not simply copy the structures he found in the district and prefecture administrations of the North-Eastern parts of his realm. Espousing strong Buddhist convictions, he added quite a few canonical texts of this religion to the previously purely Confucian contents of the exams in which imperial magistrates were chosen in much of China ever since the days of the Great Han. When this provoked indignation and protest from Han traditionalists, Yishi reacted by going a couple of steps further, diversifying the curriculum to include much of the knowledge which was considered important in the different parts of his far-flung and heterogeneous empire, e.g. mathematics and astronomy in the Indian tradition. Increasingly, exams became difficult intellectual challenges instead of fig-leaves for legitimizing the installation of aristocratic offsprings as regional governors. The administrative abilities of this group proved superior to others, and so Yishi and later Huizong extended the exam requirement onto virtually every position in the middle and higher administrative apparatus, which began to grow to proportions not seen since Han times.
But the Yan emperors did not only rely on a rational bureaucracy. Their polity had long thrived on controlling commerce, so when hydrodynamic innovations in the Far West lead to increasing trade volumes, but less positive and even negative trade balances for the Yan empire`s productive Eastern provinces, the Yan emperors and their administration took measures which did not have to heed the demands of powerful guilds, as was the case in India. China-proper brought forth porcelain of increasingly good quality, the likes of which could not be found anywhere else in the world. The export of these items along the Silk Road had begun – but the early Yan emperors saw that there was plenty of room for expansion. In contrast to the approaches of Han times, Yan emperors did not begin by regulating production. Especially Yishi thought this was a merchant`s job, and while he considered merchants to be of great importance, he also thought of his imperial administration as having more solemn duties than that. Instead, Yishi thought that spreading the knowledge of the latest techniques as far as possible throughout his empire was key to improving and increasing porcelain production. As a result, he had his administration initiate craft schools in various cities. Innovative artisans who chose not to keep their knowledge secret anymore and instead teach others what they knew were rewarded by the imperial administration with trading privileges (exporting one`s products towards the West along the Silk Road usually required high safety fees; artisans who engaged in teaching were rewarded with lower rates or even full exemptions).
When agrarian rebellions broke out in Liang at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, Huizong waited for Liang to become weakened enough, then marched in and annexed province after province between the Yellow River and the Yangtse as far as the Taipingyang [4], reducing Liang to the very South and causing the dynasty´s collapse and replacement with the Chen. At his death, the second emperor of Yan left behind a vast and powerful empire. Its neighbours, from the Yarlung, Zhangzhung and Chen in the South to the Liao and Gaoche in the North and various smaller polities in the West were much weaker than Yan and, with the exception of Chen, all of them paid tribute to Yan.
When Huizong was succeeded by a series of less capable and sometimes short-lived emperors, the administrative and economic innovations endured. The bureaucracy proved capable of innovating on its own, as was the case with the invention of woodblock printing of imperial edicts for exact reproduction and distribution throughout the far-flung empire, or of essential texts for the imperial exams which were made available in public libraries where candidates prepared themselves for the big tests. It maintained a good collection of taxes, so that Yan`s granaries were always well-filled and even major draughts did not lead to such dramatic famines as might have caused agrarian revolts.
The climate of technological innovation filtering in from the West and multiplied by targeted subsidies and institutions like the artisan schools led to first careful steps towards a domestic waterpowered textile industry in Yan`s old mountainous heartland, where every brook and stream was dammed and used for milling in the 14th century. China`s most important contribution to the Hydrodynamic Age, which it entered a little belatedly, though, was hydraulic mining, which was increasingly used in the Eastern provinces to gain kaolin, an important raw ingredient for porcelain.
Targeted state support for the porcelain industry and for a modernization of the domestic textile industry as well as for mining and iron production continued and spread Southward even after the collapse of the Yan dynasty towards the end of the 14th century, with the framework provided by administrations which adopted and continued Yishi`s new approaches under the rule of various dynasties, and the actual work, the inventions and the commerce being carried out by a growing and growingly self-confident group of industrial tycoons and their wage workers. Philosophical influences filtering in from the West along the Porcelain Road, as the Silk Road soon came to be called, and down through all layers of society, not the least among them Buddhism, helped relativise Confucian skepticism towards commercial activity. Emperors capable of strategic thought seized on the opportunity of increasingly unstable social hierarchies to further enhance their centralized power and shape society through edicts and legal codes according to the visions they had of how Huaxia should develop. When emperors were weak or internecine wars weakened or removed centralized control, the forces of tradition would resurge temporarily – but by the end of the 14th century, it was clear that China had irrevocably embarked on its journey of modernization and would soon come to lead the world of the Middle and Late Hydrodynamic Age.
[3] Sichuan
[4] Pacific Ocean
In two weeks` time, I´ll finish this last installment with a) a few alt-althist thoughts, b) the promised map for around 1300 AUC / 550 CE and c) a few authorial reflections on my first timeline.
Yes, although "industrialization" ITTL at this point is by no means encompassing.limited to a few domains, and no steampower. Many crafts have not advanced to levels comparable to that of OTL's 18th century. But economic dynamics have undoubtedly accelerated.
The other day on
Foro de Historia Speculativa / Dissertationes Speculative Ante 2500
in a thread which would translate as…
Challenge: Anthrakodynamic Revolution instead of Hydrodynamic?
#1
The Ghana, May 24th, 2769, 11.25 p.m.:
Recently I´ve been thinking about how the world might look like if industrialisation had not happened based on waterpower, but on something less environmentally intrusive like, say, coal. Just think: Italia, Dalmatia, Eastern Atlantis, Sygria, Svitudo, Helvetia and all these other mountainous places, how beautiful would they look without artificial lakes and dams everywhere? Unfortunately, the Electric Revolution is rather too late for a PoD, since waterpower had way too much of a technological advance over other energy sources already.
But what if the initial mechanical revolution with the textile mills and everything in the 12th century had happened with, for example, coal as a fuel instead of waterpower and steam engines driving early textile mills etc.? Could this have worked? And if so, would it still start in Asia Minor, or maybe instead in some place with great coal deposits, like, say, along the Rhine?
So here is your challenge, should you accept it: Have the great leap in mechanization happen based on coal instead of waterpower! Bonus points if it happens earlier than IOTL.
#2
dux, May 25th, 2769, 9.13 a.m.:
No way that could have happened.
Building steam engines requires steel of a quality which was way beyond what the Greeks were able to make at that time. Or anybody else, for that matter. Also, last time I checked, fully waterpowered textile mills only came into being in the late 13th century; in the 12th century, it was just water-powered spinning wheels.
#3
Boudicca, May 25th, 2769, 10.57 a.m.:
I`m not sure if it`s possible… but Britannia could be a good place to start a coal-based industrialisation. It had coal, ore, wool… and the Celts had a great tradition of iron-working. The concept of steam power is not too abstract, it was known to Heron already. If someone came up with the idea, and an aristocrat had decided to put their resources into making a steam engine-powered textile mill happen, instead of meddling in Hibernia or Iutia, they might have made a fortune out of it and attracted others to copy the idea.
#4
Simon, May 25th, 2769, 12.21 a.m.:
Boudicca wrote:
The concept of steam power is not too abstract, it was known to Heron already
Please, not the aeliopile again! It was a mere toy, its output utterly insufficient to power even an automatic shoebrush.
The Ghana wrote:
Just think: Italia, Dalmatia, Eastern Atlantis, Sygria, Svitudo, Helvetia and all these other mountainous places, how beautiful would they look without artificial lakes and dams everywhere?
What is your problem with dams and lakes? I think they look nice, especially seen from above… and coal isn`t exactly making the world prettier, either. Coal fires stink, and the smoke darkens everything.
Also, what others have said before: iron quality was far too bad for practical steam engines in the 13th century. To have a coal-powered industrialisation, you would either need to speed up metallurgical innovations by centuries, or slow down mechanization efforts by centuries. Both is borderline-ASB.
#5
Impractical Crab, May 25th, 2769, 2.00 p.m.:
This could have actually happened. A lot of factors had to come together for the hydrodynamic revolution to happen: the abolition of slavery, an unusually long period of peace and prosperity, the Confederacy`s unique combination of a weird heterogeneity of legal systems, yet unfettered free trade within much of the Mediterranean. You only need to eliminate one of the factors, and fully mechanized cloth-production in waterpowered textile mills is not happening in the 13th century. You could have the Hunnic invasions take a turn for the worse. Or civil wars break out earlier, and the Confederacy falls apart a century before OTL. Or the opposite: legal harmonization across the Confederacy happens earlier, perhaps a Codex Tarentinus in the 12th century already, or the Koinon Neon succeeds in the 1060s. With Agonistic, Simonist, Aetas Aurea and other radical isotian factions as strong as they were in the earlier years of the Confederacy, such a unified law code could easily regulate mill-building in unfavourable ways, or prevent the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few oligarchs from happening.
Technical innovations would have happened sooner or later anyway, of course. But we cannot rule out that an exponential growth in installed mechanical power only happens several centuries later, when the building of steam engines has become a viable and even practical option. Coal is indeed the second most likely energy source, greater quantities of it are easily available, which was not the case with oil or gas, let alone electricity, which required a whole set of further innovations. And with a completely different energy source and industrialisation taking place in an entirely different time period, places other than Asia Minor are definitely in the cards. I would not say Britannia, though. Gallo-Roman feudalism was economically far too stagnant for such changes to become likely. Changing this would probably require a PoD in the first millennium AUC. Otherwise, India might be a good bet.
#6
The Ghana, May 25th, 2769, 8.28 p.m.:
Thanks for your feedback and ideas, guys! Especially Impractical Crab, I might actually take up your idea and write a timeline where the Confederacy falls apart earlier and steampowered industrialisation happens in India….
#7
Uriel, May 26th, 2769, 1.13 a.m.:
Excellent idea, I would love to read that!
#8
Impractical Crab, May 26th, 2769, 4.47 p.m.:
Mind you, that doesn`t mean a coal-powered industrialisation would have left the world a better place. It´s always difficult to say how far-reaching the consequences of burning such a lot of coal might have been…
#9
Simon, May 26th, 2769, 5.13 p.m.:
Impractical Crab wrote:
Mind you, that doesn`t mean a coal-powered industrialisation would have left the world a better place. It´s always difficult to say how far-reaching the consequences of burning such a lot of coal might have been…
Yeah, that. Such a lot of coal fires would cause such an incredible pollution that it would lower the quality of living in very large regions, or even worldwide. Some theoretical ecologists I´ve read even suggest that it would mess up the weather across the planet big time. I don`t think people would have tolerated such a nasty, dirty business at all.
* * *
And here is the promised map, I skipped forward to around 1330 AUC:
Legend:
1 - Judaea
2 - Samaria
3 - Isauria and Pamphylia
4 - Chattia (post-Heormannian imperial core)
5 - peripheral post-Heormannian kingdoms
6 - post-Warmannian imperial core around Moraha
7 - peripheral post-Warmannian kingdoms and their Vandilian conquests
A Few Authorial Endnotes
This has been my first timeline on this forum, and writing it has been a lot of fun. Receiving feedback from other forum members felt great and motivated me to aim for plausibility and in-depth explanations. Sadly, I know that I haven`t always excelled at achieving these objectives. The amount of research required was only one factor which proved problematic – the other one being my desire to take this timeline and my pet polity, the Confederacy, far into a bright future, and to have things like the Hunnic invasions, the stronger Mazdakists and the development of waterpowered textile manufacturing happen. I fear now that these attempts have caused a few plausibility problems, and even more narrative weaknesses.
And I had already come quite a long way… My first attempt at writing such a timeline was on althistory.wikia.com: http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Abrittus
Writing for the higher plausibility standards of this community here made me realize that I couldn`t just turn most of the Roman Empire of the Principate into a federal democracy like I had done on the other site. It had to be messier than that, bloodier, more diverse, more ambiguous. Writing that differently felt good. (When I began writing, I didn`t know that things would turn out differently in that respect. The idea of the militarized Roman rump-Empire (Sirmium) came to me later. That is why one of the earliest posts, where I have the tourist guide speak about events during the times of the revolution in Singidunum is wrong now. Unfortunately, I can´t edit the post now since it`s too old.)
But I should have made it messier still, even more divisive, with more severe setbacks, infights, external threats etc. The Confederacy should have come apart or experienced bloody civil war, like the Hellenic democracies of classical antiquity did, too. The Roman Empire should have experienced more frictions and power struggles, too, which would have opened the floodgates for barbarian meddling. The drawback to this would have been to slow down things even more, and honestly, I might have got lost among a self-created pandemonium of rivalling post-imperial Greco-Roman statelets. Also, writing it that way would have required a lot of creative stories about battles, commanders, politicians, intrigues, alliances etc., which aren`t exactly what I´m strong at.
Writing the timeline with less handwaving, more failures of those I sympathise with and more ambiguities might have developed some of the concepts which fascinate me in a much more meaningful way. Since I wasn`t able to achieve this, I`ll finish this with a few explicit words about what fascinated me, what compelled me to write this timeline, and what writing this timeline and receiving the feedback from all of you – for which I cannot thank you enough – has revealed to me about these topics.
(All of the topics can be summed up in the pivotality I see in the Third Century. Radical change was imminent on so many levels – and much less predictable than it looks at first sight.)
1. Christianity `s Diversity
By the middle of the 3rd century, Christianity has become a very sizable minority. Although its hierarchies already mirrored the political model of the Roman Empire whose essence and legacy it would soon become, the movement was still so incredibly more diverse than what Nicaea, Chalcedon etc. would soon make it. It appealed to the dissatisfied on many levels and in many different, often incompatible ways. Radical asceticism or good deeds in the community? Constitute your community after the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, or give the Caesar its due? Its structures were both surprisingly hierarchical for a heterogeneous marginalized minority, and surprisingly democratic for its time (still). Being a Christian was a political issue – but what politics it meant was not yet hewn in stone. I wanted to give the millennarist egalitarianism of the Agonistici and similar groups more space. In hindsight, I think I should have given more thought to the reclusive tendencies within Christianity, though – and let the theocratic beast go wilder, doing more damage to itself and throwing more monkey-wrenches into the wheels of economic development.
2. The Military Anarchy – an Idly Running Democratic Momentum? Or: the Empire`s Unused Human Resources
Civilized empires of antiquity were never defeated by migratory peoples from the periphery because the latter had superior military technology (they most often had not), greater numbers of potential warriors/soldiers (they never had), a more solid economic powerbase (LOL), or better strategists and politicians. Empires defeated themselves – they could not unearth the human resources they nominally had control over. Often, this is explained in terms of “overstretchedness”, i.e. too thin an elite controls too many people as a result of conquests.
In Rome`s case, though, Romanization was quite a success story, so classical overstretching theory does not apply, and indeed few people have attributed Rome´s crisis and downfall to secessionist movements and provincial revolts. Which raises the question… well, during the 3rd century, around 50,000,000 people identified more or less strongly as Romans. One or two centuries later, the figure has not changed much, and yet this huge civilization is generally described as being unable to muster enough soldiers to withstand the onslaught of barbarian groups which are both much less numerous and less able to produce good weaponry. That has always appeared odd to me. It was as if the people whose great-great-grandparents had actively Romanised themselves gave up on their state.
This has made me see the so-called “Military Anarchy” with different eyes. Soldiers elevating people from among themselves to the purple, and endangered towns and provinces supporting them – weren`t they among the last people who actively attempted to defend the Romanity of their quarters and who still showed civic spirit and an interest in their res publica? Yet, at the same time, they always set on the wrong horse; almost every usurper dashed to Rome and abandoned those who had elevated him. A momentum of popular engagement running idly, disappointed over and over again. From this vantage point, the so-called consolidation under Diocletian, Constantine etc. was the quiet before the storm and after the last gasps of life had left the Roman body politic.
At the same time, from this vantage point, the Crisis of the Third Century was only a few mental steps away from establishing post-imperial, but definitely Roman states which could mobilise their human resources to a much greater extent. My timeline has aimed to take these steps. Not only in the Confederacy, where the armed forces ally and ultimately subordinate themselves to local civic movements and their institutions, but also in the rump empire. Looking back, though, I should have given the Alexandrinian legions a more central role in the constituting process of the Confederacy for plausibility`s sake – and I should have made the rump-imperial beast lash out more, not just against the Confederacy, but also against the Germanic Barbarians across the Danube, with more conquests and less isolation. But also with more instability, which would have opened the floodgates for Germanic meddling.
3. What the Latifundia Could Have Become, Too
Another aspect which fascinates me is the socio-economic structure of the latifundia / villae rusticate in the imperial period. So ambivalent. They surely were the roots of OTL´s reversal to economic manorialism with demonetarization, subsistence, “inner secession” from the empire and of the introduction of feudalist military and political structures. That´s why I had the Gallo-Roman part of the former Empire go down this road, even without barbarians taking over everywhere.
But they were not just a symptom or cause of crisis. They also brought relatively capital-intensive, complex production principally aimed for the market to a countryside previously caught in the stagnant world of subsistence. In the 3rd century, they had to work almost without slaves – which would have made them attractive places for those who had to offer their labour – had it not been for the landowners` political power which helped tweak the whole legal system in their favour (a process completed under Diocletian after it had overcome peasant revolts in many places, and which caused yet more of them: the bagaudae are not a figment of my imagination…)
Could the mechanizing (oil-presses! saw-mills!), export-oriented and labour-divisive rural economic complexes not have turned into persistently profit-oriented, more broadly owned units – something like cooperatives? Not replacing cheap slave labour with cheap serf labour might have provided a greater incentive for mechanization, while keeping the large market-oriented structures looks like the only context in which it could have a chance. That would have required successful peasant revolts, which in turn were only thinkable if other (e.g. religious) rebellions occurred, too, and gave the whole thing an ideological basis, and parts of the military supported it, too.
The socioeconomic system with the “synergeia” are the bedrock of the Confederacy. I admit that bringing them about required a lot of handwaving. What I feel bad about, though, is not taking them seriously enough. If such structures were really implemented, some would indeed seal themselves off from the market, diversify and go into communal susbsistence mode – turn into villages of egalitarian sects, either kept in that state by a dogmatic religion or public cult, or threatened by a reversion into neo-tribalism. Others would go bankrupt, and yet others would become super-powerful, absorbing land and resources from competitors and turning into micro-states. Having a comitium civitatis – and even a majority of them Confederacy-wide! – protect and freeze their status and land boundaries as if they had the hindsight of a late 19th-century Cooperativist thinkers was perhaps a bit too much wishful thinking on my part.
* * *
Anyway – I have ranted enough. Has anyone of you any constructively critical feedback which might help me write better timelines in the future? What did you like, what did you miss / not like? Where would you have wanted this timeline to move? … As always, I am grateful for every comment.
Foro de Historia Speculativa / Dissertationes Speculative Ante 2500
in a thread which would translate as…
Challenge: Anthrakodynamic Revolution instead of Hydrodynamic?
#1
The Ghana, May 24th, 2769, 11.25 p.m.:
Recently I´ve been thinking about how the world might look like if industrialisation had not happened based on waterpower, but on something less environmentally intrusive like, say, coal. Just think: Italia, Dalmatia, Eastern Atlantis, Sygria, Svitudo, Helvetia and all these other mountainous places, how beautiful would they look without artificial lakes and dams everywhere? Unfortunately, the Electric Revolution is rather too late for a PoD, since waterpower had way too much of a technological advance over other energy sources already.
But what if the initial mechanical revolution with the textile mills and everything in the 12th century had happened with, for example, coal as a fuel instead of waterpower and steam engines driving early textile mills etc.? Could this have worked? And if so, would it still start in Asia Minor, or maybe instead in some place with great coal deposits, like, say, along the Rhine?
So here is your challenge, should you accept it: Have the great leap in mechanization happen based on coal instead of waterpower! Bonus points if it happens earlier than IOTL.
#2
dux, May 25th, 2769, 9.13 a.m.:
No way that could have happened.
Building steam engines requires steel of a quality which was way beyond what the Greeks were able to make at that time. Or anybody else, for that matter. Also, last time I checked, fully waterpowered textile mills only came into being in the late 13th century; in the 12th century, it was just water-powered spinning wheels.
#3
Boudicca, May 25th, 2769, 10.57 a.m.:
I`m not sure if it`s possible… but Britannia could be a good place to start a coal-based industrialisation. It had coal, ore, wool… and the Celts had a great tradition of iron-working. The concept of steam power is not too abstract, it was known to Heron already. If someone came up with the idea, and an aristocrat had decided to put their resources into making a steam engine-powered textile mill happen, instead of meddling in Hibernia or Iutia, they might have made a fortune out of it and attracted others to copy the idea.
#4
Simon, May 25th, 2769, 12.21 a.m.:
Boudicca wrote:
The concept of steam power is not too abstract, it was known to Heron already
Please, not the aeliopile again! It was a mere toy, its output utterly insufficient to power even an automatic shoebrush.
The Ghana wrote:
Just think: Italia, Dalmatia, Eastern Atlantis, Sygria, Svitudo, Helvetia and all these other mountainous places, how beautiful would they look without artificial lakes and dams everywhere?
What is your problem with dams and lakes? I think they look nice, especially seen from above… and coal isn`t exactly making the world prettier, either. Coal fires stink, and the smoke darkens everything.
Also, what others have said before: iron quality was far too bad for practical steam engines in the 13th century. To have a coal-powered industrialisation, you would either need to speed up metallurgical innovations by centuries, or slow down mechanization efforts by centuries. Both is borderline-ASB.
#5
Impractical Crab, May 25th, 2769, 2.00 p.m.:
This could have actually happened. A lot of factors had to come together for the hydrodynamic revolution to happen: the abolition of slavery, an unusually long period of peace and prosperity, the Confederacy`s unique combination of a weird heterogeneity of legal systems, yet unfettered free trade within much of the Mediterranean. You only need to eliminate one of the factors, and fully mechanized cloth-production in waterpowered textile mills is not happening in the 13th century. You could have the Hunnic invasions take a turn for the worse. Or civil wars break out earlier, and the Confederacy falls apart a century before OTL. Or the opposite: legal harmonization across the Confederacy happens earlier, perhaps a Codex Tarentinus in the 12th century already, or the Koinon Neon succeeds in the 1060s. With Agonistic, Simonist, Aetas Aurea and other radical isotian factions as strong as they were in the earlier years of the Confederacy, such a unified law code could easily regulate mill-building in unfavourable ways, or prevent the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few oligarchs from happening.
Technical innovations would have happened sooner or later anyway, of course. But we cannot rule out that an exponential growth in installed mechanical power only happens several centuries later, when the building of steam engines has become a viable and even practical option. Coal is indeed the second most likely energy source, greater quantities of it are easily available, which was not the case with oil or gas, let alone electricity, which required a whole set of further innovations. And with a completely different energy source and industrialisation taking place in an entirely different time period, places other than Asia Minor are definitely in the cards. I would not say Britannia, though. Gallo-Roman feudalism was economically far too stagnant for such changes to become likely. Changing this would probably require a PoD in the first millennium AUC. Otherwise, India might be a good bet.
#6
The Ghana, May 25th, 2769, 8.28 p.m.:
Thanks for your feedback and ideas, guys! Especially Impractical Crab, I might actually take up your idea and write a timeline where the Confederacy falls apart earlier and steampowered industrialisation happens in India….
#7
Uriel, May 26th, 2769, 1.13 a.m.:
Excellent idea, I would love to read that!
#8
Impractical Crab, May 26th, 2769, 4.47 p.m.:
Mind you, that doesn`t mean a coal-powered industrialisation would have left the world a better place. It´s always difficult to say how far-reaching the consequences of burning such a lot of coal might have been…
#9
Simon, May 26th, 2769, 5.13 p.m.:
Impractical Crab wrote:
Mind you, that doesn`t mean a coal-powered industrialisation would have left the world a better place. It´s always difficult to say how far-reaching the consequences of burning such a lot of coal might have been…
Yeah, that. Such a lot of coal fires would cause such an incredible pollution that it would lower the quality of living in very large regions, or even worldwide. Some theoretical ecologists I´ve read even suggest that it would mess up the weather across the planet big time. I don`t think people would have tolerated such a nasty, dirty business at all.
* * *
And here is the promised map, I skipped forward to around 1330 AUC:
Legend:
1 - Judaea
2 - Samaria
3 - Isauria and Pamphylia
4 - Chattia (post-Heormannian imperial core)
5 - peripheral post-Heormannian kingdoms
6 - post-Warmannian imperial core around Moraha
7 - peripheral post-Warmannian kingdoms and their Vandilian conquests
A Few Authorial Endnotes
This has been my first timeline on this forum, and writing it has been a lot of fun. Receiving feedback from other forum members felt great and motivated me to aim for plausibility and in-depth explanations. Sadly, I know that I haven`t always excelled at achieving these objectives. The amount of research required was only one factor which proved problematic – the other one being my desire to take this timeline and my pet polity, the Confederacy, far into a bright future, and to have things like the Hunnic invasions, the stronger Mazdakists and the development of waterpowered textile manufacturing happen. I fear now that these attempts have caused a few plausibility problems, and even more narrative weaknesses.
And I had already come quite a long way… My first attempt at writing such a timeline was on althistory.wikia.com: http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Abrittus
Writing for the higher plausibility standards of this community here made me realize that I couldn`t just turn most of the Roman Empire of the Principate into a federal democracy like I had done on the other site. It had to be messier than that, bloodier, more diverse, more ambiguous. Writing that differently felt good. (When I began writing, I didn`t know that things would turn out differently in that respect. The idea of the militarized Roman rump-Empire (Sirmium) came to me later. That is why one of the earliest posts, where I have the tourist guide speak about events during the times of the revolution in Singidunum is wrong now. Unfortunately, I can´t edit the post now since it`s too old.)
But I should have made it messier still, even more divisive, with more severe setbacks, infights, external threats etc. The Confederacy should have come apart or experienced bloody civil war, like the Hellenic democracies of classical antiquity did, too. The Roman Empire should have experienced more frictions and power struggles, too, which would have opened the floodgates for barbarian meddling. The drawback to this would have been to slow down things even more, and honestly, I might have got lost among a self-created pandemonium of rivalling post-imperial Greco-Roman statelets. Also, writing it that way would have required a lot of creative stories about battles, commanders, politicians, intrigues, alliances etc., which aren`t exactly what I´m strong at.
Writing the timeline with less handwaving, more failures of those I sympathise with and more ambiguities might have developed some of the concepts which fascinate me in a much more meaningful way. Since I wasn`t able to achieve this, I`ll finish this with a few explicit words about what fascinated me, what compelled me to write this timeline, and what writing this timeline and receiving the feedback from all of you – for which I cannot thank you enough – has revealed to me about these topics.
(All of the topics can be summed up in the pivotality I see in the Third Century. Radical change was imminent on so many levels – and much less predictable than it looks at first sight.)
1. Christianity `s Diversity
By the middle of the 3rd century, Christianity has become a very sizable minority. Although its hierarchies already mirrored the political model of the Roman Empire whose essence and legacy it would soon become, the movement was still so incredibly more diverse than what Nicaea, Chalcedon etc. would soon make it. It appealed to the dissatisfied on many levels and in many different, often incompatible ways. Radical asceticism or good deeds in the community? Constitute your community after the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, or give the Caesar its due? Its structures were both surprisingly hierarchical for a heterogeneous marginalized minority, and surprisingly democratic for its time (still). Being a Christian was a political issue – but what politics it meant was not yet hewn in stone. I wanted to give the millennarist egalitarianism of the Agonistici and similar groups more space. In hindsight, I think I should have given more thought to the reclusive tendencies within Christianity, though – and let the theocratic beast go wilder, doing more damage to itself and throwing more monkey-wrenches into the wheels of economic development.
2. The Military Anarchy – an Idly Running Democratic Momentum? Or: the Empire`s Unused Human Resources
Civilized empires of antiquity were never defeated by migratory peoples from the periphery because the latter had superior military technology (they most often had not), greater numbers of potential warriors/soldiers (they never had), a more solid economic powerbase (LOL), or better strategists and politicians. Empires defeated themselves – they could not unearth the human resources they nominally had control over. Often, this is explained in terms of “overstretchedness”, i.e. too thin an elite controls too many people as a result of conquests.
In Rome`s case, though, Romanization was quite a success story, so classical overstretching theory does not apply, and indeed few people have attributed Rome´s crisis and downfall to secessionist movements and provincial revolts. Which raises the question… well, during the 3rd century, around 50,000,000 people identified more or less strongly as Romans. One or two centuries later, the figure has not changed much, and yet this huge civilization is generally described as being unable to muster enough soldiers to withstand the onslaught of barbarian groups which are both much less numerous and less able to produce good weaponry. That has always appeared odd to me. It was as if the people whose great-great-grandparents had actively Romanised themselves gave up on their state.
This has made me see the so-called “Military Anarchy” with different eyes. Soldiers elevating people from among themselves to the purple, and endangered towns and provinces supporting them – weren`t they among the last people who actively attempted to defend the Romanity of their quarters and who still showed civic spirit and an interest in their res publica? Yet, at the same time, they always set on the wrong horse; almost every usurper dashed to Rome and abandoned those who had elevated him. A momentum of popular engagement running idly, disappointed over and over again. From this vantage point, the so-called consolidation under Diocletian, Constantine etc. was the quiet before the storm and after the last gasps of life had left the Roman body politic.
At the same time, from this vantage point, the Crisis of the Third Century was only a few mental steps away from establishing post-imperial, but definitely Roman states which could mobilise their human resources to a much greater extent. My timeline has aimed to take these steps. Not only in the Confederacy, where the armed forces ally and ultimately subordinate themselves to local civic movements and their institutions, but also in the rump empire. Looking back, though, I should have given the Alexandrinian legions a more central role in the constituting process of the Confederacy for plausibility`s sake – and I should have made the rump-imperial beast lash out more, not just against the Confederacy, but also against the Germanic Barbarians across the Danube, with more conquests and less isolation. But also with more instability, which would have opened the floodgates for Germanic meddling.
3. What the Latifundia Could Have Become, Too
Another aspect which fascinates me is the socio-economic structure of the latifundia / villae rusticate in the imperial period. So ambivalent. They surely were the roots of OTL´s reversal to economic manorialism with demonetarization, subsistence, “inner secession” from the empire and of the introduction of feudalist military and political structures. That´s why I had the Gallo-Roman part of the former Empire go down this road, even without barbarians taking over everywhere.
But they were not just a symptom or cause of crisis. They also brought relatively capital-intensive, complex production principally aimed for the market to a countryside previously caught in the stagnant world of subsistence. In the 3rd century, they had to work almost without slaves – which would have made them attractive places for those who had to offer their labour – had it not been for the landowners` political power which helped tweak the whole legal system in their favour (a process completed under Diocletian after it had overcome peasant revolts in many places, and which caused yet more of them: the bagaudae are not a figment of my imagination…)
Could the mechanizing (oil-presses! saw-mills!), export-oriented and labour-divisive rural economic complexes not have turned into persistently profit-oriented, more broadly owned units – something like cooperatives? Not replacing cheap slave labour with cheap serf labour might have provided a greater incentive for mechanization, while keeping the large market-oriented structures looks like the only context in which it could have a chance. That would have required successful peasant revolts, which in turn were only thinkable if other (e.g. religious) rebellions occurred, too, and gave the whole thing an ideological basis, and parts of the military supported it, too.
The socioeconomic system with the “synergeia” are the bedrock of the Confederacy. I admit that bringing them about required a lot of handwaving. What I feel bad about, though, is not taking them seriously enough. If such structures were really implemented, some would indeed seal themselves off from the market, diversify and go into communal susbsistence mode – turn into villages of egalitarian sects, either kept in that state by a dogmatic religion or public cult, or threatened by a reversion into neo-tribalism. Others would go bankrupt, and yet others would become super-powerful, absorbing land and resources from competitors and turning into micro-states. Having a comitium civitatis – and even a majority of them Confederacy-wide! – protect and freeze their status and land boundaries as if they had the hindsight of a late 19th-century Cooperativist thinkers was perhaps a bit too much wishful thinking on my part.
* * *
Anyway – I have ranted enough. Has anyone of you any constructively critical feedback which might help me write better timelines in the future? What did you like, what did you miss / not like? Where would you have wanted this timeline to move? … As always, I am grateful for every comment.
FINIS
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Nice.
I'm amused and flattered to see that I have an alternate-historical alter-ego as well.
I agree with your own self-assessment. Things could, and probably should, have been messier earlier on. I get that the goal was to move towards this early social upheaval, but I felt that too often there was too much going right. It could, and probably should, have been more of an uphill battle for the forces of democratization and all the revolutionary changes this timeline ultimately saw.
Tribalism like you talk about should have been a bigger issue as well - you're right that lots of communities would revert towards local customs and cut themselves off from the larger Roman world as everything came crashing down. It happened near enough in OTL. I think your points about the soldiers are interesting, but the soldiers of the era to my understanding were pretty shortsighted, far more interested in a quick payday than long term power.
One of the problems, and a problem I've tried to think about in my own musings on the Late Roman Empire is the culture of the (particularly western) elites. Landholders and their political power was in a damaging way divorced from the power of the state. The aristocracy did not have nearly enough investment in the continuity of the broader regime. If their power was broken, the communes could serve as a useful base of taxes and manpower - or could serve as yet another threat to the resources of an already tottering Empire.
I'm amused and flattered to see that I have an alternate-historical alter-ego as well.
I agree with your own self-assessment. Things could, and probably should, have been messier earlier on. I get that the goal was to move towards this early social upheaval, but I felt that too often there was too much going right. It could, and probably should, have been more of an uphill battle for the forces of democratization and all the revolutionary changes this timeline ultimately saw.
Tribalism like you talk about should have been a bigger issue as well - you're right that lots of communities would revert towards local customs and cut themselves off from the larger Roman world as everything came crashing down. It happened near enough in OTL. I think your points about the soldiers are interesting, but the soldiers of the era to my understanding were pretty shortsighted, far more interested in a quick payday than long term power.
One of the problems, and a problem I've tried to think about in my own musings on the Late Roman Empire is the culture of the (particularly western) elites. Landholders and their political power was in a damaging way divorced from the power of the state. The aristocracy did not have nearly enough investment in the continuity of the broader regime. If their power was broken, the communes could serve as a useful base of taxes and manpower - or could serve as yet another threat to the resources of an already tottering Empire.
Thanks for your feedback, both of you!
@Archangel,
I do have plans for another timeline, which may be more in the form of sketches instead of fully narrative, though, due to the lack of spare time I´ll face soon. It´s a Hussite timeline (working title "A Different Chalice"), and I´m currently trying hard to reign in my tendency to wank the Hussites.
@Practical Lobster,
I agree with your points.
Concerning the soldiers, though: usurpations were not only initiated and carried through by the soldiers (who may indeed have cared more for a payrise and a greater likelihood to survive than for anything else), they were also actively supported by municipal and provincial administrations in many cases. Just think of how fast Postumus, a soldier from simple backgrounds in Germania Inferior, secured support for his OTL Gallo-Roman separate empire from as far away as Hispania. The troops he commanded may have supported him because he allowed them to keep the loot confiscated from the Frankish invaders, but towns all across Gaul and Hispania had different motives for backing him. Sadly, though, municipal government was structually decaying at the same time, too. Here, too, it was the same problems with the decurional aristocracy which you already mentioned.
@Archangel,
I do have plans for another timeline, which may be more in the form of sketches instead of fully narrative, though, due to the lack of spare time I´ll face soon. It´s a Hussite timeline (working title "A Different Chalice"), and I´m currently trying hard to reign in my tendency to wank the Hussites.
@Practical Lobster,
I agree with your points.
Concerning the soldiers, though: usurpations were not only initiated and carried through by the soldiers (who may indeed have cared more for a payrise and a greater likelihood to survive than for anything else), they were also actively supported by municipal and provincial administrations in many cases. Just think of how fast Postumus, a soldier from simple backgrounds in Germania Inferior, secured support for his OTL Gallo-Roman separate empire from as far away as Hispania. The troops he commanded may have supported him because he allowed them to keep the loot confiscated from the Frankish invaders, but towns all across Gaul and Hispania had different motives for backing him. Sadly, though, municipal government was structually decaying at the same time, too. Here, too, it was the same problems with the decurional aristocracy which you already mentioned.