Download PDF | How the Barbarian Invasions Shaped the Modern World_ The Vikings, Vandals, Huns, Mongols, Goths, and Tartars who Razed the Old World and Formed the New (2008)
321 Pages
INTRODUCTION
THE COUNTRIES OF ENGLAND, FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND CHINA
are the result of the barbarian invasions. Moscow, Dublin, and Delhi are international centers of government, commerce, and culture because of the barbarians. Even the Europeans’ unexpected discovery of the Americas can be traced back to the barbarians.
These claims may surprise readers. After all, the barbarians were rapists, killers, looters, destroyers of great cities, and ravagers of the countryside. And they were all that. They caused pain and destruction everywhere they went, but by examining their motives for rampaging across the territory of their neighbors we can see how they set off a string of events that resulted in the world we know today.
Popular culture has always preferred an image of the barbarians as hairy, half-naked wild men who swoop down on a village, slaughter the men, carry off the pretty girls, and send the local monks scampering for the hills. On the other hand, academic historians generally tend to shy away from the violent aspects of the barbarian invasions, preferring to discuss the trade routes opened up by the Vikings, or making the case that Rome never truly fell. Both points of view are true to a certain degree, yet both fail to offer a clear picture of the barbarians because each puts too much emphasis on only one facet of the story. The goal of this book is to find a middle way between two extremes. A quick word about the term “barbarian.” It comes from the Greek word barbaros, which refers to people who cannot speak Greek, meaning uncivilized outsiders.
A GREAT LIGHT IS EXTINGUISHED
One of the liveliest debates recently has raged over the question, “Did Rome fall to the barbarians?” The answer seems obvious—on August 24, 410, an army of Goths led by their king Alaric stormed into the city, subjecting the defenseless inhabitants to three days of looting, torture, and murder. Clearly, Rome fell.
Many professional historians point out, however, that the entire Roman Empire did not collapse in late August 410, and while Rome’s provinces in western Europe were in for a rough time over the next few decades, Rome's provinces in the east, ruled by the emperor in Constantinople, flourished for centuries to come, virtually unaffected by the carnage and mayhem inflicted upon the west by the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the Franks, the Angles, and the Saxons. In other words, modern historians are trying to assure us that the sack of Rome in 410 was not the cataclysm we have been led to believe.
It’s easy to be dispassionate at a distance of 1,500 years, but to the people who lived at the time of Rome’s fall it seemed like the end of the world. “The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished!” lamented St. Jerome, the renowned translator of the Bible into Latin, and a man steeped in Roman culture who sheltered traumatized refugees from Rome in his monastery in Bethlehem.
In far-off Britain, a monk named Pelagius recorded that even in that remote province, “Everyone was mingled together and disturbed with fear; every household had its grief and an all-pervading terror gripped us.” While in North Africa that great theologian and classical scholar, St. Augustine, began writing his greatest work, City of God, a meditation on the folly of placing one’s trust in an earthly city when the only city that was truly eternal is found in heaven.
For the people of the Roman world, then, the fall of Rome to the Goths was a disaster. It struck at the heart of their civilization, it filled them with dread about where this barbarian group would strike next, it made them afraid that the only society they knew would be utterly destroyed—and if it were, how could they live in the coarse, violent world of the barbarians?
The fears of Jerome and Pelagius and countless others were well-founded. Within a century of the sack of the Rome, all of Rome’s western provinces would be in the hands of various barbarian nations. The infrastructure of the empire crumbled: aqueducts no longer brought fresh water into the cities, no one performed the necessary routine maintenance on Rome’s vast network of roads, the schools shut down, the libraries were trashed, and even the Latin language broke down, mutating into regional dialects that we know today as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French. It was truly a disaster, but over time, out of the ruins emerged modern Europe.
PIRATES AND MERCHANTS
For interested readers and researchers, there is no shortage of barbarian nations—the Alemanni, Magyars, Pechenegs, Sarmatians, and Gepids. The list is a long one. The purpose of this book, however, is to tell the stories of the most influential barbarian groups.
Every barbarian nation discussed in this book had a motive—often more than one—for invading its neighbors’ territory. The Goths wanted revenge for years of mistreatment at the hands of the Roman emperors. The Vandals, who began as a weak, starveling band in the forests of Germany, wanted power, security, and respect.
The Vikings wanted the gold of the monasteries of the British Isles, not to hoard, but to hand out to their retainers. It sounds odd to say that the Vikings went to such trouble to steal things they planned to give away, but in Norse society the most admired man was the lord who dispensed gold and silver generously to the men of his war band—and the most honorable way to amass such treasure was to raid one’s enemies.
In many ways the Vikings are the most interesting of the barbarian nations. They marauded from the northernmost islands of Scotland, to the Ukrainian city of Kiev, all the way to Pisa in Italy, and it is possible they even tried to raid the Egyptian port of Alexandria. Utterly fearless in battle, intrepid on the open sea, and merciless to anyone who resisted them, the Vikings terrorized western Europe for two hundred years.
Yet there was much more to the Vikings than mayhem. They were shrewd strategists who understood that a fragmented society such as the warring tribes of the Ukraine and Russia, or the petty kingdoms of England and Ireland, presented them with opportunities to pick off these tribes or kings one by one, establish themselves as the new rulers in the land, and then bring more Vikings in to colonize the country.
But settlement was only half of the Viking equation; they were also skillful, enthusiastic traders. From Kiev they used the Ukraine and Russia’s network of rivers to carry furs, amber, and slaves to the markets of Constantinople and beyond. In return they received jewels, spices, and silk from Asia, which they sold in the market towns of Sweden and Norway. Archeologists excavating in Scandinavia have uncovered Moorish coins and even little figures of Buddha—striking evidence of the commercial reach of the Vikings.
In Ireland the Vikings found a society that was almost entirely rural and pastoral, whose entire economy was based on the barter system, and whose commercial ties did not extend beyond England, Scotland, and Wales. Considering the number of excellent bays and harbors along the Irish coast, the Vikings must have considered this a tremendous waste.
To remedy the situation, the Vikings founded Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Arklow, Cork, and Limerick—the first cities in Ireland—all established as centers of international trade. To reach far-off markets, the Vikings taught the Irish how to build fine wooden ships. And to bring Irish merchants up to speed in the global marketplace, they introduced coins to the Irish economy.
TWO BARBARIAN KINGS
Every barbarian raid was led by a captain or a chief or even a king, yet in most cases the memory of these men died centuries ago. Attila and Genghis Khan are both the exceptions. Charismatic, daring, and relentless, both of these conquerors in their times astonished and terrified the world.
The fearsome reputation of Genghis Khan’s Mongols spread so widely in the thirteenth century that fishermen in Denmark refused to put out to sea, afraid they might run into a Mongol fleet in the North Atlantic (actually, the sea was the one place the Danish fishermen would have been safe—the Mongols never did learn the art of navigation).
Attila and Genghis shared an identical motivation: to make their poor, disunited, nomadic people a world power by merging them into an unstoppable fighting machine. Attila accomplished that original goal brilliantly. When he began, the Huns were desperately poor and often hungry. Within a few years the Huns’ crude wooden carts were top-heavy with the loot from countless cities and towns, as well as chests brimming with tribute money paid to Attila by the Roman emperor. But what would the Huns do with all this wealth?
They had no tradition of farming or living in towns, and in spite of their successes on the battlefield, they showed no inclination to settle down in any of the lands they had ravaged. Even Attila could not imagine anything for his people other than a nomadic existence. Consequently, after Attila’s sudden death, the Huns returned to the steppes of Asia, where they scattered, dissipated their wealth, and ultimately vanished from the historical record. Of all the barbarian kings and barbarian nations, Attila and his Huns are the most famous, yet aside from their fame as cruel marauders they have left ‘little perceivable trace upon the modern world.
Genghis Khan, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted for his Mongols—he wanted to build nations, he wanted his people to acquire the technological and artistic skills the Chinese possessed. At his death, his empire extended from China to eastern Europe, from Beijing to Moscow, and at each city Genghis conquered, he sorted out the engineers, the builders, the men of science, the craftsmen, and the artists, and sent them to Mongolia to teach their secrets to his people.
Commerce was also part of Genghis’ plan for lifting the Mongols to greatness. He reopened and made secure the Silk Road that linked the markets of India and China with those in Asia Minor, North Africa, and Europe.
It is often said that Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity are the four pillars of western civilization—and that is true. They gave us our ideas about government, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, morals, what is true, and what is beautiful. But our world was also shaped by much more violent, much less noble forces—the Goths, the Franks, the Angles, the Saxons, the Vikings, and the Mongols. This book searches through ancient sources and modern studies to disclose how the barbarians shaped our world.
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