Book: The Silk Roads

A history of pre-biblical trade routes. China and Persia dominated the civilized world for a millennia before Europe's emergence from the Dark Ages.

Unlike "Palestine 1936" this author's style is fast and informative, very readable, and full of big information.  Justly a bestseller.

Chapter Two deals with the distribution of religions along the Silk Roads, how travelers brought different gods from different parts of the world together.  Christianity, as we know, was cobbled together in the Third Century from a number of religions in order to try to appeal to the maximum number of people: Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Manichaeism, some Buddhism and Confucianism. Like fashion, like spices, like cuisine, religions evolved as they intersected and took bits and pieces from each other.

This is interesting.  There is evidence the fall of Rome in 476AD was at least partially caused by climate change.

The Huns in the northern regions of China were driven off their lands by drought and crop failure 350-370AD, causing them to migrate westward and south. They conquered everything in their path.

Including, a hundred years later, the tottering Roman Empire, which was unable to adjust to rising sea levels and crop instabilities, disease and mass starvation.

Some contemporary Roman sources attributed the fall of the Roman Empire and the decent of the world into prehistoric barbarism to the Empire's adoption of Christianity as its state religion.

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_seven_ecumenical_councils]Numerous attempts were made [/url]to codify what should be in the official xtian doctrine:

• Council of Nicaea, 325 AD
  
• First council of Constantinople, 381
  
• Persian council, 410
  
• Persian council, 420
  
• Persian council, 424
  
• Council of Ephesus, 431
  
• Council of Chalcedon, 451
  
• Constantinople treaty, 532
  
• Second council of Constantinople, 553
  
• Third council of Constantinople, 680-681
  
• Second council of Nicaea, 787
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha

In between, there was much fighting (bloody as well as verbal) over doctrinal differences such as whether Jesus was divine or a man.

And the Justinian plague of 541-549, caused by the same bacterium that caused the Black Death in 1346, decimated many competing religions. This was one result of the explosion of global trade routes and the growth of big cities. The fall of the Roman Empire in 476, overrun by northern barbarians, might also have something to do with the decline of public health some 65 years later.


Naturally, the religion with the best army becomes dominant.

Peter Frankopan wrote:

The sources relating to the early Islamic period are complex and pose serious problems of interpretation. Establishing how contemporary and later political motivations shaped the story of Muhammad and the messages he received is not easy—and, what is more, is a matter of intense debate among modern scholars.

Yeah, no shit.  To say nothing of the fact that church leaders ban any discussion of what might be fact and what might be fiction.

Baghdad was the cultural center of the Islamic empire in the tenth century; its population has been estimated at ten million. It's only eight million today.

The slave trade, which first flourished in the Roman Empire, thrived in the tenth century. There was a lively trade in Slavs (hence the name) and Blacks from Africa, with the prettiest girls being the most sought after.

As I learned in "The Reconstruction," one of the benefits of being a slave-owner is that you could make more slaves without having to purchase them.  You only needed to buy pretty young females and hold them until they were of breeding age. Then either other slaves, or the slave owner himself, would breed them.

In this way, over time, the most attractive traits of people all over the world were shared and spread, and mixed with the genes of their owners.  The eugenics and democratization effects of slave breeding is a topic I've not heard discussed much.

Peter Frankopan wrote:

So convinced were senior clergy that the apocalypse was at hand [after the fall of Constantinople in 1453] that a priest was sent to western Europe to find more specific information about precisely what time of day it would take place. Based on the Byzantine calendar that was used in Russia, the timing seemed to be crystal clear. Using the date of Creation as 5,508 years before Christ, the world was going to end on 1 September 1492.

What else happened around then?  Oh yeah.  On August 3rd Christopher Columbus set sail for India.

It was The Crusades pretty much that militarized religion. Prior to that, religions co-existed in harmony and tolerance, even when leaders with a new religion took over a patch of land.

After that, the defeated were forced at the end of a gun (or spear) to convert or be exiled or killed.

After the Crusades this book started detailing the myriad of blood feuds that dominated the region for a thousand years.  It lost me.

I read several other books in the interim, while this one sat on my side table.

Got back to it this weekend. I skimmed ahead through the Middle Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, the voyages of Columbus and Magellan, the opening up of global trade routes, the rise and fall of empires based on the strength of their navies.

The Dutch became wealthy due to their shipbuilding expertise.

The English became an empire due to their shipbuilding.

The British Empire began tottering when their conquests began rebelling against crippling taxation. Slavery kept the costs of production down, but at the expense of good will.  Previous empires (like the Romans) were built less on CONQUERING and more on INCORPORATING foreign lands. The Brits wanted foreign cultures subsumed.

Too many players and not enough booty led to world tensions at the end of the 19th Century. Oil took over (from spices and slaves) as the leading target of plunder.

This led to WWI, after which the winning powers divided up the world amongst themselves. This was not popular with the losing powers, leading to WWII.

I'm starting to read full pages again.

This book is immense, and detailed, and incredibly deeply researched. A person could spend a lifetime reading it.