Alboin, the Iron Crown, and the Lombards

The fall of the Roman Empire was by no means a pretty thing, and by the mid 6th Century, less than a century after Odovakar sent the last Emperor into exile, the Italian Peninsula, once the heart of the Empire, was completely war-torn.  Odovakar had been murdered in 493 by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, but the Byzantine Empire, the residual eastern half of the Roman Empire that was not dissolved with Odovakar’s dismissal of the Emperor, was not about to let the most densely populated region in Europe go so easily.  Repeated campaigns by the Byzantines ravaged the countryside even worse, but internal political machinations within the Byzantine Empire did not allow any permanent gains to be made.

It is upon this background that our story begins, when the Ostrogoths were permanently conquered by the rebounding Byzantine Empire, which appeared poised to re-take all of the former Roman Empire and more.  Mostly ignored at the time were the events happening in the Danube River valley.

An extremely busy map of the Mediterranean World in 565

So, One thing you’ll notice is that on the northern border of the Byzantine (here called Roman, because that’s basically what it was) are a few bigger kingdoms, namely the Lombards and Gepids.  You’ll see Lombard spelled a bunch of different ways if you research this for yourself, so don’t worry about all that, but the important part to remember here is that the Lombards are in an extremely unpleasant area of the world.  It’s cold, but it really doesn’t rain as much as you think it would, and for the farming techniques available at the time, most of it was unarable (unfarmable).  As a result, the Lombards were really looking for a place that was not where they were, which led them to fight with their neighbors, the Gepids, constantly.

In 552, the Lombards scored a big win on the Gepids.   Most of our history on this stuff comes from Paul the Deacon, who wrote down largely what he was told by Lombards several decades after it happened, but it seems like the Lombard prince Alboin, killed the son of the Gepid king in what was a complete rout.  External sources do confirm this, because the Byzantine Emperor Justinian intervened on the behalf of the Gepids, hoping to keep the Gepids and Lombards at each others’ throats so that they wouldn’t turn to the logical next target – the fabulously wealthy Byzantines.

Justinian’s plan seems to have worked at first.  Somewhere probably after 560, Alboin succeeded his father to the crown of the Lombards and waged a new war against the Gepids.  In 565, the Byzantines intervened once more, although they were by this point much weaker than they had been and were ruled by a new Emperor, Justin II.  Either way, the Gepids and Byzantines combined were more than enough to wipe out the Lombards.  Alboin, seeing no other option, formed an alliance with Bayan I, Khagan of the Avars, but it came at a price.  Bayan demanded that the Gepids’ lands belong to him at the conclusion of the war, plus half the war booty, much of the Lombards’ cattle, and a tenth of the Lombards’ lands.  By 568, the Gepid kingdom had been annihilated and subjugated by the Avar horde, and Alboin had slain the Gepid king, taking his daughter, Rosamund, as his new wife.

It didn’t take long for Alboin to realize that he had made a deal with the devil, and Bayan’s posturing made it clear that before long, he would turn on his old ally and take the Lombards’ lands.  Alboin determined that he and his people, as they had a century before, would have to migrate south, this time into Italy.  Somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Lombards around a third of whom would have been fighting fit warriors, made the trek from their homelands in Pannonia to the Italian Peninsula.  On Easter Sunday of 568, the Lombards departed, and they don’t show back up on the historical record for a year.

To this day, it is unclear as to whether the Byzantines even knew the Lombards were coming.  They were certainly unprepared, but then again, not many countries could be compared for 50-100,000 soldiers invading with an entire nation in tow.  No Germanic tribe had done this for almost a century, and the Lombards would be one of the last.  Paul the Deacon says that Alboin entered Italy “without any hindrance,” which would suggest that the Byzantines were entirely unaware of the impending crisis, and they were never able to put together a coherent response.

One of the major issues with Alboin’s invasion was that Alboin was an Arian Christian – one who believed that Jesus was not God but rather a special creation of God, neither god nor man, designed to atone for the sins of the world.  Arianism had been condemned at the 325 Council of Nicaea (in which Saint Nicholas punched Arius in the face, true story; that’s the same Saint Nicholas who is now your beloved Santa Claus), but the Arians had been much more aggressive missionaries than the orthodox Nicaean Christians had been.  Because of this, most of the invading Germanic tribes had, at least at first, converted to Arianism.  Through a complicated series of events that I have nowhere near enough time for, Arianism had more or less disappeared, particularly after the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 553.  Now, fifteen years later, another major Arian power was making its presence known.

The Byzantines viewed their struggle against the Lombards as a Holy War, and the influx of heretics into Italy would serve as a catalyst for Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) to lead a sort of evangelistic revival in the Church that would lead to the establishment of the institution we now call the Catholic Church.

Literally the first evidence of anybody resisting the Lombards is at Pavia…

Right there.  The Lombards had marched clear across Northern Italy and nobody had said a thing.  The issue that the Lombards ran into was that they weren’t used to siege warfare of any sort, and so when a walled city finally refused to surrender out of sheer terror, the Lombards just had to sit outside and wait.  This was not something they were good at, and so while Alboin sat there with the main army, his men scattered all around, raiding Burgundy to the Northwest and moving farther south and taking more land.

Alboin also apparently became an alcoholic at this time (although it’s possible that he had been for a while, the unfamiliar Byzantine liquor might have been too strong for him), and an initially ambitious and warlike king became apathetic and lazy.  Pavia fell in the spring of 572, after over two years of siege, and Alboin declared a new kingdom of the Lombards, allegedly forging for himself an Iron Crown (more on that later), but the title was, by this point, meaningless.  His men had already fought and lost to the Burgundians without his presence or permission.  They had conquered much of Southern Italy without his blessing as well.  Alboin was a figurehead, if even that.

Things came to a head in June of 572, as Alboin’s wife, Rosamund, plotted to murder him.  Mind you, we mentioned that Alboin had killed her father fourteen years before, and she probably didn’t just forget about that.  Now, a lot of people diverge on the story of Alboin’s murder.  Gregory of Tours, a generally solid source but not one who specialized in the Lombards, says that Rosamund had simply bode her time until the opportune moment, whereupon she decided to poison the Lombard king.

Paul the Deacon tells the story differently.  He says that Alboin had gotten drunk, as usual, and had been using Rosamund’s father’s skull as a drinking vessel.  This might sound like a fantastic tale, but this has been done a lot through history, even as late as the 13th Century among the Bulgars.  The Bulgars and Avars seem to have been pretty big fans of the whole skull-drinking thing, and it’s not unlikely that Alboin, seeing the ferocity and speed with which the Avars subdued their enemies, became something of an admirer of the practice.  One way or another, he began to taunt his wife and even forced her to drink from her own father’s skull, which rekindled Rosamund’s desire to see Alboin dead.

With no real succession plan in place, the assassination of Alboin led to a downward spiral among the Lombards that led to a ten-year period known as the Rule of the Dukes.  It would not be until 584, when a foolish invasion of Burgundy would result in a Frankish alliance against the Lombards, that the Lombards would, only out necessity, reunite under a single king.

“King of the Lombards” would never be a powerful title, as the Lombard dukes preferred to maintain their own rights in their own principalities, but the title became symbolically important, as the myth of the Iron Crown grew.  Later, when declaring their own position as “King of Italy,” the kings of the Germans would take an iron crown they claimed had been forged by Alboin himself, giving a certain ancient rite to their position.  Of course, few German kings were ever able to exercise practical control in Italy, but the myth was created by Alboin, who permanently broke Byzantine hegemony in the Italian Peninsula.

The Lombard territories at the death of Alboin in 572

Shivaji Bhosale – A Life

So, the more that I think about this, the more I begin to realize how daunting a project this is, because Shivaji’s life is basically an action movie.  The pseudo-founder of what would later be known as the Maratha Confederacy, Shivaji remains one of the most famous and heralded figures of Indian history.  Part of the difficulty is separating the myth and cult of personality that has now developed around Shivaji from the historical man.  Part of the distortion of Shivaji’s image is due to the Hindu Nationalist movement (hence, why I decided to talk about the Hindu Nationalists on Sunday), as he was the first Hindu ruler of any importance on the Indian subcontinent since the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire over a century before.  Shivaji’s conquests protected a Hindu faith that had come under increasing amounts of persecution under the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and he used the “moral high ground” as a major weapon in his war against the Mughals.

Shivaji was born in Pune in either 1627 or 1630.  Not real important which.  It is important to note, that Pune District remains one of the strongest bastions of the Hindu Nationalist movement to this day.  Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi, was, fun fact, also from Pune.  So when Shivaji was pretty young, in 1645, he apparently bribed a local official from the Bijapuri Sultanate (a minor state in the Deccan, in central India) to hand over a fort to him.  Now, you might not think this is a big deal, but explain to me how a minor 17th Century Indian monarch is supposed to conquer this…

Tornar Fort

Because that’s what Shivaji got.  Before long, another fort had pledged allegiance to him, and he had bribed a second commander out of his fort.  The Bijapuri Sultanate was not large enough to ignore something like this for long, because this was not the first time that the Maratha had been problematic.

It’s important to understand that around this time, Hindu philosophy was really taking off.  Unlike most religions, there’s no single figure that really founds it.  It is, rather, an accumulated set of beliefs and traditions that have been practiced in India for thousands of years beyond memory, and although there remained (and still do remain) substantial differences among Hindus, there was a certain common identity, and this gave people something to rally around.  At this time, Indian, and particularly Northern Indian, politics had been almost entirely dominated by Muslims for about 600 years, but the Muslims only made up an estimated 8% of the population at the time (it’s a little more now).  However, the “Hindus” never really thought of it as a religious war.  They viewed it as mostly an ethnic conflict with the invading Turks, but because they wrote so little about what they thought about the whole thing (or at least, almost none of it survives; a notable exception here is the Ardhakathanak by Banarsidas; it’s a pretty easy read and worth reading), we have little means to understand how the Muslims were understood.

What Shivaji brought to this was a military aspect.  He never phrased it in terms of a Hindu holy war but more as a Hindu/Maratha war of liberation.  He was strongly against forced conversion of Muslims, and he vehemently opposed slavery (although the Hindu caste system doesn’t seem so different from slavery to me).

So, like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the Bijapuri sultan sent around 30,000, maybe 40,000 guys against Shivaji under the Afghan general Afzal Khan.  Shivaji had managed to scrape together around 13,000 by way of comparison, and he had no muskets, compared to Afzal Khan’s 1500.  The pair of them met at Pratapgad, and since Shivaji held this fortified position…

The Fort at Pratapgad

Afzal Khan decided he would negotiate with him.  What followed was a classic “Han shot first” argument.  Some claim that Afzal struck first, while others claim that Shivaji (who, one way or another, definitely brought a dagger to a no-weapons parley, which is more than a little shady) attacked Afzal.  One way or another, Shivaji lived (if he hadn’t, this would be a very anti-climactic story), and he and his army routed the now leaderless Bijapuris.  By 1660, the Bijapuris had forged an alliance with the Mughals against Shivaji.  One of the issues with subduing the Maratha, however, was the terrain.  You saw the two forts that I showed above.  Dotting the entire rocky, hilly landscape of Maharastra are forts just like or similar to these, and since Shivaji held them with full garrisons of men, he was a nightmare to subdue.  It didn’t matter how many people the Mughals sent, manpower was not what was needed.  What was needed was better artillery than existed on the Indian subcontinent, or anywhere, for that matter.

Shivaji would never be powerful enough to challenge the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb directly, and after eluding him for years, Shivaji was captured in 1666 and taken to Agra.  The details of this part are a little shaky, because the guy either seduced the Emperor’s wife with nothing but the hungry eyes (I’m guessing not), or he just disguised himself and found his way out of Agra. Shivaji’s army had taken a tough hit from clashing directly with the Mughals, but the notion of independence had taken root in the hill country of Maharastra (that’s where the Maratha live and where they speak Marathi).

As he got his army back on its feet, Shivaji made a few raids against the British in Bombay (which at the time was rather small, compared to the 20 million person metro population it has today), but for the most part he was pretty quiet.  Suddenly, in 1674, when most of the Indian Subcontinent seems to have believed that Shivaji was out of the picture, Shivaji scored a large victory at the Battle of Nesari against the Bijapuris after the Mughals had withdrawn, and Bijapuri power was effectively broken in Maharastra.  Worsening relations between Bijapur and Aurangzeb would eventually result in the latter conquering the Bijapuri Sultanate in 1686.

With his lands secured, Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati of the Maratha Realm later in 1674, and over the next century, the Maratha would become the most powerful empire on the Indian Subcontinent, only being subdued by the surge of British military presence in the early 19th Century.  For the last several years of his life, Shivaji fought to secure a stable inheritance for his sons, and that would mean not provoking the Mughal Empire, so instead of attacking the Mughals, he moved south, acquiring additional lands there and surrounding the lucrative Portuguese trading port of Goa, giving him an essential trading partner.  Unlike many great military men, Shivaji ensured that his sons would be able to do what he never was – directly challenge the Mughal Empire rather than simply defy it, as he had.  This (kind of grainy) map shows the extent of his realm at the end of his life:

So when you look at the size of what Shivaji created, you probably think “Oooooh… what big empire…” but the importance of Shivaji lies not with what his end accomplishments were.  Of all these countries you see on the map (and others existed elsewhere) Shivaji was the only Hindu ruler, despite the fact that around 90% of India was Hindu at this time, and, as I mentioned, that gives him considerable cultural significance to this day.  Not to mention, he’s notorious for all kinds of badassery that I didn’t really have time to go into here (I mean, ripping a general open with a knife and escaping prison is cool and all, but catching arrows mid-flight is way cooler).  He’s the kind of guy who spends almost three decades (1645-1674) of his life either holed up in forts or on the run in the Maharastra countryside, eluding powerful emperors and sultans the whole time.  His life was an action movie, and honestly, Hollywood should pick it up (although Bollywood’s already done a few decent jobs on it).

The An Lushan Rebellion

The 755 census in the empire of the Chinese Tang Dynasty recorded 52,919,309 persons residing in the realm.  In 764, only nine years later, the census stated that 16,900,000 persons lived in China.  So what happened in between?  I’m so glad you asked, because the story is oddly forgotten to popular memory.  How could 36 million people die in less than a decade when the world’s population was still relatively low, and the massive-scale weaponry used today was still unavailable?

Now, a little disclaimer here, one of the main answers might lie with the fact that after the crippling An Lushan Rebellion, the government lacked the infrastructure to go find every single person living within the realm, but even if methodology changed (which the roundness of the second figure might suggest), a lot of people still died.

So, to begin, we’ll do some background.  In 712, a guy named Tang Xuanzong (also called Tang Minghuang, meaning “Brilliant Emperor of the Tang”) took the imperial throne in Chang’an (Beijing would not be the capital of China for some time yet).

Tang Empire around 700 AD

At the time, the Tang Empire was the most powerful China had seen in about five hundred years, since the fall of the Han (technically, so the Han kind of came back, but it wasn’t the same).  The Tang had enjoyed considerable success against the Turks, Tibetans, and Balhae (in Korea), and things seemed to be going right for the empire.  Xuanzong re-organized the military, and his reforms brought in a number of non-Chinese (for whatever value “Chinese” existed as an ethnicity), even recently subjugated, soldiers.  Among these was one An Lushan.  His mother was a Göktürk, but his father’s identity is still unknown.  One way or another, An Lushan rose through the ranks considerably quickly.

Apparently, he was noticed, for in 743, he was brought before the Emperor himself in Chang’an (this was a really big deal for a foreigner to be invited to the court, as you might assume).  A number of perhaps apocryphal anecdotes survive from this time, but the Tang records and histories are surprisingly detailed, so we cannot dismiss them entirely.  An Lushan apparently had a thing for the Emperor’s concubine Yang Guifei (formerly his son’s, but in 737, the emperor figured he might as well take her for his own; great dad), because he, on one occasion, bowed to her before the Emperor.  When he got called out on it, he said, “Oh, well, we barbarians typically bow to mothers first.”  Apparently there’s a number of other instances where he slighted the Emperor and then said, “Oh, well, it’s just a Göktürk thing.  My bad.”

Xuanzong apparently bough it, because the sources say that An Lushan continued to rise in his favor despite these episodes, likely due to Yang Guifei’s constant praise of him.  In 755, with rising discontent due to the obvious excesses of the Tang court, An Lushan declared a revolt, calling himself the adopted son of Yang Guifei, although contemporary critics alleged an affair between the two of them.  An Lushan’s actual military prowess is questionable, however, since early in the rebellion, much of his army was massacred at the Battle of Yongqiu.  The sources say that he had 40,000 soldiers, compared to the loyalist army of 2,000.  This seems like an exaggeration, but it’s fair to assume that this was a battle An Lushan was supposed to have won, and instead he got slaughtered.

The main thing that sustained the An Lushan rebellion at the beginning was continued court intrigue among the Tang that prevented Xuanzong from assembling any real army to respond to An Lushan’s revolt.  An Lushan approached Chang’an with limited resistance, and in the summer of 756, the city, which had a metro population of roughly 2 million, was sacked.  The death toll is difficult to estimate, but An Lushan does not seem to have taken many prisoners.  With his victory, An Lushan proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Yan Dynasty.

As Xuanzong fled, he seems to have gone through a sort of personal crisis, as he abdicated the throne and made his son the new Emperor Suzong.  Around the same time, the Yang family, from whom Yang Guifei hailed, joined the rebellion, which cast considerable doubt upon the motivations and loyalties of Yang Guifei herself, and while the imperial court evacuated Chang’an, the concubine was murdered by angry courtiers who blamed her for the rebellion.  The rebellion almost seemed complete at this point, but Tang Suzong responded by hiring thousands of Arab mercenaries and the Khagan of the Uighurs to hold off the Yan advance.  Compounded with the increasingly erratic behavior of An Lushan himself, the rebellion suddenly found itself facing serious problems.  The rise of famine in the North crippled their supply lines, and, fair or not, An Lushan was blamed.  The self-proclaimed emperor had been suffering from a number of ailments, including glaucoma, which left him effectively blind.  Ulcers caused him constant pain, and the emperor became prone to caning or even impulsively executing his servants.  Out of friends and out of resources, An Lushan was murdered by his son An Qingxu.  Qingxu was no more successful than his father, and in 757, the Yan were fought to a stalemate at the Battle of Siuyang – the first time the Tang had been able to meet the Yan in open combat since the fall of Chang’an over a year before.

For the next couple of years, the only general who could make any headway for either side was the Yan’s Shi Shiming, but he and Qingxu seem to have had a difficult relationship in that when Qingxu tried to replace Shi Shiming after his advance slowed down at Fanyang, Shi turned around and killed the emperor.  There seems to have been a lot of uncertainty as to whose side Shi Shiming was on in the aftermath of Qingxu’s murder, but fairly soon, it became clear that Shi Shiming was on his own side.  He and his 100,000 soldiers rolled across the countryside virtually unopposed, but in 761, Shi Shiming was captured, ambushed, and then strangled when his captors feared they would be pursued, thus ending the An Lushan Rebellion.  Pockets of resistance would continue until the autumn of 763, but Suzong was eventually able to re-establish Tang control over most of the country.

Now, this is the story of the “Brilliant Emperor,” who was so brilliant, that he promoted an apparently incompetent military commander, who was fooling around with his favorite wife, whom he had stolen from his son.  The Tang dynasty would never truly recover from the An Lushan Rebellion, despite Suzong’s apparent competence, but perhaps the most lasting effect of the rebellion was that those Arab mercenaries I mentioned didn’t go home.  Instead they stayed in China, evidently settling among the Hui people in the Northwest, who are, to this day, predominantly Muslim.  Ever since, Islam has been a somewhat small, but still vocal, minority in China, and tension between the East and the Muslim minorities in the West has been a continued narrative over the centuries.  Like I said, the exact death toll of the war is impossible to determine, but the censuses at least tell us that at the end of the war, the Tang dynasty had less than a third of what they used to have to tax and recruit into the army, which alone would be enough to cripple any empire.

So, the lesson for today, don’t take your sons’ concubines.  That’s weird.  Don’t do it.

The Danger of Hindu Nationalism

So, I don’t want to be a downer here, but this is something that’s important, so although I typically don’t write opinion pieces, this is one.  Hindu Nationalism is a vocal minority in the world’s largest democracy, and so it’s a really big deal.  Using the IMF’s numbers, India is the second largest economy in the world.  The UN and World Bank rank them a little lower, but they’re still in the top 10 by pretty much any metric you look at.  India is #3 in terms of real GDP growth rate among countries with over 60 million people.  That’s ahead of touted up-and-coming economies like China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  India’s rate of 7.3% is three times that of the United States, and they have the worlds fourth largest military (assuming North Korea’s numbers are correct and not over-inflated).

I hope that I’ve convinced you that India and her 1.2 billion people are important, because I’m going to start talking about Hindu Nationalism now.  Sometimes termed “Hindu polity,” Hindu Nationalism really started taking off in the early 19th Century in India, as a sort of response to the British occupation.  Uprisings against increasing British power had taken shape in the form of the Maratha Confederacy (I’ve got a post to do with that on Tuesday), the Sikhs in the North, and the Kingdom of Mysore in the South, but all of these had made little effect against the British Raj.  Indian political theorists began to argue that the only way that India could truly become Indian again would be to unite.

Well, that all sounds fine and dandy on the surface until you start thinking about it.  When had India ever been united?  Never.  Aurangzeb, the great Mughal Emperor, had managed to extend tentative control over the South,  but the speed with which his empire disintegrated after his death calls into question how much control the Mughals truly had.  So, where does the notion of “India” come from?  Well, it wasn’t a uniquely European idea, but it had not historical precedent until 1948, with India’s independence, and what did the Hindu Nationalists do to the man who had brought India’s independence about (Mahatma Gandhi)?  They shot him three times in the chest at point-blank range.  Hindu Nationalists don’t want a united India.  They want their united India, because there’s a right kind of India and a wrong kind of India.

Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, was a member of the RSS (Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsēvaka Saṅgha, or National Volunteer Organization), a controversial group that has admittedly done a number of good things. The RSS is well-known for its blood drives during the Bangladeshi Revolution in 1971 and responding quickly and effectively to humanitarian crises – often better than the government.  In 1975, when Indira Gandhi attempted to suspend the Constitution, the RSS were on the front lines protesting her, despite her unilateral suspension of the right to free speech.  I’m not here to tell you that the RSS is bad because they’re Hindu Nationalist.  I’m saying they’re dangerous and Hindu Nationalist and that there’s a strong correlation between having this far-right perspective and being dangerous.  The fact that the RSS has been associated in some way with almost every major Hindu Nationalist movement in the last forty years or so is concerning.  Its role in the destruction and vandalism of mosques is concerning.

Narendra Modi

The RSS is currently closely associated with the BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) – the group currently in charge and from which Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, hails.  Typically the BJP prioritizes the globalization of India and the promotion of a robust, industrialized economy over social welfare (the MO of the Indian National Congress), and, although there’s far more nuance to it than this, one could potentially label the BJP as more similar in terms of economic policy to the Republican Party in the United States and the INC as more similar to the Democratic Party.  Socially, however, the INC would lie somewhere in the middle in the United States, while the BJP lies far to the right.

So a little on Modi now.  He was initially loved by the Western media.  I mean, this was a guy who was going to fix up Indian politics and fix up the economy, just like he had as Chief Minister of Gujarat state.  Economically, India’s done pretty well under him, but since his election in 2014, hundreds of violent attacks on non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, have been carried out with little response from the government.  People like to tout Modi’s success in Gujarat, but they seem to forget about a few little things that happened in 2002, when as many as 2500 Muslims were killed in February and March.

Local volunteers attempt to extinguish a train fire during the Gujarat Riots

Modi was incapable of reeling the violence in, which might lead one to question whether the BJP politician was even interested in stopping the anti-Muslim killings.  Critics will also point out that the violence was cleaned up when the violence started spilling over to Hindus.  Now, none of this can be officially tied back to Modi himself, and he has done a good job of keeping corruption at arm’s length away from him, but still, it happened on his watch.  When BJP politicians such as Manohar Lal Khattar are saying that they think people who eat beef should leave the country, it might suggest that the far right is not so far away from the BJP as one might like to pretend.

In the words of James Carville, “The economy, stupid.”  People don’t really care about civil issues that much when their pocketbooks are suffering.  I’m not saying that’s right – quite the opposite – but it’s also unreasonable to expect anything different, particularly in a country with so many people who cannot survive if their pocketbooks suffer, and when Narendra Modi can offer real economic change like he did in Gujarat, people are going to vote for him, particularly after years of domination by the INC.

Here’s my counterpoint, however.  There is a common-sense correlation, that is backed up somewhat by statistics, but the methods of gathering such data are suspect, between civil peace and economic growth.  Can we really expect people to go out and invest and spend money if they are afraid to do so?  If they are afraid that the government is hostile to their way of life?  Don’t forget that Modi’s successes in Gujarat came after the end of the 2002 riots.  If the BJP wishes to be an effective, uniting voice in Indian politics it is going to have to start reaching across the aisle, and as long as Modi continues to pretend that he has the majority and the mandate in New Delhi that he had in Gujarat, real socio-economic change will not happen.

The Kingmakers – The Rise and Fall of the Praetorian Guard

As Augustus became the first Roman Emperor in 27 BC, many changes came to the government, among which was the establishment of an imperial bodyguard – called the Praetorian Guard.  The Praetorians were considered among the most elite units of the Roman military, but their existence posed a few problems for the emperors, for the Praetorians were typically more loyal to their own officers than they were to the emperor.

Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, was wisely wary of the Praetorians.  He recognized them as his predecessor’s men and reduced their numbers, moving their quarters outside the city limits of Rome.  Tiberius’ contemporaries dismissed him as paranoid (and they were right about his being too paranoid, just not on this point), but Tiberius’ successor, Caligula, would prove him right on the Praetorian Guard.

Now, there were a lot of things wrong with Caligula, so maybe it’s not really fair to blame the Praetorians for murdering him.  After all, the man who calls himself a god, turns the palace into a brothel, deliberately wastes money on things, murders for amusement, and takes a romantic interest in his sister is probably not the sort of guy who should be running the most powerful country in the world.  Even despite all these things, the Praetorians didn’t say anything.  They drew the line at Caligula wanting to make his horse (in whom he allegedly also had a romantic interest) a consul, which would have made the animal their commanding officer – at least in name.  Caligula was talked down from making his horse a consul, settling for making it a priest (even the emperor has to compromise), but the damage to his relationship with the military, and particularly the Praetorians, had already been irreparably damaged.  The Praetorians murdered Caligula on January 24, 41 AD, setting a dangerous precedent, for the emperors they would later murder were not all horse-lovers (okay, one of them was, but they didn’t technically murder him).

The Praetorians put Caligula’s not insane uncle Claudius on the throne after him, and according to most historians, it was a decent choice.  Problems arose again when Claudius’ successor, Nero, killed his mother and started blaming the Great Fire of Rome on Christians (it pretty clearly wasn’t their fault).  Rumors of horse-loving started floating around again, and the Praetorians abandoned Nero as Galba revolted in 68 AD.  The following “Year of the Four Emperors” saw the Praetorians help Otho overthrow Galba after he had seized power, only to see Otho overthrown by Vitellius and his own army.  Vitellius wised up to the Praetorians and disbanded them, replacing them entirely with his own men.  The problem was that the Praetorians then went and joined Vespasian, another general who was staging a revolt (joke’s on you, Vitellius).  Vespasian took power in 69 and reduced the size of the Praetorian Guard again, placing his son Titus in charge as Praetorian Prefect.  Titus became emperor after his father, but he passed away a couple of years after a remarkably unhappy reign, which saw some dispute as to who would be his successor.

The Praetorian Guard solved this dispute by putting Domitian, Titus’ brother, on the throne, only to have some level of involvement in his murder fifteen years later (they at least didn’t seem to interested in preventing it).  The next handful of emperors are commonly referred to as the “Five Good Emperors” and symbolize the peak of the Roman Empire.  From 96 to 177, there was essentially no disputing the pre-eminence of the Empire, but after Marcus Aurelius’ death, his son, Commodus took the throne.

Dangit, Joaquin.  The Empire had a good thing going.

So… Commodus was either crazy or just a jerk.  Either way, the Praetorians weren’t fans of the guy who insists on being called, “Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius.”  It’s a mouthful, and it’s also hard to only refer to someone with pronouns to avoid having to say a name that long.  When that guy starts telling people he’s a demigod and likes to fight rigged gladiatorial battles, you draw the line.  The Praetorian Prefect Laetius helped murder Commodus in 192, whereupon Pertinax was put in office.  The Praetorians decided they didn’t like Pertinax a few months later and auctioned (yes, auctioned) off the throne to Didius Julianus.  They killed him three months later, but before they could sell the throne again, the Spanish-born general Septimus Severus took the throne by force and replaced the Praetorians with his own guys (wise move, Septimus).  Septimus Severus was the first non-Roman to have taken the throne by force, and you know, the Romans didn’t seem too upset about it after having had good old “Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius” and the guy who bought the throne  in power for the last fifteen years.

Septimus Severus was better than his predecessors, but he still likely contributed to the Crisis of the 3rd Century, in which the Roman economy collapsed and Germanic tribesmen ravaged the frontiers with increasing impunity.  The crisis ended with the rise of the emperor Diocletian, who reorganized  the Empire into four main administrative areas in a system called the Tetrarchy.  It’s hard to deny that Diocletian was a turning point for the Empire, and under him, the Praetorian Guard began their final decline while the Empire recovered.  Diocletian removed the Praetorians from the palace in 284, and by the time of his abdication in 305 (the only Roman Emperor to do so), the Praetorians were simply a part of the city guard in Rome.  The following year, the son of the lieutenant emperor in the West, Maxentius, brought the Praetorians back one last time, as he contested the succession of Constantius Chlorus as Western Emperor.  After Maxentius’ defeat at the hands of Constantius Chlorus’ son, Constantine, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine marched into Rome and disbanded the Praetorian Guard permanently.

A definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” and the dogged commitment to having the Praetorian Guard as the personal protectors of the Emperor certainly fit this definition.  Look, I’m no expert on this, but if the Secret Service murdered several Presidents in a row, maybe we would try something else, but the logic seems to have been that the Empire was doing so well in spite of the Praetorians, who eventually integrated themselves into the imperial tradition itself, that it was better just to live with them than to risk the unknown consequences of dissolving the unit.  In retrospect, a Roman Empire without the Praetorians might not have had to endure the Crisis of the 3rd Century, which irreversibly damaged the Empire.  Hypotheticals aren’t the business of the responsible historian, but it’s fair to wonder as to what might have occurred without the Praetorians, or if Vespasian would have simply removed them after the Year of the Four Emperors, rather than trying to reform the corrupt institution.

The Shi’a-Sunni Split, Part 3

So, the more that I thought about this post, the more I kept on thinking it would be a crash-course in Middle Eastern history, and honestly, in my ~1500 word cap for this post, I simply could not do it justice.  As a result, I decided to BRIEFLY describe the succession of Caliphates and explain how they allowed Shi’a to survive.  Mind you, there’s been a lot of other people who have claimed to be Caliphs.  Later Ottoman Sultans began identifying as Caliphs, the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement in northern India has a Caliph – even ISIS has a Caliph.  It really doesn’t take much to call yourself something, but only a handful of people have had the capability to realize the actual power of a Caliph.

Europe and the Middle East in 750

So to start today’s story, we’re going to fast forward to the year 750, which is, I admit, skipping a lot.  The Byzantines had more or less given up on the whole idea of maintaining their African empire, as the local Berber and Vandal populations had risen up against them while the Umayyad armies swept across the Maghreb.  Under the newly-converted Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad (whose story I’ll tell you someday), the Muslim armies conquered essentially all of Spain, aside from the mountains in the north, where the Basques held out.  Meanwhile, the Byzantines had been too busy dealing with the Slavs and Avars in the North and the Lombards in Italy to wage a prohibitively expensive war against the Umayyads.

The Umayyad popularity was largely based on their battlefield success.  In fifty years, they had conquered Visigothic Spain, Sindh, in what is now Southern Pakistan, the Caucasus Mountains, and all of the northern coast of Africa.  A series of defeats in the mid-8th Century, however, left the Umayyads with very few friends.  The first of these came in 718, at the Siege of Constantinople, in which an army of as many as 120,000 Arabs (likely exaggerated but technically possible at the time).  The Byzantine Emperor Leo the Isaurian’s signature victory had a number of consequences within his own empire, but in the Caliphate, it set off a chain reaction of losses.  In 725, in India, against the Kingdom of Avanti, the Muslim armies suffered what appears to have been a major defeat.  Very little information still exists about this, but the momentum of Muslim conquest in India clearly slowed after this.  Meanwhile, in the West, what was at least at the time considered a major defeat at the hands of the Franks in Battle of Tours resulted in the abrupt halt of Muslim advances into Europe (I know some people like to downplay Tours, but I’ve never heard a good explanation as to why a follow-up expedition was never even planned).

The lack of historical material about the latter two battles makes their importance somewhat difficult to determine, but what happened soon afterward, with the overthrow of the Umayyad clan, would imply that these were hardly inconsequential to the people of the time period.  The revolt of the Abbasid clan in 750 saw everyone save the Arab tribal establishment turn on the unpopular Caliphs.  Even the Shias sided with the mainline Abbasids.  The Umayyads would re-emerge six years later in modern Spain and Portugal and would set up their own “Caliphate” there, but they would never expand their influence much beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

Now, what does all this have to do with the Shi’a, you might ask?  I’m glad you did, because that makes a great segue into my next point… Multiple different Islamic states is what preserved the existence of the Shi’a faith.  For the first 150~ years of Islam’s existence, the entire faith was under a single political head.  With the Umayyad revolt in Spain, and sixty years later, the Tahirids’ revolt in Persia would make the break-up of the Islamic Empire permanent. With this development, the descendants of Ali could flee to more tolerant nations to escape persecution.

In 909, the first Shi’ite state was established in North Africa.  Over the remainder of the 10th Century, they would come to control Egypt and would establish the city of Cairo.  Under the Caliph Mansur, the Shias would come to control Jerusalem.  Mansur’s an interesting guy in a lot of ways, and his disappearance in 1021 is almost a fitting end to such a bizarre life.  All that was found of him was his donkey and bloodstained garments.

Mansur changed his policy on religious minorities several times, even saying a couple of things that almost sound like he thought all religions were basically the same (this is not orthodox Islamic teaching).  He was known to impulsively condemn men to death, and he and his men destroyed the famed Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem  This led to his moniker “the Mad Caliph” in the West, but in Isma’ili Shi’a, he is considered a sage teacher.

The Crusades, which broke out less than a century after the death of Mansur, would weaken both the Fatimids and the Abassids so greatly that both of them would suffer on as puppet governments for another century and a half, until the Mongol invasions acted as an impetus for their final overthrow.  The fragmentation of the Islamic Empire allowed for the survival of fringe groups like Shi’a, which, in the top-down regime of the Caliphs, would not have been able to survive.

Today, four majority-Shi’a countries exist – Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, with significant minorities existing in Pakistan, India, Lebanon, and Syria.

Distribution of Islamic Sects and Schools

Now, about 1300 years removed from the Shi’a-Sunni split, more splits have occurred within the sects themselves, although within the Sunnis, most all Hanafis would call the Maliki Muslims, the Shafi’i would call the Hanbali Muslims, etc.  The only intra-sect split that has become a large, faith-determining issue is the Isma’ili-Jafari split in Shi’a.  For the most part, however, Shias and Sunnis do not consider one another to be true followers of the prophet.

So, hopefully this somewhat meandering post covers the bases that my first two posts did not.  If you have additional questions, feel free to comment, and I’ll do what I can to answer.  Some questions might be better posed to an actual Muslim, however. 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Paul

The Shi’a-Sunni Split, Part 2

So last time we left off on Ali’s victory over Aisha at the Battle of the Camel.  In the moment, it seemed like Ali had some momentum behind him, but he still faced a number of issues.  For one thing, it was not as though everyone in the Caliphate suddenly got along after they were conquered.  Less than forty years before, Syria and Mesopotamia had been on opposite sides of the bitterest Byzantine-Sassanid Persian conflict ever (this was briefly mentioned in my post a few days ago, but once again… it’s a story for another time), and now they were supposed to just get along?  Faith and religion can be incredible uniting forces, but they don’t change the fundamental tendencies of people.  People will still hold grudges and they will not suddenly become amnesiacs, simply because they all worship the same god suddenly.

Although the contemporary sources don’t cite this as a major problem, reading between the lines is not difficult.  There are certain regions of the Caliphate that consistently pose problems for central control, and the Syrian-Mesopotamian-Arab rivalry would be a repeating issue.

Another issue was the rise of the Khawarij, better known as the Kharijites.  Literally meaning “outsiders,” the Kharijites were purists of the highest order, and they would pose issues for many a Caliphate for years to come.  The root of early Kharijite ideology comes from Uncle Ben’s famous quote, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and the Caliphs were certainly claiming great power.  The problem was that they were not always responsible, or at least their behavior was not above reproach, so the Kharijites would invoke takfir (a less formal means of excommunication for Muslims) against them.  A precursor group of the Kharijites had even been the ones responsible for the murder of Caliph Uthman.  After a battle with Muhammad’s own widow, the Kharijites, who had originally supported Ali, seem to have begun to question his authority as Caliph.

Map of the Mediterranean 650

From Basra, Ali marched his army toward Muawiyah, and the two armies met at Siffin in Syria.  The details of the battle are a little unclear, but it appears to have ended with the refusal of both sides to continue fighting fellow Muslims, due to the Qu’ran’s explicit commandments against just such an act.  Other accounts cite concern of what would happen to their families should the Byzantines counterattack or should the Persians reorganize and revolt (mind you Persia had only truly been subjugated for about fifteen years at the time).

Now, in retrospect, we can see that a Byzantine attack was somewhat unrealistic.  Emperor Constans II was in defense mode, and although the Byzantine navy remained the unquestioned superpower of the Mediterranean Sea, his land army was busy fighting off Slavs in the Balkans.  The Muslims do not seem to have understood this, and both sides withdrew after considerable bloodshed.

To outsiders, the general opinion was that Muawiyah had won, and this narrative was reinforced by the permanent break of the Kharijites with Ali.  Trusting in his tentative truce with Muawiyah, Ali proceeded to pursue the Kharijites until he and his son Hasan drew them into battle at Nahrawan in Iraq in 659.  Ali’s faction was victorious, but he solidified himself as Enemy No. 1 for the Kharijites, despite their being more ideologically opposed to Muawiyah.

In 661, while in prayer, Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite with a poisoned blade, and his son Hasan claimed succession.  Hasan personally decapitated his father’s assassin, but if his father’s claim had been questioned by Muawiyah, Hasan’s was outright contested.  Ultimately, Kharijite resistance never really allowed Hasan to assemble an army of any note, and when Muawiyah arrived in force with his army of Syrians, Hasan had little choice but to surrender.  He would live out the last eight years of his life in Medina, keeping his head down and publishing theological writings, but there remained a substantial number of Muslims, particularly in modern-day Iraq, who continued to hold Hasan as the rightful Caliph.

The Umayyad Caliphate, which Muawiyah established in 661 after Hasan’s surrender, would go on to be almost unarguably the least popular Caliphate of the four major Caliphates (Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid) and less than a hundred years later, their rule would implode.  During this time, the rift between the followers of Hasan and his direct descendants in the male line and the less-organized majority, whose head was decided far less systematically.  To this day, the Shi’a remain more organized than Sunnis, particularly in the Ithnā’ashariyyah’ (called “Twelver” in English) branch.

I suppose it might be useful here to see what “Sunni” and “Shi’a” actually mean, because this really helps when you’re trying to understand the sect.  Sunni (which is the sect that today constitutes, conservatively, 85% of Muslims is derived from the word sunnah, meaning “habit,” “custom,” or “tradition.”  Today, Sunnis are typically more ritualistic than the Shi’a, as you probably noticed in their Five Pillars in my post yesterday.

Shi’a is an abbreviation of Shia-ne-Ali (followers of Ali).  Essentially, Shi’a means “follower,” and, as a result, their works tend to emphasize the teachings of the Imams (the direct descendants of Ali).  Now, there are disputes among Shias about who the rightful Imam was/is, the majority believing in the Occultation (in essence, Muhammad al-Mahdi’s disappearance in 941, to return at an unknown date).  Because so much of their faith is based on theological writings, rather than tradition, Shi’a belief tends to be a little more analytical and systematic than Sunni (I’m painting with really broad strokes here).

So, there’s a number of other theological differences between Sunnis and Shias that I’m going to try to quickly sum up here (they can’t be quickly summed up).  As we mentioned yesterday, Shias do not believe that they will actually see Allah when they go to heaven.  There are also some differences in prayer.  Sunnis cross their arms while they pray, but Shias keep their hands by their sides.  Additionally the five times a day thing for Sunnis doesn’t apply to Shias; Shias condense it all into three times a day.  Most of the leading Sunni scholars are now dead, and modern-day Sunnis do most of their theological work either with the Qu’ran itself, the Hadiths, or with the writings of prominent Sunni scholars, but the Sunnis lack a central body of “theological government” like the Shias have.  The Marja’ (often called Grand Ayatollahs) are the highest rank in the Shi’a clergy, of whom there are currently 64 (this is not a fixed number).  Below these are the Ayatollahs, and below them are the Muitjahids (essentially, people who have shown enough competency in Islamic jurisprudence so as to form their own opinions).  Mutijahids are not obligated to follow a Marja’, but a Muqallid, (literally, a follower of a Marja’) does not have permission to create his own theological opinions and must follow one more educated and well-versed than himself.

So, next time we’re going to go over how it is that Shi’a survived (which is an interesting story on its own) and why today, the country with the largest Shi’a population in the world is Iran.  As kind of a teaser, here’s a little chart of countries by Shi’a population.

The Shi’a-Sunni Split, Part 1

So this is a delicate subject, and I’m going to try to treat it as such, but before I start, I should note that I am not a Muslim.  As a result, many of my comments will perhaps seem critical of the faith.  Do not misconstrue it as such, but simply know that this is my view of the matter, and I find that there is a concerning lack of understanding of how and why this split happened.  Today, we’re just going to be laying the groundwork for the split, going through the Battle of the Camel (you’ll know what that means by the end) and covering some basics of Islamic theology such as the Umma.  By the end of this series hopefully you’ll understand the basics of the Shi’ite-Sunni split, as well as a little about other major groups such as the Ibadi and Sufi.  A short disclaimer here, I learned most of what I know of Islam from Sunnis, and what I know of the Shi’a comes from my own research.  As a result, I might phrase things in a way that sounds a little Sunni-esque.  This is not intentional, it’s just the way I learned it.  There will be no images (aside from one diagram) used for these posts out of respect for the Islamic faith.

So, let’s begin.  Islam teaches about much of what would be considered the Judeo-Christian Old Testament.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, and others are all mentioned in the Qu’ran, and Muhammad, in many ways, viewed himself as the last in a succession of prophets going back to more or less the creation of man.  On the other hand, Muhammad viewed himself quite differently than the others, for it was his message by which people would be saved.  As a result, all Muslims recite the Shahada “the testimonial word,” that declares, “There is no god but God; Muhammad is the messenger of God.”  Typically, the Muslim god is called “Allah” in English, but Allah simply means “God” in Arabic.  From here on out, I’ll be using Allah to reference the Muslim deity.

Along with Shahada, Sunnis believe Muhammad mandated four other principal teachings, which are today known as the “Five Pillars of Islam.”  These are:

Shahada.  An almost mantra-like expression of faith, upon which the believer is to meditate.  This is the first step one takes in order to become a Muslim.

Salat.  This is the Islamic tradition of prayer, which consists of five daily prayers – Fajr, Dhuhr, ‘Asr, Maghrib, and ‘Isha.  These prayers may be performed anywhere, but if available, prayer in a mosque is best.

Zakat.  One of the originally most attractive features about Islam is charity.  Today, Muslims donate more to charity than any other active faith, and in the highly stratified society that Muhammad presented his message in, this resonated with people.  Like Salat, Zakat breaks down into five basic parts: on must declare one’s to Allah his intent to give, the zakat must be given on the day it is due, afterwards one may not exaggerate one’s spending, the giver must give zakat according to what he has, and the zakat must be given in the place where one earned it.

Sawm: Sawm handles the entire Muslim diet, but specifically it refers to ritual fasting, particularly during the month of Ramadan.  This year, Ramadan will start on June 6 and will continue until July 5.  During Ramadan, Muslims may not eat while the sun is still up, although special exceptions are granted by most groups to diabetics, nursing mothers, the old and infirm, etc.

Hajj: Pilgrimage to Mecca.  This is to be done during the month of Dhu al-Hijjah (will be September 2 to October 2 in 2016), and every Muslim is obliged to do this at least once in their life.  Once within a certain distance of Mecca, the traveler will don the Ihram a simple garment of two white sheets.  Whilst in Mecca, one walks around the Kaaba seven times, touches the Black Stone known as Istilam and symbolically “stones the devil.”

Now, non-Sunnis might phrase the Five Pillars differently, but pretty much none of them would dispute that the Five Pillars are good things to do.  Please note that the Five Pillars of Islam are not listed in the Qu’ran.

Shi’a promotes an alternative set of pillars, which are more theological in nature rather than practical.  Most Shi’ites would say that you need to understand these five tenants before practicing the five Sunni pillars, called Usul-e-Deen.

1. Tawheed: The Oneness of Allah.  This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
2. ‘Adl: The Justice of Allah.  Also, not hard.
3. Nabuwat: Prophethood/Apostleship.  In essence, this is about the nature of the succession of prophets all the way down to Muhammad.
4. Imamat: Leadership (more on this next time, but this is the first difference between Shi’a and Sunni)
5. Mi’ad: The Day of Judgment.  Shi’ites do not believe that they will ever see God.  This is a somewhat contentious issue.

From there, a Muslim may practice Islam with the ten Furu’-e-Deen, which includes the Sunni Five Pillars.  For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into all those, because we have a little history to get to.

Anyway, one of Muhammad’s most attractive teachings was the Umma – that when one becomes a Muslim, one’s old identity is gone and one is absorbed into the new tribe and nation of Allah.  For a man from arguably the most powerful Arab tribe (the Quraysh) to offer membership to all in his tribe was revolutionary, and although Arab tribal identity did not evaporate overnight (largely due to some events we’ll cover next time), Islam and the Umma offered something that the traditional faiths could not – unity.

After Muhammad died, people began to realize that he hadn’t really left much of a succession plan.  Like I said before, this is not meant to be a critique of Muhammad; it’s just an observation.  Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s good friend, became the first Caliph in 632, upon the Prophet’s death, but he died two years later, leaving the Caliphate to Umar.  Under Umar, Islam experienced its most rapid growth, sweeping over Palestine and Egypt, but upon his death in 644, it was less clear as to who should be the new Caliph.  Ali ibn Abi Talib was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, but he was passed over for Uthman ibn Affan.  Uthman, fair or not, was increasingly viewed as nepotistic, and on July 17, 656, he was murdered by a mob of protestors.

Muhammad, Uthman, and Ali’s Family Tree.  Their names are in purple.

What followed is known as the First Fitna.  After the death of Uthman, the Umayyad clan desired to keep the Caliphate within their line.  Ali, however, contended that the Banu Hashim clan (both his and Muhammad’s clan) held the superior claim.  Muawiyah, the de facto leader of the Umayyads, viewed Ali as having been complicit in the death of Uthman.  While Muawiyah assembled his forces in Syria, Aisha, Muhammad’s widow, took an army of 30,000 to Basra, where she was met by Ali.  In the ensuing battle, Aisha was counseled to mount the camel and ride through the battle (hence the name “Battle of the Camel” to get the men to stop fighting one another.  Aisha’s forces crowded around the camel to keep their leader safe, but Ali’s forces managed to cut the back legs of the camel, and Aisha fell from her mount.  She fled, only to be captured by Ali.

Ali pardoned her, but Aisha would never again involve herself in politics.  Although the situation seemed to have calmed itself, the lines had already been drawn between to camps in the Islamic world.  The full Shi’ite-Sunni split had not yet fully begun, but the gap between the two factions could not be resewn.

To be continued… 🙂

Antoine Lavoisier – A Life (1743-1794)

Okay, so preface here – I am not a scientist.  I am neither very knowledgeable about science, nor am I terribly interested in its nuances, but 18th Century scientific discoveries are today not extremely advanced stuff, so I feel more or less qualified to talk about this, having taken high school chemistry.  If I say something incorrect or simply imprecise, feel free to correct me in the comments.

Anyway, Lavoisier.  As you can probably tell from the name, he’s French.  He’s best known for his work as a chemist, but he did a lot more than just that.  Lavoisier began to work on the actual mechanism behind respiration and was one of the first to connect it to metabolism.  He was an activist, attempting to use his own prestigious position within France to save foreign academics from the Reign of Terror, and even had a part in creating the metric system.

So, we’ll start at the beginning with Lavoisier’s education, which was as a lawyer.  He practiced relatively little law, as you might imagine, and at the age of 26, in 1794, he helped publish the first geological map of France.  After this, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences, the prestige of which is somewhat difficult to understand in today’s academic system.  Today, scholars of all sorts may talk to one another via email or video-chat without much problem, and they can easily and readily view one another’s work in academic journals.  As a result, many academics have myriad opportunities to collaborate with minds of their same caliber.  In Lavoisier’s day, such an opportunity was almost unheard of.  With the exception of perhaps the British Royal Society, there existed no other entity in 1769 that included so many learned men, almost all of whom had given valuable contributions to the sciences.  There were a few honorary members (Napoleon, for instance), but the level of academic discourse at the Academy must have been almost foreign to these men, who would have been used to having to dumb down their work for others so that they could be better understood.

Around the time of his admission into the Academy, Lavoisier bought a share in the Ferme générale – essentially a privatized form of the IRS used by the French Monarchy in the 18th Century.  This gave Lavoisier a certain standing within the government, which he attempted to use on monetary reform, which would have helped the peasants, but ultimately, he was ignored.

In 1772, Lavoisier began devoting time to working on Phlogiston Theory – which posited that all flammable substances contained a chemical called Phlogiston, which, when burned, would release part of itself into the air (smoke) and would also disintegrate into a solid (ash).

Lavoisier’s new formulation of combustion theory

Lavoisier’s experiments noted that after burning substances, somewhat counter-intuitively, weighed more than before combustion, but phlogiston theory would suggest that with the escape of the now-combusted phlogiston, the burned object would weigh less.  Lavoisier presented his findings to the Academy, where Joseph Priestly, a visiting Englishman, heard Lavoisier’s thesis.  Priestly and Lavoisier worked together for a time on the issue, and Priestly came to call what we now know as Oxygen “dephlogisticated air.”  In 1783, Lavoisier read to the Academy his new paper Reflections on Phlogiston, in which he launched his attack on Phlogiston Theory as a whole, taking things a step farther than Priestly had.

Teaming with Pierre Simon de Laplace, another famous scholar of the time, Lavoisier went a step further and attempted to see what would happen when one took this new gas, which was somehow linked with combustion, and combined it with another newly-discovered gas, which Lavoisier named “Hydrogen” (literally water-maker; nobody ever called scientists creative at naming things).  When the two reacted, they produced water, and so, Lavoisier and Laplace found that they had accidentally proven that water was not an element – a belief that had been held for 2,000 years.  Oops.

Unfortunately, nobody could agree on how this finding affected combustion theory.  Lavoisier would contribute a few other things to combustion theory, such as the fact that amplified sunlight could accelerate combustion, but there was still no consensus on the actual mechanism of combustion and how it works.

Lavoisier would move on to work on Stoichiometry, which he is often erroneously named the “inventor” of.  Number one, he didn’t invent it, he discovered it.  Number two, people had been making stoichiometric observations for well over a century at the time of Lavoisier.  What makes Lavoisier unique is that he seems to have been the first to understand the whole process mathematically.  Mikhail Lomonosov had stated half a century before that nothing is actually lost in a chemical reaction, but Lavoisier turned the whole thing into a simple algebra problem.  He also attempted to form a sort of periodic table, which he was never able to perfect as completely as he wanted.  It consisted of some 55 elements, which he could not distill any more than he already had, and in 1789, he published the first actual textbook on chemistry.

Other notable observations and inventions of Lavoisier were that diamond is simply another form of carbon, the most efficient form of saltpeter production to date (which was key in producing gunpowder), and a new method for lighting the streets of Paris.

After the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Lavoisier began to tread more carefully.  He worked with Laplace once more to begin creating the national set of weights and measures demanded by the new French Republic, but he entered suspicion when he began defending foreign scientists who were working in France at the time.  Lavoisier was already distrusted by the regime, due to his work with the Ferme, since taxes were in large part viewed as a royal tool to repress the people.  Moreover, much of Lavoisier’s work had been enabled by the government.  In the 1770s, he had been requested by the crown to oversee gunpowder production for the French army, a job which Lavoisier seems to have been very successful at.  Moreover, Lavoisier’s position gave him a lab in the National Armory, where he could conduct scientific experiments of his own on the government’s dime.  In November of 1793, the order of all former tax gatherers was ordered, and Maximilien Robespierre named Lavoisier a traitor not long afterward.  He was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794, shortly before Robespierre fell from power and was himself guillotined.

Lavoisier was but one among several scientists executed during the Reign of Terror, which greatly contributed to France’s “brain drain” in the early 19th Century.  Although the effects of this phenomenon on the French economy are hard to quantify, France would never be truly competitive with Great Britain economically throughout the 19th Century.  The historian’s job is not to answer “what if” questions, but I do not believe it is unreasonable to say that had France not killed so many of its educated people during the Reign of Terror, it might have had a better economy.  That seems like pretty simple logic.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this piece.  Lavoisier is an incredibly diverse guy, and the basis of the way we study chemistry today is largely due to his (and a little bit of Laplace’s) work.  I’m not a big scientific historian, but the occasional guy is pretty interesting, so later on, I might throw out a piece like this again.

Thanks for reading,

Paul

Unifying Korea Is a Lot Older of a Problem Than You Might Think

To start our story, we’ll be going pretty far back – all the way to 238 CE in the Korean Peninsula.  The Han Dynasty in China had just fallen apart after an admirable 400-year run, and in its place, three rival emperors, each naming himself the rightful successor to the imperial throne, emerged.  For the purposes of our story, only one of these is important – Cao Pi, whose son, Cao Rui made an alliance with the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo in 238.

The Situation in Korea c. 350

The purpose of this alliance was primarily to re-subjugate the Gongsun Clan, which had grown increasingly powerful in the Northeast over the past few years.  The Gongsun campaign went fairly quickly, but thereafter Cao Rui’s kingdom, Cao Wei, saw little reason to remain allied with Goguryeo.  With King Dongcheon of Goguryeo’s raid on Wei territory in 242 (apparently he thought his old allies wouldn’t mind), the alliance broke down entirely, and in 244 and 245, the Wei army devastated Goguryeo’s army and countryside.  However, Wei never bothered to actually occupy Goguryeo, aside from a few following punitive expeditions, and so they allowed the kingdom to rise again.

Meanwhile, in the South, old tribal confederacies were beginning to form into hereditary monarchies.  The old Mahan Confederacy was consolidated into the Kingdom of Baekje under King Goi, and in the Southeast, a new kingdom called Silla emerged.  Between the two southern kingdoms lay the tiny, yet still influential, Kaya (also spelled Paya) Confederacy.

In the mid-4th Century, Baekje began expanding to the North, against her much larger neighbor of Goguryeo.  Goguryeo had been weakened by a coup in the year 300, and the following thirty-year reign of the ineffectual Micheon.  Micheon’s successor Gogugwon is perhaps more difficult to evaluate, but it was on his watch that the much larger and, until that point, more powerful Goguryeo was defeated by Baekje.  Gogugwon was killed in battle in 371, seemingly sealing the decline of Goguryeo.  Gogugwon’s successor, Sosurim, however, decided that if Goguryeo were to survive, it would have to modernize.  Sosurim set up several laws to decrease the power of individual clans and tribes and to increase national identity in his realm.

In 391, Gwanggeato ascended the throne of Goguryeo, at a time when there was still some mystery as to who the most powerful nation on the Korean Peninsula was.  Gwanggeato was only nineteen at the time of his accession, and he was thirty-nine when he died, but during his time on the throne, he forced every single southern country to pay him tribute and to recognize him as their suzerain.  Upon his death, the southern kings immediately stopped paying tribute, but the seeds of Korean unification had been planted.

Baekje would decline throughout the 5th Century, and in the early 6th Century, the name “Goguryeo” was changed to the somewhat more manageable “Goryeo.”  Over the course of the mid-6th Century, Silla would become the leading power in the South as it annexed the Kaya confederacy and, together with Baekje, they conquered the populous and wealthy Han River Basin.  Before Silla and Baekje could advance any father, however, their alliance broke down, and Silla began a series of wars with Baekje.  Silla gained the upper hand in these, partly because of their rigidly-organized society.  The so-called “bone rank system” was a sort of caste system for Koreans.  Clothing, estate size, and how far one may go to find a bride were all dictated by one’s societal class, and Baekje could never match this sort of state control.

The real impetus for Korean unification, however, came with the rise of the Sui Dynasty in China, under the half-Turkic general Yang Jian.  Yang Jian fought a small campaign against Goryeo, which the Korean kingdom managed to survive, but the common threat to the West began to concern the Koreans, particularly as Yang Jian’s son, the Emperor Yangdi, began preparing to launch a second, yet larger, offensive into Korea.  The Battle of Salsu in 612 was a watershed event in Korean history.  Allegedly, over 300,000 Chinese soldiers were slaughtered, crippling the Sui Dynasty.  Ordinarily, such a large number would be ignored, but the implosion of the Sui Dynasty that followed soon afterward lends some legitimacy to this claim.

The Sui Dynasty was soon followed by the Tang, who did not lose interest in the Korean Peninsula.  After a few failures against Goryeo, the Tang allied themselves with Silla, believing that Silla could become a client state of theirs.  Silla conquered Baekje in 660, despite intervention from Goryeo, and in 668, Tang and Silla forces subjugated Goryeo itself.  Now, the Tang deployed their “master stroke,” turning on Silla in 670.  After a six-year war, Tang and Silla agreed on a border at the Taedong River.

Traditionally, many Korean historians have called this the founding of a unified Korea, but when one actually looks at the map, it’s pretty clear that Silla did not hold all of the peninsula.

Silla and Balhae (we’ll talk about that in a second) around the year 700

The Tang would not hold on to the Peninsula for long, as a revolt from the Khitan people allowed the former territory of Goryeo, along with the Mohe people (ancestors of the modern Manchus) to establish their own kingdom called Balhae in 698.  For two centuries, this balance of power persisted, until in 892, with the onset of the Later Three Kingdoms Period.

In the ninth century, people had started to resent the bone rank system (who could have seen that coming?), and before long Silla began falling apart.  The kingdoms of Hubaekje (later Baekje) and Hugoguryeo (later Goguryeo) were established, almost as if people thought that repeating history would give them a more favorable result.  At first, Hubaekje was the most powerful kingdom, but King Taejo of Hugoguryeo took the upper hand, and by 940, Korea had been reunified, and Taejo’s campaigns against Balhae had given him control over the entire peninsula under the standard of Goryeo.

Historians still disagree as to whether Silla’s “unification” actually counts as a unification of Korea, and, as you might expect, the debate is highly politically charged.  Goryeo was a northern kingdom, and most of the historians doing the debating here are from the Republic of Korea – or South Korea.  As a result, they would love to portray history in such a way that might lend legitimacy to South Korea, rather than dwelling on a past when the North conquered the South.  If we can say that the first nation to unify Korea was a southern kingdom, however, it – after a certain sense – could make it seem like the Republic of Korea has a “right” to North Korea.  Of course, the honesty of the discourse on the history of Korean unification was largely influenced by the heavy censure of free speech that South Korea endured for most of the 20th Century.  In recent years, scholars have had a more honest debate that has begun to consider Goryeo’s conquest in the 10th Century the first time Korea – and all of Korea – was truly united.