The Super Summary of World History Read online

  Caesar had adopted Octavian as his son (Caesar was Octavian’s great uncle) in his will. After Caesar’s murder Octavian became emperor; thus, Caesar found a way to keep the empire intact through a novel method of transferring the power of governance. The death of a dictator often causes problems with the transfer of power. Normally, an heir takes over, however, if there are many heirs wars start endangering the existence of the state. Under Caesar’s concept, as an emperor neared the end of his rule he adopted a person as his son who would then go on to rule in his place after his death. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian Augustus (maybe those Greek names were not so bad after all), for example, chose the best man he could find to rule the empire after his death, in this case Tiberius, and adopted him as his son; thus, the power transfer problem was solved. If Emperors following Augustus followed his example the result would be a kingship based on merit instead of heredity—at least as long as each emperor followed the plan.

  Childless Augustus died in AD 14 choosing Tiberius as his successor. Not a great choice, but Tiberius made an even worse choice for his successor, Caligula. Caligula spawned horrendous crimes, including killing his grandmother and engaging in sex with his three sisters. He also dissolved the Senate, making everyone angry in the process. Somehow, through it all, the Roman bureaucracy held on and held the empire together. After Caligula decided he was divine the Praetorian Guard decided to test that out and killed him, showing that being divine is not easy; thereafter, Claudius became emperor. After yet another round of murders and conquests, mostly in Britain, Claudius adopted Nero as his heir. Nero was 16 when Claudius died, and he was a poor leader. Nero drank, ran around with women endlessly, and raised taxes (sounds like most modern politicians). He also engaged in a hideous persecution of Christians.[45] After a life of killing people for no reason, including kicking his pregnant wife to death, the Praetorian Guard put Nero to death. Rome rejoiced.

  Their followed a series of emperors rejecting rejoicing, but they held things together: Galba (AD 68), Vespasian (AD 69), Titus (AD 79), Domitian (AD 81), Nerva (AD 96), Trajan (AD 98), and Hadrian (AD 117). In AD 138 Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius took over, ran a good administration, and then, adhering to Roman tradition, named Marcus Aurelius as his heir. Too bad, because Marcus Aurelius broke the long tradition of awarding power to the most worthy man. Marcus gave the empire to his son Commodus, a worthless man who murdered one of his sisters and slept with another. Commodus, his mind filled with filth from the start, was terminated by a conspiracy of his personal whores in AD 192. Civil War followed, and a rapid succession of emperors that were unworthy of the post.

  A group of very poor leaders was at the helm as the empire declined.[46] The empire was not able to hold on to its far-flung territories. Just as before, in the early empires of the Middle East, barbarians from the east and north began to pound the frontiers of the western Roman world. Slowly at first, the empire pulled back, still trying to defend on the boundaries of the great rivers the Rhine and the Danube. Nothing the Western Empire could do stopped the invasions of the barbarians; thus, Western Rome disappeared from history.

  Diocletian, who became emperor in AD 284, split the empire into two parts, east and west, to better govern the whole. However, the real economic strength of the Roman Empire was in the east. In my opinion, the Eastern Empire was stronger because it enjoyed a connection to Asia through the Silk Road, and was better able to trade and build its wealth through these contacts. When Constantine became emperor, he moved the capital to Byzantium and renamed the city after himself—Constantinople (is this typical of a politician or what?). Slowly, the two halves of the empire stopped supporting one another, and the west grew ever weaker until it could no longer defend its boarders from the barbarian tribes attacking from the east. As the Western Roman Empire fell, the invaders settled into Gaul, Spain, and Italy itself. Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire would last until defeat by the Turks in AD 1453. The west fell in about AD 455 after numerous sacks of the city of Rome.

  It was during the Western Empire’s decline that the Christian religion began to be accepted, and eventually became the mainstay of European culture after Rome’s demise. The emperor Constantine granted Christianity legal status in AD 313 through the Edict of Milan, thus preventing further persecution of Christians. In 380 it became the official religion of the empire, and by AD 392, Christianity was the empire’s only legal religion. Through a series of church counsels beginning in the 300s, the church settled on which books would comprise the Bible, and settled various questions concerning key elements of the faith (Apostles’ Creed—2d century, Nicene Creed—AD 325). St Jerome (AD 374-420) and St. Augustine (354-430) were major contributors to church doctrine. By the time the Western Roman Empire was at its end in AD 455, the Catholic Church has taken up its position as the philosophical and religious center of Western Europe. In addition, the importance of Rome’s preserving and transferring classical Greek culture and learning to the West cannot be overstated. The ability of Western Christianity to absorb these classics was a key factor in the Renaissance.

  The fall of the Western Roman Empire centered on the following problems—in order of importance:

  1) Major Economic Weakness. After the empire split into the eastern and western halves the Western Empire became weaker by the year. After losing the oriental trade, and the food supplies from Egypt, the Western Empire degraded incessantly.

  2) Total Corruption of the Government in Rome. By the end of the empire in the West, the Roman emperors, the senators, and the administrators were scoundrels of the first order. The great leaders who had built Rome had long since left the government and the army.

  3) The Roman Army Failed to Adapt to Changing Warfare. The Roman legions, which emphasized infantry formations, were becoming obsolete because of improvements in heavy cavalry formations. Leadership was also wanting, and strategic thinking was not the forte of the legions and their leaders as the end neared.

  4) Rome Always on the Defense. After AD 117, Rome was always on the Strategic and Tactical defensive. Clausewitz in his classic book On War stated that the purpose of a defensive strategy was to hold on until the time came for offensive action, because on the defense one possesses no ability to control the ultimate decision. Rome, somewhat like the USA in the Vietnam War, could not effectively take offensive action against the barbarian tribes accumulating beyond their frontiers. The enemy’s center of gravity was beyond the Rhine and Danube Rivers, in their temporary homelands, and beyond these mighty rivers the German tribes were out of Rome’s reach. The distance and the physical barriers destroyed Rome’s ability to strike at their enemy’s center of gravity. The barbarians could build their strength to strike when and where they wanted. Against this kind of problem, Rome had no effective answer.

  Was holding Gaul an overextension of Roman power? The riches of the empire came from Spain, North Africa (Egypt), and the east—not Gaul (my opinion). Defending the Rhine took many legions. Could the Romans continue winning by creating a buffer zone in a small area north of Italy, and fortifying the passes through the Alps and the Pyrenees? By water born trade Rome could maintain prosperous contact with all its major provinces in Spain, the Levant, Turkey, Greece, North Africa and thence the Far East. By not overextending themselves into Gaul, perhaps the Roman Empire had a chance to survive into the medieval era.

  The fall of the Western Rome took generations. After about AD 200, the population consistently fell all over the Western Empire. Land once cultivated fell into disuse. The size of towns shrank. Trade, as measured by shipping, fell over one-half. In addition, a rather-bad plague hit the Roman world about 169 to AD 170. The population decline continued until the seventh century. Under Diocletian, the value of Roman coinage fell endangering the finances of the empire; however, Constantine saved the day by instituting gold coinage that held its value because the empire kept the content pure and correctly weighted. However, the Western Empire’s power was waning, and after the Easte
rn Empire removed Egyptian grain from the city of Rome, the end was near. By AD 500, barbarian tribes settled where they pleased, and Rome’s legions no longer patrolled the roads or kept the peace. Rome slowly became only a ghostly image in the minds of those few once knowing its glory. Soon, even that remembrance faded as history pulled its dark cloak over the Roman West.

  Discussion of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire

  Let us digress for a moment and discuss an overview of history to this point: the fall of the Western Roman Empire about AD 455.[47] The fall of the Western Roman Empire ushered in a new age in Europe. Rome (in the west) was obliterated, and what took its place was a new society in which the learning and unity of the Romans was utterly lost, replaced by disunity, chaos, and a distinct lack of quality in every aspect of life. Seldom has the world experienced such a complete loss of knowledge. How do people forget how to build frame and panel doors, how to read and write, or how to make light wheels with spokes? In a relatively short period, memories of Roman quality, accomplishments, and innovation faded. Mud huts sprang up under the great Roman aqueducts, and rubble rapidly replaced wonder.

  Comparing this total cultural collapse to conquests in Asia, we note that China suffered invasions as brutal as those invasions suffered by Rome (the Mongols for example); nevertheless, China continued as a culture and a people. The invader’s language, dress, and cultural identity were absorbed into China, never to return. Rome fell and its culture, dress, language, heritage, and learning were totally lost for centuries; however, by contrast, China endured the invasions and fundamentally remained the same. It may be that the vastness of both the geography and the populace of China just swallowed the invaders whole. The invaders normally brought a somewhat crude culture into China, so the more sophisticated culture of the Chinese may have been so attractive to the conquerors they were ready to copy and adopt it as their own.

  Egypt also survived at least two outside invasions, and their population was much smaller than China’s; still, they managed to retain their ancient traditions, dress, and culture, and in due course, toss the invaders out. Why did Rome fail to do the same?

  These questions are impossible to answer, because after the fall of Rome the area fell back into a prehistory of sorts, in that few remaining inhabitants of Western Europe could read or write. The Roman population declined for decades before the conquests, and the invader’s numbers were large; thus, perhaps the more numerous invaders—after killing off many more Romans—simply overpowered the remaining Roman population. We may speculate that since Rome fell slowly, and inhabitants of the West knew of safer areas in the empire, they escaped the descending carnage using the Roman roads; thus, the Romans left and the invaders were all that remained. In the other instances, such as China, the population stayed and eventually overcame the invaders along with reestablishing their culture. In Egypt, their sophisticated society may have kept them apart from a set of crude invaders, or they may have simply felt their gods would eventually bring them through. All this is conjecture, but by making comparisons we can obtain a deeper understanding of history.

  This view of the Western world becoming a big heap of debris after the Western Roman Empire fell is somewhat dated as many historians now say the period we once called the “Dark Ages” were nothing of the kind. They say a new vigor was put in place eventually giving the world the Renaissance, the printing press, science, and the flowering of the modern world. In my mind, “eventually” is the key word, because that “eventually” took centuries and a lot of luck. There was no guarantee the world following Rome would produce anything. In fact, the world after Rome looked very much like the one Rome had conquered. Before Rome, Europe was a mass of warring tribes without large well-constructed cities, roads, administrative organization, trade, or safety—all of which came by way of Rome. After Rome, the landscape reverted to the past: a disarray of unconnected crumbling towns, a shrinking population, constant war between local warlords, rampant disease, falling farm production, no protection from lawless bands roaming the countryside, and little or no trade. Thus, the term “Dark Ages” is well applied to Western Europe after the fall of Rome.

  Whatever view we take, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire is a watershed in history, as what came after Rome was far different than Rome was or ever would have been. Now is a good time to review the past many thousands of years and see if we can discover some unity in the story of humankind.[48]

  The Need for Protection

  From the earliest writings of the Bible in Genesis, we find that murder was one of the first acts of humanity. After God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, they have two sons, and soon thereafter one son, Cain, murders the other, Abel.[49] The Bible gives no definitive reason for the murder of Abel. Of course, many view these biblical stories as fables; however, the story illustrates one undeniable truth—people kill one another on a regular basis for no reason.

  From the dawn of history, in heroic stories of Gilgamesh, Isis and Osiris, the Iliad, Beowulf, and others we find that bloody conflict is a major theme. It seems men were slaughtering each other as soon as they became Homo sapiens, and the abundance of walled cities is the proof. Since large walls are such an early development, we can assume war developed early on as well. In most areas walls were the rule, and they went up early on, and they were made very strong. Jericho, a very ancient city, built a massive wall by 8000 BC. In the Iliad, Homer describes the walls of Troy as so immense the Greeks failed to breach them after a ten-year war. The Greeks got into the city through a trick (the Trojan horse). Walls, especially very hefty walls, take a lot of time, serious labor, and skill to construct. Such undertakings require major resources in terms of time, food, labor, talent, and materials—precious commodities in ancient times. At the Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BC, archeologists note that several major cities extended and strengthened their walls before the advent of a disaster overwhelming the people behind those walls. The obvious conclusion is they feared an invader, and spent the time and effort required to strengthen their chief defense against attack—the wall. A government that cannot protect its citizens cannot govern. In the final analysis, protection from war, chaos, and starvation is the first order of business for any government. Therefore, security is at the center of governance. People often chose a dictatorial government and security over a democratic government and uncertainty. This is a common thread throughout history.

  Murder and war seem to be a permanent part of humanity’s story. Is such vile behavior ensconced in our genes? What does all this say about us as human beings? Why have we consistently conquered, murdered, raped, and pillaged our neighbors—and anyone else we could find? Why this must be so is a root that grows deep in our history and our psyche, but it is logically impossible to explain.[50] It seems people such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Genghis Khan, Caesar, and Sargon, who were willing to kill anyone to obtain supremacy, are always around. Even at an individual level, Jack the Ripper’s ilk still walks among us, ever so willing to take the lives of others for pleasure. So it was 4,500 years ago, and so it is today. Just as protection was vital 4,500 years ago, it is still indispensable today. When a government ceases to protect, it ceases to govern.

  Invaders from the Center of the World

  Observe that ancient civilized areas favored building on great rivers with access to coastlines. This may be so because of the need for trade to build a great city. The traders could travel down these rivers to reach the ocean which is the leading platform for trade. Boats can carry a lot of cargo a long way much easier than people using animals can cross great distances. Until the advent of railroads, boats were by far the preferred choice for moving cargo. Thus, from the Middle East to China we find the first civilizations along great rivers leading to the coast.[51]

  From the land mass at the center of the Old World, east of the Urals and west of Mongolia north of the Caspian and Black Seas, came raiders steadily battering the civilizations along the great rivers of the ancient
world. These threats came from nomadic peoples living deep in the Eurasian land mass, and apparently living without large permanent cities. The nomadic invaders toppled or weakened empire after empire. We do not know why the invaders kept appearing from the same general location. Experts theorize that a “sea of grass,” stretching from China to Europe, allowed the nomads to travel from one end of the Eurasian land mass to the other while raiding all the way. The sea of grass was essentially non-broken grassland where nomads grazed horses and moved freely from the border of China to Eastern Europe. Still, miles of unbroken grassland cannot explain everything. Certainly, the region of the Black Sea and beyond was vast, and could maintain large numbers of inhabitants, but why move south repeatedly? In addition, why were these invaders so effective in overcoming the civilized people in Mesopotamia, Greece, Italy, Turkey, India, and China? When these clans moved south, they had effective leaders, an excellent military organization, and sometimes superior arms. So far, archeologists have not discovered numerous significant ancient cities to the north of the Fertile Crescent or agricultural societies with great irrigation systems, large buildings, permanent roads, libraries, or other trappings of organized power; thus, the origin of these invaders is tough to establish with certainty.

  Recent discoveries (2007-09) of new civilizations in the region of Turkistan dating from 2000 BC by Russian archeologists may explain where the nomadic invaders came from. These cities are large and well organized urban environments that possibly sustained sizeable populations, probably five to ten thousand or more. To date only a few cities are under excavation, but the Russian archeologists are only scratching the surface. Unfortunately, written languages are not part of the present discoveries. Note the climate in the area of discovery is wet, and this kind of climate quickly dispatches evidence of civilization. Pottery that was painted grey is the most common find (painted grey ware). Pottery may be the longest lasting product of civilization because it does not decay easily, although normally found in a shattered condition. The painted grey ware is not located in Mesopotamia or Egypt, but India has numerous examples; thus, we assume the pottery came to India by trade or possibly the people creating the painted grey ware were the Aryan clans who invaded India.