Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Page 16

  As it was, he took out what he thought was a reliable insurance policy by signing a treaty with the empire that guaranteed Roman military help if he needed it. With Roman backing, Hermenegild’s Catholic mini-kingdom began to force the Arian king Leovigild to make major politico-religious changes.

  Hermenegild’s propaganda against his father was overwhelmingly religious in content. He claimed that Leovigild was persecuting his son on purely religious grounds—a propaganda spin designed to appeal to Catholics, whether Romano-Spaniards, recent Visigothic converts, or the authorities in the papally influenced Roman province of Spania.

  King Leovigild was therefore obliged to try to portray himself as highly liberal in his attitude to Catholicism if he wanted to spike his son’s propaganda guns and therefore reduce his son’s ability to rally his rebel troops. It was under such political pressure that Leovigild took two dramatic courses of action in 582, just as he was preparing to attack his son.

  First, he announced that he would henceforth be prepared to worship at the shrines of Catholic martyrs and even, on occasion, in Catholic churches—something the Arian Visigothic kings had never done before.

  Second—and much more fundamentally—he made a statement saying that Christ and God were equally important and equally divine. Although he did not extend this equality to the third part of the Trinity (the Holy Spirit), his statement brought his theological viewpoint as an Arian king very close to that of his Catholic son and of his imperial Roman backers.

  In putting Christ on an equal footing with God, the royal announcement of 582 jettisoned in a few words the central belief of Arianism as it had been for more than two centuries. It was a breathtaking concession, virtually negating the theological raison d’être of the entire Arian faith. What had begun as a tactical PR maneuver to outpropagandize the rebel prince had the effect of preparing the ground for even more fundamental change just five years later.

  With his new Catholic-friendly, highly diluted religious beliefs in place and on record, the king moved swiftly against his son. The city of Merida fell, and Leovigild minted special commemorative coins bearing the legend “Victoria.” Then, early in 583, just a few miles from Seville, he seized the key rebel fortress of Osset and the ancient town of Italica.

  Leovigild then faced the prospect of doing battle with the imperial Roman army, which had been called in by Hermenegild under the terms of his treaty with the empire. But the king succeeded in bribing the imperial general with thirty thousand gold coins, and the imperial army stayed in its camp as Leovigild stormed Seville. His son, Hermenegild, however, managed to escape and took refuge in independent Catholic Cordoba. His father seized control of that city and cornered his son, who had sought sanctuary in a church.

  The king sent his younger son, Reccared, into the building to persuade the rebel prince to give himself up and appeal for royal mercy. Hermenegild prostrated himself before his father, and in an apparent act of mercy the king helped him up and kissed him. And yet the prince was rapidly sent into exile to Valencia and then to some sort of prison in Tarragona, where he was kept in chains. Then, at Easter 585, the king tried to trick Hermenegild into accepting Holy Communion from an Arian bishop. The prince—still a Catholic—refused, and his father, the king, ordered his murder. The Hermenegild saga was over.

  The tragedy remained a forbidden subject in Spain for many generations, but the process of politico-religious change that had been set in motion could not be stopped.

  In 586 several top Catholic clergymen who had gone into exile during the war with Hermenegild returned to a warm welcome—and some contemporary Catholic sources even claimed that the Visigothic king, Leovigild, converted to Catholicism in secret shortly before he died in April 586. Leovigild’s younger son, Reccared, took the throne, and ten months later converted to Catholicism—secretly, for fear of how the Arian nobility would react.

  First the new king called a conference of Arian bishops to try to persuade them to move in a Catholic direction, but with little success. Then he called a joint meeting of Arian and Catholic bishops, and finally he convened a meeting solely for Catholic bishops at which he announced his conversion. There followed at least two Arian assassination attempts and an armed Arian revolt, but all three failed, and Arian church property was given to the Catholic Church. The ban on Catholic Church councils was lifted, and Arianism became an illegal heresy in Spain, just as it had been for many years in much of the rest of Europe.

  In Toledo in 589, Reccared presided over the first Catholic Church council to be held in Spain for forty years. Addressing the assembled bishops, he criticized his father’s Arianism and proposed the adoption of a specifically oriental eastern-Roman element into church services, namely, the Creed of Constantinople. This, he said, should be recited in unison by congregations before the Lord’s Prayer “so the people would believe that which they had to repeat regularly, and would therefore be unable to plead ignorance of the true faith.”7

  Perhaps more sinisterly, he also accepted the Catholic clergy’s demands for a clampdown on the Jews. In an effort to further ingratiate himself with the Catholic clergy, he introduced new legal restrictions on Spain’s Jewish population. Jews were banned from holding a whole array of public offices, and all sexual contact between Jews and Christians was banned. In some areas the Church further decreed, or tried to decree, that Jews were forbidden to chant the Psalms at funerals and that Jewish slaves would be whipped a hundred times if they did not rest on the Christian Sabbath.

  Reccared’s conversion in 587 marked, in a real sense, the birth (or more accurately, the conception) of modern Spain. Before 587, Spain had been a strictly binational state, with two utterly distinct legal systems, languages, religious traditions, and political systems. Now suddenly there was only one religion—Catholicism. Gothic, as a language, was fading and a local Latin dialect, proto-Spanish, was coming into general use. Roman dress and fashion prevailed. Intermarriage between Visigothic Spaniards and Romano-Spaniards had been allowed for a decade or so, and Spanish anti-Semitism had snarled its way into existence and would reach horrific proportions within a generation, remaining a key aspect of Spanish culture for centuries.

  The more accessible monarchy of the Germanic past, with its lack of hereditary law, had already been dead for fifteen years, replaced by a more centralized, exalted, semihereditary system that enhanced its power by making the Catholic Church of the majority Romano-Spanish population a virtual tool of government. The internal needs of the monarchy and the catalytic role of the external force of the Roman Empire brought about a state that was fast developing as a more centralized, devoutly Catholic, nationalistic, and stridently anti-Semitic entity, the key traditions and characteristics of which were revived in opposition to the Islamic conquest and occupation, survived in exile during the Islamic interlude—and reemerged as the ideological foundations of imperial and modern Spain.

  Spain—and indeed Europe as a whole—had been transformed by the climatic and epidemiological developments of the sixth century.8 In a very real sense, 535 and its aftermath had helped bring ancient Europe and the ancient Middle East to a close and had given birth to their proto-modern successors.

  PART SEVEN

  DISASTER IN

  THE ORIENT

  19

  C H I N E S E

  C A T A S T R O P H E

  China is today the world’s most populous nation, accounting for around 20 percent of the world’s total population. In terms of area, it is the third biggest on the planet. Its unity and its huge number of inhabitants are likely to combine to make this giant among nations one of the prime political and economic players of future world history. The concept and even the name of China as a united political entity go back to the Qin (pronounced “chin”) Dynasty of the third century B.C., but in terms of real political continuity, the unification of China dates from the late sixth century A.D.

  Although China had been politically united between 221 B.C. and A.D. 220, for mos
t of the succeeding 369 years the country was politically fragmented at any given time into a number of independent states (up to sixteen in the north and just one or two in the south). Thus, with the exception of 60 years of total fragmentation in the tenth century and 180 years of a straight north-south split in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, China has since the sixth century enjoyed almost a millennium and a half of political unity.

  It was the history of the sixth century that produced that unity—and it was the climatic disaster of the 530s that, probably more than any other factor, shaped that century’s history.

  “Yellow dust rained down like snow.”

  Thus wrote the author of one of the great chronicles of sixth-century China, the Nan shi, or The History of the Southern Dynasties, describing the beginning of a terrible and fateful sequence of events that began sometime between mid-November and early December 535.

  A similar entry, adding only that the dust (ch’en in Chinese) could be “scooped up in handfuls,” was included for the month of December 536. And a third entry (for 1 February 537) reported that on that day “it rained hui” that was “yellow in colour.” The word hui was also used in another record of the 536 event, one contained in the Sui-shu, or The History of the Sui Dynasty. Whereas ch’en means “dust” or “dirt,” hui means “dust” or “ashes.”

  The potential difference in meaning lies at the heart of a great climatic conundrum. The mysterious ch’en or hui falling from the sky in late 535 and the winter of 536–537 must have been either volcanic ash or a totally extraordinary and unseasonable series of very severe dust storms caused by massive climatic disruption. But whatever the nature of the celestial dust, its arrival was the first evidence in China of a period of severe climatic dislocation.

  Other evidence of climatic chaos was not slow in coming. In July 537 China was hit by frost, while in August it snowed. The History of the Southern Dynasties recorded that “in July in Qingzhou and [another province] there was a fall of frost” and that “in August in Qingzhou there was snow,” which “ruined the crops.” Qingzhou, a low-lying province, is roughly at the same latitude as southern Spain and central California; summer frost and snow were, in normal times, virtually unknown.

  With the crops destroyed in Qingzhou and several other provinces, there was a widespread famine. The crop failure must have lasted for two years, for in September 538, “since there had already been deaths from famine,” there was an amnesty of rents and taxes.

  All these entries come from the Ben ji (the basic annals) of The History of the Southern Dynasties. However, the northern Chinese annals (the Bei shi) also record a sharp climatic deterioration and a series of famines for the mid-530s.

  “Because of drought, there was an imperial edict which ordered that in the capital [Ch’ang-an], in all provinces, commanderies and districts, one should bury the corpses,” says the Bei shi for late April to early May 535.1 “[There was] great drought. [The government] had to provide water at the city gates [of Ch’ang-an] and the hall gates [of the palace] as well as the gates of the government offices,” says the entry for late June and early July of the same year. Then in September 536, in the north Chinese “provinces of Bian, Si, Zhuo and Jian, hail fell” and there was “a great famine.” By December the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that the government had to send special inspectors “to investigate [the conditions of] the famished refugees who were roaming around north of the Yellow River.”

  And in Shaanxi province, “the land within the Passes,” The Annals of the Western Wei in the Bei shi state that there was “a great famine,” and that “the people practiced cannibalism and 70 to 80 percent of the population died.”

  “In the following year [in March], because there had been hail and drought in nine provinces, there was a great famine and as the people fled [in search of food] I begged [the emperor] that the [state] granaries should be open to give relief,” wrote a senior government official, as the climatic dislocation continued. In the summer of 538 in what is now the province of Shandong there was a massive flood. The waters rose so high that “the toads and frogs were croaking from the trees.”2

  The climatic chaos and its resultant agricultural failures appear to have had two immediate political consequences. First, the emperor of southern China tried to invoke the powers of heaven to improve the situation.³ He decided that he personally would carry out the state’s major annual agricultural religious ritual, the ceremonial plowing of the imperial wheat field.

  In this ritual, in March the emperor personally plowed the first furrow in the field. The three highest governmental officials then did the next nine furrows (three each), followed by other top officials, who did five each. Selected commoners did the rest. The ritual plowing was preceded by a grain offering to a Chinese-style agriculture god, the Divine Husbandman, who they believed had long ago given the knowledge of agriculture to the Chinese people.

  The imperial plowing ritual had fallen into disuse for most of the fifth century and was performed only infrequently in the first third of the sixth century. Then in 535 climatic disaster and crop failure seem to have forced the southern authorities to make it an annual ritual, and it was held each year from then until 541, excepting 539. They had to be seen by the population to be doing something to remedy a situation in which tens of thousands of people—perhaps even hundreds of thousands—were dying.

  The second political consequence of the famine was far more serious. The crop failures and the result of social dislocation and poverty undermined the economy of the southern Chinese state. The tax system virtually collapsed, presumably because there was no surplus wealth to collect. The 538 tax amnesty—introduced in twelve provinces because of famine deaths—was repeated in 541, but this time throughout southern China and for a period of five years. After that it was extended three more times, until 551.

  The initial reason for the collapse of the tax system was certainly the poverty caused by the famine, but other related causes lay behind the constant renewal of the amnesty. As poverty persisted and the lack of tax revenue destroyed the government’s ability to rule effectively, popular revolts began to break out.4 Three are known—one ethnic, one probably partly religious, and one political—but there were probably others of which no record survives.

  The ethnic revolt almost certainly owed its genesis to the weakened state of central government at this juncture. Its epicenter was the Hanoi area of Vietnam, which was then part of the southern Chinese state. Under the leadership of a commoner called Li Fen (probably a Sinicized Vietnamese), the rebels defeated the local Chinese governor in 541 and then two years later humbled an army led by a member of the emperor’s family, the Prince of Linyi. Soon the rebel leader, buoyed with confidence, started calling himself emperor. With central government massively weakened in financial terms, it took another two years to suppress the revolt. But eventually—in 546—Li Fen was captured and thrown into a cave, where presumably he perished.

  The second revolt was briefer but, in a way, perhaps more serious than the Vietnamese uprising. It broke out in 542, engulfed an area only three hundred miles southwest of the capital, near the city of Ancheng, and owed its origins to the famine in two ways. Like the Vietnamese insurrection, the Ancheng rebels almost certainly took advantage of the tax-starved central government’s weakness. Perhaps more significant, the rebels probably saw the famine and the ensuing poverty in millenarian religious terms.

  In conventional Buddhist belief, the next Buddha—the Maitreya—will return to save the world when the last Buddha’s message of ethical enlightenment has been forgotten and the world is again totally steeped in evil. This “second coming” is not thought of as being imminent. It is something that will be necessary only thousands of years hence. But in nonconventional “heretical” Buddhism—the so-called Left Way—the Maitreya was expected rather sooner. It is likely that the Ancheng rebels included just such messianic radicals who regarded the increased levels of poverty and suffering
as evidence that the world had entered a period of darkness and decay and that the coming of their Messiah was imminent. They may well have seen their revolt as preparing the way for their savior.

  The entry in the Nan shi for early 542 is quite terse—it suggests the probable heretical affiliations of the rebels in its note that ‘’the commoner Liu Jinggong from Ancheng commandery, embraced the Left Way and rebelled.” His followers, who numbered tens of thousands, took over some five thousand square miles of what is now northern Jiangxi province. In the end, the emperor’s son, Prince Yi (of whom more later), sent an army that successfully defeated the rebels and captured their leader, Liu Jinggong, who was taken to the capital and beheaded in the city’s central marketplace.

  By 546 the country was in such an appalling financial state that the currency began to lose its value. In 547 it was said that more rebellion was brewing. As in other parts of the world, the climatic events of the mid-530s ushered in a period of climatic instability, and in 544, 548, and 549 China was hit by three more droughts.

  In the northern Chinese Bei shi, a major drought is cited for 548, while The History of the Southern Dynasties records extremely serious droughts and subsequent famines in 549 and 550, in which the population was reduced to cannibalism in some areas. The accounts say that in the famine of 549 “people ate each other” in the great city of Jiujiang (now Jiangzhou) on the south bank of the Yangtze, and in 550 “from spring until summer there was a great drought, people ate one another and in the capital [modern Nanjing] it was especially serious.”