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Chapter 1
I N T R O D U C T I O N : G E O G R A P H I C A L A N D
H I S T O R I C A L B A C K G R O U N D
T h e s u b j e c t o f t h i s b o o k is the evolution of the pattern and structure of world trade over the past millennium. If we used the expression “world trade” for the current year or any period in the recent past it would have a clear and unambiguous connotation. The com- ponent units would be individual sovereign nation-states and “world trade” would be the goods and services that flow between them, across national borders. The individual nation-states, or “countries,” could be classified in various ways: geographically on the basis of continent or climate zone, “stage of development” in terms of level of per capita income, or by their relative endowments of factors of production. We would then relate some classification of the commodities that enter world trade, say “primary products” and “manufactured goods” or “capital-intensive” and “labor-intensive” goods, to the geographical or other characteristics of the countries and this would constitute what is meant by the “structure and pattern of world trade.” It is when we turn to the question of the long-run evolution of this “structure and pattern of world trade” that a host of problems arises. What are the beginning and end points over which this evolution is to be examined? What if political boundaries shift, as they undoubtedly do, so that “countries” which exist at the end point did not exist at the beginning, or which existed at the beginning did not at the end? The longer the time span chosen the more acute this problem becomes, and a millennium is a very long time. A bold solution to this difficulty was offered in an influential article by Mauro (1961), who proposed an “intercontinental model” for the study of world trade in the early modern period, in the form of an interregional input–output table or matrix that would record the flows of goods and precious metals between the continents over time. This would eliminate the problem of shifting political boundaries by replacing the evanescent nation-state with the presumably immutable geographic entity of the continent. Toward the end of his article, Mauro explicitly evoked the
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invaluable work of the interwar International Scientific Committee on Price History (Cole and Crandall 1964), which collected internationally comparable price data for several countries, and expressed the hope that such a collaborative endeavor would fill in his trade matrix for the early modern period, and presumably other periods as well. While this hope has not as yet been fulfilled, we will adopt Mauro’s basic organizing framework throughout this book. While not ignoring flows of goods and services within regions, our main focus throughout will be on interregional and intercontinental flows. As Lewis and Wigen (1997) have pointed out, however, in the very title of their stimulating work, the notion of continents as fixed and self-evident divisions of the Earth’s surface is itself something of a myth. They coin the useful term “metageography” (p. ix), to mean “the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world.” Examples of metageography, in addition to the familiar example of the continents, would be the “North–South” division of the world between advanced and developing countries, or the First, Second, and Third World classification that was common during the Cold War. While Australasia, Africa, North and South America, and Antarctica are clearly distinct physical entities with well-defined physical boundaries, the separation of Europe from the rest of the contiguous Eurasian landmass is arbitrary and problematic. The fre- quently invoked Urals have never been an effective barrier, and it has long been debated whether Russia is in Europe, Asia, or both. Indeed, at the time of writing the question of Europe’s eastern boundaries was one of the key political headaches confronting the leadership of that continent. Some classification of the Earth’s surface, however, is obviously essential for our purposes. Lewis and Wigen (p. 13) propose the concept of “world regions,” namely “multi-country agglomerations, defined not by their supposed physical separation from one another (as are continents) but rather (in theory) on the basis of important historical and cultural bonds.” In what follows we will demarcate seven “world regions” covering the Eurasian landmass and Africa north of the Sahara. These are (i) Western Europe, (ii) Eastern Europe, (iii) North Africa and Southwest Asia, (iv) Central or Inner Asia, (v) South Asia, (vi) Southeast Asia, and (vii) East Asia.
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Western Europe 2
We use this term to designate the western extremity of the Eurasian landmass, starting roughly at the eastern borders of the contemporary nation-states of Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia, including also all the offshore islands in the Atlantic and the Mediter- ranean (see figure 1). The eastern boundary is chosen to reflect the extent of the cultural influence associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the Latin script. Thus the western Slavic nations of the Poles and Czechs are included while the eastern Slavic Russians and the southern Slavic Serbs are not. The Hungarians are also included on the basis of their religious affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church, despite their ethnic and linguistic differences from the rest of Latin Christendom. Our division of Western and Eastern Europe therefore turns on the difference between the heritages of the western and eastern branches of Christianity in the shaping of the political and social institutions of the two regions. Linguistically, our definition of Western Europe includes all Romance languages, except Romanian, all Germanic and Celtic languages, Polish, Czech and Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian, Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian. Geographically, this region has many natural advantages that have often been remarked upon. Perhaps the most important is the high ratio of coastline to land area, greater than for any other continent according to Rhoads Murphey (1970, p. 87). Western Europe also has the lowest average elevation and the greatest proportional extent of plains (ibid., p. 90). It enjoys a relatively mild temperature in relation to latitude, due to the effect of the Gulf Stream. The Great European Plain that stretches unbroken from the Atlantic to the Urals has long been highly fertile and productive. The many rivers, draining into the Baltic, the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, have kept transport costs low and market areas connected. The mountain ranges that form the central spine of the peninsula provide valuable woodland and pasture for livestock in the high valleys, and are traversed by accessible passes that connect the shores of the Mediterranean in the south to those of the Baltic and the Atlantic in the north. At the same time, Eric Jones (2003) has observed that there are a sufficient number of natural barriers within the region—the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the English Channel, to name but three—to make its political unification
2 Sources for this section include Barraclough (1976), Bartlett (1993), Becher (2003), Boussard (1976), Collins (1991), McCormick (2001), McEvedy (1961), McKitterick (1995, parts I and II), Murphey (1970), O’Brien (2002), Reuter (1999, parts I and II), and Riche (1993).
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Figure 1. Western Europe.
militarily difficult. Finally, Murphey (p. 90) notes that Western Europe is “the tip of the great triangle formed by Eurasia as a whole” and is the “point of the land funnel” along which influences of all kinds can flow from east to west. 3
3 On this last point, see Diamond (1997).
I N T RO D U C T I O N 7
marking the beginnings of the subsequent nation-states of France in the west and Germany in the east, providing the “birth certificate of modern Europe” as Riche (1993, p. 168) eloquently puts it. The central band, stretching from the North Sea to Italy, was the territory that went with the imperial title to Lothar. The Carolingian line eventually died out, to be replaced in France by the dynasty of the Capetians in 987, and in Germany by the Ottonians of Saxony. At its height the dimensions of Charlemagne’s empire were unde- niably impressive. According to Becher (2003, p. 118) it encompassed 1 million square kilometers with 180 dioceses, 700 monasteries, 750 royal estates, 150 palaces, and nearly 700 administrative districts. Given the available technology and resources, however, it was impos- sible to impose any unified central administration over such a vast domain. The court could not remain permanently in the capital at Aachen and wandered peripatetically from place to place through- out the year. The administrative districts were under counts, with dukes sometimes overseeing groups of counties. Central control was attempted through the dispatch of royal emissaries, known as missi, while diplomatic correspondence and administrative records were in the hands of clerics in the royal chapel. After the breakup of the empire toward the close of the ninth century the various dukes and counts, and even lower-level local leaders, increasingly began to govern independently, tied together only by the looser bonds of feudal vassalage. This tendency was particularly marked in the western sections of the empire, what is now France. In the eastern or German section of the empire, the unity of the state was preserved to a much greater extent. Here the last Carolingian died in 911, to be replaced from 918 as king by Henry, duke of Saxony, who founded the Ottonian dynasty that lasted until 1024. The German kingdom in this era was a sort of federation of a few great duchies, such as Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia, Thuringia, and Swabia. The ducal ruling houses, as Barraclough (1976, p. 111) noted, were mostly descended from the commanders of imperial frontier armies, with a tradition of loyalty to central authority. They were willing to elect or nominate one among them to be somewhat more than “first among equals” in their own collective interest against barbarian and other enemies. During the long reign of Otto the Great (936–73), the German kingdom was established as clearly the most powerful state in all of Europe, with military victories over the eastern Slavic tribes as well as (and in particular) the Hungarians, who had been ravaging all the settled lands around them for decades, at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. Like Charlemagne, Otto also invaded Italy to protect the pope and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 962, a title that survived
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until it was abolished by Napoleon in 1806. Despite its prestige, in practice this title did not imply much more than the addition of northern Italy to the territories that Otto and his successors ruled in their native land, and considerable influence over the other states and cities in both Germany and Italy. In addition it involved them in a lengthy and exhausting struggle with the papacy over the investiture of bishops and other issues involving the “separation of church and state.” Despite the glamor of these Italian incursions, the main thrust of the Ottonians was their relentless pressure and expansion on the open plains to the east against the pagan Slavic tribes. Just as the Franks had done to the Saxons themselves two centuries earlier, the Saxons followed a policy of conquest and forced conversion of the Slavic tribes in their way. The frontier was extended eastwards by the establishment of fortresses and garrisons along the “marches,” and also by episcopal foundations, the most important of which was at Magdeburg. A great uprising of the Slavs in 983 halted the expansion temporarily, but it was resumed after a generation. Support of the church was a major political technique of the Ottonians, enhancing their power not only on the frontier but also within the duchies themselves. Otto the Great’s grandson, Otto the Third, died in 1002 at the age of 21 before his grandiose plans for a reunification of the eastern and western empires and churches through marriage to a Byzantine princess could be realized. The power and prestige of the Ottonians was maintained and preserved by the succeeding Salian dynasty, starting in 1025. A notable development of the tenth century, reflecting the success of the Ottonians, was the adoption of Roman Catholic Christianity by the western Slavic peoples of Bohemia and Poland and by the previously nomadic Hungarian invaders soon after their defeat at Lechfeld. The Czechs of Bohemia, inhabiting the valley of the Vltava, a tributary of the Elbe, converted under German pressure early in the tenth century, with a bishopric established later at their capital Prague. Bohemia functioned henceforth as a duchy of the German Empire, closely related to Bavaria. The Polish ruler Mieszko the First, of the Piast dynasty, converted in 966 and shrewdly placed his realm under the protection of the Holy See to prevent complete German domination. His successor, Boleslaw Chrobry, the “Brave,” expanded the domain in all directions against other Slavic peoples, while maintaining generally good relations with the empire. Otto the Third assisted him in the establishment of the capital Gniezno as an archbishopric in 1000. The year 1000 also saw the crowning of the future Saint Stephen as king of Hungary, after his conversion together with his father Géza in 995,
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them from waging relentless war against each other, ending in the establishment of the “Mercian Supremacy,” the hegemony of the central kingdom of Mercia over all the others, for much of the eighth and early ninth centuries. King Offa, who ruled from 757 to 796, was notable for the volume and quality of his coinage, the scale of his public works such as the famous Offa’s Dyke that he erected as a barrier against the Welsh, and the trade treaty that he negotiated with his great contemporary Charlemagne, who treated him as an equal. The level of culture attained by Anglo-Saxon England in this period is indicated by the “Ecclesiastical History of the English People” written by the Venerable Bede around 730, and the career of Alcuin of York, another great scholarly cleric. The ninth century saw England ravaged by the Danish Vikings, who began by raiding monasteries and coastal towns before occupying extensive territory in the northeastern part of the country, which came to be known as the “Danelaw,” with the capital at York. They met stubborn resistance by the English led by King Alfred of Wessex (871–99). He eventually defeated the invaders and confined them by treaty to the Danelaw. His successors eventually recaptured all of the lost areas and by 1000 ruled over a unified England. The Danish king Harold Bluetooth had meanwhile converted to Christianity in 965, followed soon after by Olaf Tryggvason of Norway and Olof Skötkonung of Sweden. The Danes returned in force to England soon afterwards and Harold’s grandson Canute ruled England from 1016 to 1035. What this brief synopsis has attempted to demonstrate is the emer- gence of the entity that we are calling Western Europe from a fusion of the legacy of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church with that of the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic tribes. This fusion is well illustrated by the career of the aforementioned Alcuin, educated at the cathedral school in York, who met Charlemagne in Parma in 781 while the latter was on his way to Rome. Alcuin became Charlemagne’s most influential adviser, and while abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours worked to promote a standardized version of written Latin, the Carolingian minuscule. This provided a means for information to be commu- nicated and stored across the Carolingian Empire, allowing for the more efficient diffusion of both religious and secular knowledge across Western Europe (Blum and Dudley 2003). The process that began with the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis around 500 was brought to a close with those of the Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and Scandinavians in the last century of the first millennium.
I N T RO D U C T I O N 11
Eastern Europe 4
The western borders of this region, for our present purposes, will approximately coincide with those of the contemporary states of the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Ukraine, together with the Balkan Peninsula (see figure 1). The major formative cultural influences on the region were the Byzantine Empire and the Greek Orthodox Church, so we will also include the entire area of the present state of Turkey, which constituted the core area of the empire, with its capital at Constantinople (now Istanbul). The eastern borders, with the neighboring world region of Central or Inner Asia, will be shifting with the frontier between the settled agriculture of the Russians on the one hand and the forest zone of the northern hunter-gatherers and the steppe of the pastoral nomads on the other, altering with the balance of military power. As defined it is a very large continental area with wide extremes of temperature. It is marked by major, partly navigable rivers such as the Don, the Dnieper, and the Volga, which drain into the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The main mountain ranges other than in the Balkans are the Urals and the Caucasus, bridging the isthmus between these two inland seas. The first Russian state was the so-called Kievan Rus, a loose fed- eration with its capital at Kiev. The Rus were Scandinavian Vikings, drawn to the east by the prospects of booty, mercenary military service, and the trade in furs, amber, and slaves for luxury products and silver from Byzantium and the Islamic World. They formed a small warrior aristocracy ruling over a mass of Slav peasantry. Between Kiev and the northern principality of Novgorod the Rus maintained a profitable monopoly of the trade routes linking the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Caspian along the rivers and the portages between them. The Rus always had to contend, however, with powerful steppe nomadic peoples such as the Bulgars, Pechenegs, and Khazars for control over these trade routes, and they also had to protect their own sedentary agricultural populations from these predators. The Russians and other Slavic peoples were initially barbarians on the northern fringes of the Byzantine Empire. By the familiar logic of acculturation they fell under the cultural sway of the more advanced civilization. The Serbs and the Bulgarians in the Balkans were con- verted in the eighth and ninth centuries and the Kievan Rus Prince Vladimir was baptized and married the sister of the Byzantine emperor
4 Sources for this section include Christian (1998, chapters 13 and 14), Franklin and Shepard (1996), Hoetzsch (1966, chapter 1), McEvedy (1961), Obolensky (1957), O’Brien (2002), Reuter (1999, part III), and Vernadsky (1948).
I N T RO D U C T I O N 13
sagacious and formidable ruler, suppressing the tribe responsible for Igor’s death and reforming the tribute collection system on a more centralized basis. She personally converted to Christianity on a visit to Constantinople but insisted on independence for the Kievan church before adopting it as the national religion. The Byzantines balked, prompting her to negotiate unsuccessfully with Otto the Great for the adoption of Roman Catholicism instead. Svyatoslav (962–72) was a staunch pagan and his reign was a whirlwind of military activity in all directions. He destroyed the prosperous and influential empire of the Khazar steppe nomads and intervened actively in Bulgaria and the Balkans both in alliance with and against the Byzantines. He was ambushed and killed by the Pechenegs while returning laden with booty from his Balkan conquests to Kiev. At the time of Svyatoslav’s death his three sons were serving as his lieutenants in key cities and regions. Vladimir, based in Novgorod, pre- vailed over his brothers with the aid of Viking and Turkish mercenaries in the ensuing struggle for power. He continued his father’s support of paganism even though Christianity was spreading among the people. He eventually realized that paganism had no future and apparently considered Islam and Roman Catholicism along with Orthodox Chris- tianity as possible choices for the future state religion. The matter was finally settled when the new Byzantine emperor Basil II (976– 1025) urgently requested military assistance from Vladimir against an internal revolt. The inducement was marriage to his sister Anna, provided of course that Vladimir agreed to be baptized. In the royal marriage market of the tenth century a Byzantine porphyrogenita such as Anna was a prize catch. She had even been denied to Otto the Great as a bride for his son, the future Otto II, who had to accept another princess not “born in the purple.” Vladimir sent a detachment of his Vikings to Constantinople and they promptly suppressed the rebellion. Basil now attempted to renege on the agreement and had to be persuaded by Vladimir’s seizure of the strategic port city of Kherson in the Crimea before he dispatched the royal bride for the conversion and marriage, after which Kherson was returned to him by Vladimir as a “bridegroom’s gift.” Vladimir’s conversion, which amounted to that of the entire Rus nation, thus set the seal on the series of such events in Scandinavia, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary that were one of the most remarkable features of European history in the late tenth century. Vladimir embarked on an extensive program of church building, charitable works, and promotion of education. He died in 1015 and was canonized in the thirteenth century. Another powerful early state in Eastern Europe was the Bulgarian Empire that mounted a serious challenge to Byzantium itself, even
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though its church organization and literary culture were completely derivative from that source. The Bulgars were a Turkic people, a branch of which had settled in the lower Danube basin, dominating the local Slavic peasantry. Under the pagan Khan Krum in 811 they defeated a Byzantine army and killed the emperor, making a drinking cup out of his skull. Krum and his successors conquered much of the Balkans, though checked in the west by the Germans and the Serbs. The cultural attraction and the political and military influence of Byzantium proved too strong, however, and under Boris I (852–89, died 907) the Bulgarians converted to Christianity in 869. A major later consequence of this decision was the adoption by Bulgaria of the Cyrillic script and Slavonic liturgy devised by the monks Cyril and Methodius, originally for the Czech state of Moravia, which, however, rejected it in favor of the Latin liturgy. Moravia’s loss was the gain not only of Bulgaria but also of all the Slavic Greek Orthodox Churches, since it gave them linguistic independence from the Greek of Byzantium itself, a political asset of considerable value. This Cyrillic script used by all the Orthodox Slavic peoples, in contrast to the Latin of their western cousins, is a cultural difference between them that has persisted to this day. Despite these conversions, conflict in the Balkans and southern Russia was intense, not only between Orthodox Christians themselves but also with Germans and Poles in the north and west, and with pagan and Muslim nomadic peoples in the east. Boris I conquered Macedonia and secured an opening to the Aegean Sea in the west of the Balkan Peninsula. His son Simeon I ruled from 893 to 927 and his reign is regarded as the apex of the country’s history. He declared himself tsar of the Bulgarians and the Romans, i., a rival to the Byzantine emperor. He besieged Constantinople several times but never succeeded in capturing the great city. The Byzantines kept Simeon and his successors in check by inciting incursions by the Hungarians, Pechenegs, and Russians into Bulgarian territory. Basil II, the emperor who converted Vladimir, inflicted a crushing defeat on them in 1018, earning himself the designation of the “Bulgar-Slayer.” We have thus seen that by the year 1000 the Byzantine Empire had firmly established its Eastern European successor states in Russia and Bulgaria. Serbia had already entered the fold in the ninth century while neighboring Croatia went into the orbit of Rome, a dividing line that has persisted to this day. We now turn to the emergence of what can also be thought of as another successor state, though of a wholly different kind, the Arab caliphate.
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FF E R G H A N
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The early conquests were consolidated and extended by the Umay- yad caliphate, which ruled from Damascus, the capital of the Islamic World from 661 to 750. It is possibly the oldest city in the world and was a provincial capital for most of the ancient empires up to the Byzantine. Situated east of the mountain of Jabal Qasiyun—from which descend streams that watered the lush oasis of al-Ghutah that served as a market garden of the city, with a rich variety of fruit trees, and close to a plain that could provide the crops to feed it—Damascus must also have appealed to the Umayyads on strategic and economic grounds as a crossroads of the caravan trade. They fortified the ancient citadel and constructed the architectural masterpiece of the Great Mosque on the site of the Christian cathedral. Ashtor (1976a, p. 13) cites an estimate that the Arab population of Syria in 720 was about 200, out of a total of about 4 million, or roughly 5%. The population of Damascus was said to have been 100,000 in 1350, when it “was well past its peak” (Watson 1983, p. 133). The peak must have occurred during the reigns of Abd al-Malik and his successors al-Walid (705–15) and Hisham (724–43), under whom the administration became more centralized along with the coinage, with Arabic becoming the language of the civil administration. Despite intense internal conflicts, the Islamic World thrived eco- nomically, with a wide variety of new crops being introduced from the east, leading to the growth of large new towns, from Cordoba in Spain to Al-Qayrawan in Tunisia and Cairo in Egypt, while Damascus
I N T RO D U C T I O N 17
continued to expand. Arab armies advanced across the Oxus into Central Asia, occupying Bukhara and Samarkand in 710, defeating a Tang Chinese force at the Battle of the Talas River in 751, and entering the Ferghana Valley, the easternmost point of their advance. The Indian province of Sind was also conquered early in the eighth century, with Multan in the Punjab taken in 711. All of these areas were in addition to the initial acquisition of about two-thirds of the Byzantine Empire and the entire territory of the Persian Sassanian dynasty. The Arabs also controlled the southern half of the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, including the towns of Tiflis and Derbent. The empire in 750 thus stretched from Agadir on the Atlantic coast to the Oxus in Central Asia and the Indus in India. It was clearly impossible to establish any sort of unified administra- tion over such an extensive terrain. But how was control to be exercised over the conquered lands? One possibility was to disperse the Arab rulers among the local populations, allowing them to extract taxes individually for their maintenance and support. Had such a course been followed it is likely that the Arab elite would eventually have been absorbed socially and culturally into the diverse communities over which they ruled, as happened to ruling-class Vikings in Normandy or Russia. The second caliph, Umar (634–44), made the far-reaching alternative decision of concentrating the Arabs in fortified garrison cities, maintaining themselves out of cash stipends or ata, paid out from the central treasury to which all taxes on the subject peoples were transmitted. Since Muslims were exempted from most taxes, this created an ambivalent attitude toward conversion on the part of the Arab conquerors. Local communities were thus relatively free to run their own affairs without bureaucratic interference, provided of course that they paid the jizya (poll tax), imposed only on non- Muslims, and the kharaj (land tax). The system could work well because the former Byzantine and Sassanian lands were already monetized under their previous rulers. Another major advantage was that by clustering together in their garrison cities the Arabs maintained their own language and culture, which were gradually acquired by the subject peoples instead. The disadvantage was that the new Arab ruling elite was in danger of becoming pure rentiers, except when they were called upon to fight against internal revolts or external invaders. Eventually, this crucial military function was increasingly turned over to specialized military slaves of Turkic or other foreign origin, with very adverse consequences for the caliphate. In 750 the Umayyad caliphate was replaced after a violent overthrow by the Abbasids, who altered the Arabic tribal character of the regime in
I N T RO D U C T I O N 19
stipends that this group continued to draw as rewards for past service were abolished as part of a far-reaching military and fiscal reform. A new orthodoxy in religion was also imposed, holding that the Qur’an (Koran) was “created” and therefore subject to changing interpretation rather than being the unchanging and eternal word of God. After the death of al-Mu’tasim in 842 the Abbasid regime had some brief periods of achievement and success, but the long-term trend was downward. The main reason seems to have been the difficulty of raising or even maintaining the revenue necessary to preserve the integrity of the state. Hugh Kennedy (1986, p. 189) states that the Sawad generated 100 million dirhems a year in revenue under the early Abbasids up to the reign of al-Ma’mun, but this fell to a mere 30 million a year under al-Muqtadir in 918. There were other prosperous regions such as Egypt and Fars but the center did not have access to these resources, which were largely under the control of local powers. The final blow to the prosperity of Iraq came when the great Nahrawan canal, the main source of water to the Sawad, was deliberately cut by a feuding warlord in 937 in an attempt to impede the march of a rival, thereby ruining the work of centuries (ibid., p. 199). The tenth century also saw the caliphate fall under the “protec- torate” of an Iranian warlord clan known as the Buyids (941–1055) because of their descent from a humble fisherman from the Caspian Sea area who went by the name of Buyeh. The three brothers who founded the fortunes of the clan came to power separately in Fars, Rayy, and Baghdad itself, but pooled their assets in a sort of family federation with each supporting the others. The basis of their power was the armies that they built up of infantry from their home area of Daylam, south of the Caspian, and mounted Turkish ghulams. This enabled them to control the Abbasid caliphs in conjunction with allies from the secretarial class, although the Abbasids continued to be maintained as spiritual figureheads. Despite being the “protectors” of a Sunni Arab caliphate, the Buyids had pro-Shia religious sensibilities and displayed an affinity to native Persian and Sassanian royal prac- tices, thus enhancing the Persian cast that the Abbasids themselves gave to their own regime. Buyid officers were granted iqtas, lands from which they could enjoy the revenues in return for military service, thus creating a sort of feudalism, with their own role being like that of the Merovingian mayors of the palace or the later shoguns of Japan. On the whole their regime was quite an effective one, with the province of Fars in particular enjoying great prosperity. Thus the decline of Baghdad and its environs did not mean that the entire Islamic World or even the Abbasid lands as a whole were necessarily undergoing
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a similar experience. The fiscal imbalance between the claims of the army and the ability of the economy to generate the necessary revenue remained, however, and left the system vulnerable to external shocks and threats. Both the caliphs and their “protectors” finally fell victim to the rising new power of the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks. Not only was there constant conflict at the center of the Arab empire, the initial unity of the empire soon began to disintegrate as a consequence of internal dynastic quarrels, religious schism, and the natural tendency of the segments more distant from the center to go their separate ways. Thus by the ninth century there were independent dynasties in North Africa such as the Idrisids (789–906) of Morocco and the Aghlabids (800–909) of Tunisia. The founder of the Idrisids was from a family of sharifs (descendants of the prophet) who fled to North Africa from Medina after a failed revolt against the Abbasids. His lineage attracted a following of Berber tribes who helped him found the city of Fez as the capital of a new kingdom, attracting Arab immigrants from the east and Spain. The Aghlabid dynasty originated as a heredity fief granted to a military governor of Ifriqiyah (Tunisia and eastern Algeria) by the caliph Harun al-Rashid in return for payment of an annual sum of 40,000 dinars. The capital of this dynasty was at Al-Qayrawan, which was developed as both a religious and cultural center. The Aghlabids also invaded and eventually occupied Sicily and raided the vicinity of Rome. In eastern Iran and Transoxiana the frontier states of the Tahirids (821–73), Saffarids (873–900), and Samanids (819–999) were inde- pendent in all but name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. All of these dynasties were of Iranian extraction and founded by former Abbasid officials, except for the somewhat socially revolutionary Saf- farids from the province of Sistan, founded by a coppersmith (saffar ) who unseated the Tahirids by leading a band of religious dissidents and bandits against them. The Samanids, who ruled from Bukhara, were a particularly wealthy and well-administered state. The Turkic dynasty of the Ghaznavids (961–1186), based in Ghazna and Kabul in Afghanistan, extended their sway westwards to the borders of Iraq at the expense of the Abbasids and the Buyids that were the de facto rulers of their realm. Another Turkic dynasty, the Qarakhanids, displaced the Samanids in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Transoxiana in 999 and ruled until 1211. The pattern in the east was thus for the Arab Abbasids to lose much of their effective power, first to their Iranian subjects and eventually to Turks, whether as invading tribes or as their own military. This process could be clearly seen in Egypt, where a Turkish military governor, Ahmad ibn Tulun, made himself into the virtually indepen- dent ruler in 868. Ibn Tulun built the magnificent mosque that still
