Story of Civilization – IV.xviii.ii – IV.xx.v.2

At times, as in the conquest of Greece by the Romans, military history can seem like destiny.  The Roman civilization developed and ruthlessly employed a superior fighting method to conquer a civilization whose military methodology, like its culture, had grown old.  Rome conquered Greece, and then ruled the world for half a millenium.  The rest, as they say, is history.  In this way, military history is history, and the consistent superiority of one army, one general, or one method over another becomes the superiority of a nation or people over another.

By just the same principle – that military history is history – the vicissitudes of battles, the tricks of fate, can also become history.  It is this, I think, that made the world Christian, or at least stopped it from becoming Muslim.  After the rise of Islam, which, as discussed earlier, is a pointedly militaristic religion, Muslim armies conquered much of the civilized world, rapidly moving outward from Arabia to conquer eastward to the Indus, and westward through Egypt, across the southern Mediterranean coast, and up into Spain.  The Muslim armies also moved northward, spreading with their religion into Turkish lands.  In every direction, the seemingly liquid flow of the armies was stopped only by geographical obstacles: the Pyrenees, the Sahara, the Indus, the Himalayas, the Russian steppes (and the Mongol hordes).

In one direction alone did the Muslim armies not expand: northwesterly, through Constantinople.  The city was ideally situated for defense, with only one side exposed to land, and surrounded on the other three by the waters connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.  Through Constantinople’s peninsula lay the only practical land route from the Middle East to Europe, and through the waters dominated by this peninsula, the easiest sea route.  In Durant’s telling (and Wikipedia’s), though, geography alone did not save Constantinople from the Muslim armies.  Technology, instead, was the deciding factor.

For Byzantium had Greek fire.  In an age when fighting was decided by swords, spears, and anything else blunt or sharp you could hit your enemy with, the Byzantines were among the first to pioneer the use of incendiary devices.  Greek fire, the composition of which is now unknown, was primarily used by the Byzantine navy.  Shot from pressurized jets mounted on Byzantine ships, the fire was a deadly incendiary to the wooden navies of ages past.  In many engagements over several centuries, the devastating effects of Greek fire allowed small and hastily improvised Byzantine fleets to destroy massive Muslim fleets.  The Byzantines recognized their debt to their Greek fire, and as a consequence, kept the secrets of its composition closely guarded.  They were so successful that it is to this practice that we owe our current ignorance of the nature of the incendiary.

Considering the success of the Muslim armies on every other front, and their seeming unstoppability, it staggers the mind to imagine how history might look if this tiny civilization jutting into the Sea of Marmara had not been the sole possessor of Greek fire.  After Constantinople, the Muslim invaders would have faced little organized resistance in the chaotic and poorly-developed areas to the west.  They would have run roughshod over all and sundry until reaching the Alps.  To the south, Italy was not united and in little condition to resist.  To the north, Germany was a mere collection of Gothic tribes, and to the northwest it seems doubtful that the weak Carolingian kings of France, absorbed in fighting off Northern invaders, would have provided much resistance.

It is amazing the tricks that history can play.

Edit: Carolingian kings, not Merovingians… I was off by hundreds of years in my description of France.

Story of Civilization – IV.xv.iii – IV.xviii.i

This section covers the history of Judaism during the Dark Ages.  Judaism’s history was very rough, even brutal, during this time, especially in Christian Europe.  As early as A.D. 500, we see the practice of forcing Jews to wear armbands or other distinctive garb so that other people can identify them.  Jews were prohibited from practicing many professions, and taxation was often confiscatory.  Pogroms incited by baseless stories of child sacrifice occurred once a century or so.  The milder variety of pogrom only resulted in property destruction and weeks of fear, as well as the brutal, but selective, execution – or torture and execution – of the supposed perpetrators.  The more severe variety could result in the murder of entire communities.

Excepting the brutality of murder and violence, some of these impositions were not as cruel as they appear to the modern eye.  At this time, many European populations were ethnically and religiously homogeneous, and the separate ethnicity, religion, and daily practices of the Jews provided a compelling rationale for separate governmental treatment.  Not all was imposition, either.  With special taxes came special treatment: Jewish communities were allowed to create and administer their own laws, and were exempted from some strictures imposed on the rest of the local community.  For example, they were frequently permitted to lend at interest, which Christians were prohibited – secularly and religiously – from doing.  Let these remarks not diminish the sad recognition of the murder and rapine that followed the Jews of this time.

A final observation: during the pogroms, the Jews were often given the choice between exile, death, or conversion to Christianity (not mere show – reversion to Judaism was apostasy, which was punishable by death).  In the majority of specific, historically recorded instances that Durant relates – at least three or four incidents – the Jews chose death over conversion or exile.  Moreover, often, without recorded threat of torture or other brutality, the Jews chose suicide or mass mutual murder over conversion or exile.  The forces that could motivate communities of thousands of people to such behavior have not been recorded.

To the eyes of a determinedly secular historian, the cultural production of the Jews during this time was minimal.  The Torah was already written, and the Talmud, composed in the middle of the first millenium A.D. fails to match the Torah’s beauty, but exceeds its inane obsession with the minutiae of behavior.  Due to overriding theological concerns, Jewish studies in philosophy and the sciences were minimal, with medicine being a marked exception.  In the East, the Jews matched the Moslems in poetry and the arts of the time.  In the West, they matched the Christians, which is to say that they did little, if anything, of value during the first millenium.

The most notable contribution was, in my view, a negative one.  This was the work of Maimonides, a Jewish scholar who recapitulated the work of Origen, an early Christian heretic whose work had been, in Maimonides’s time, largely stamped out.  Maimonides, following Origen, argued for an allegorical interpretation of the Torah.  For instance, he suggested that the story of Adam and Eve was not about the creation of two individual people, but the mating of active form and passive matter.  In short, he superimposed a lot of Neoplatonic garbage onto what had formerly been a meaningful story.  Maimonides was also one of the earliest proponents I have noted in Durant’s history of the argument from design, the idea that some active, creative intelligence was necessary to bring the universe to its present form.  In this way, by providing the allegorical interpretation and the argument from design, Maimonides provided two of the cornerstones of modern religious apologist thought.  Without Maimonides, this intellectual cannon fodder would perhaps not be cluttering up so much discussion today – Lord knows the current thinkers aren’t original enough to ever have come up with it…