43.MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

43.MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM

A prophetic amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of the seventh century might have concluded very reasonably that it was only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domination. There were no signs of order or union in Western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian Empires were manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction. India also was divided and wasted. On the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which probably at that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people who were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed to work in accord with China. And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain one. A time was to come in the thirteenth century when a Mongolian overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of India.

Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would have

been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the Latin end of

Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia

would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of

small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an

empire now for more than a thousand years.

Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splendour.

They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boundaries of

China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that

is still to this day one of the most vital forces in the world.

The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young

husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of Mecca, named

Muhammad. Until he was forty he did very little to distinguish himself

in the world. He seems to have taken considerable interest in

religious discussion. Mecca was a pagan city at that time worshipping

in particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of great repute throughout all

Arabia and a centre of pilgrimages; but there were great numbers of

Jews in the country—indeed all the southern portion of Arabia professed

the Jewish faith—and there were Christian churches in Syria.

About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic characteristics like

those of the Hebrew prophets twelve hundred years before him. He

talked first to his wife of the One True God, and of the rewards and

punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can be no doubt that his

thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas.

He gathered about him a small circle of believers and presently began

to preach in the town against the prevalent idolatry. This made him

extremely unpopular with his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to

the Kaaba were the chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed.

He became bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself

to be the last chosen prophet of God entrusted with a mission to

perfect religion. Abraham, he declared, and Jesus Christ were his

forerunners. He had been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation

of God’s will.

He produced verses which he said had been communicated to him by an

angel, and he had a strange vision in which he was taken up through the

Heavens to God and instructed in his mission.

AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT

AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT

_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_

As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow townsmen

increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him; but he escaped

with his faithful friend and disciple, Abu Bekr, to the friendly town

of Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities followed between

Mecca and Medina which ended at last in a treaty. Mecca was to adopt

the worship of the One True God and accept Muhammad as his prophet,

_but the adherents of the new faith were still to make the pilgrimage

to Mecca_ just as they had done when they were pagans. So Muhammad

established the One True God in Mecca without injuring its pilgrim

traffic. In 629 Muhammad returned to Mecca as its master, a year after

he had sent out these envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung, Kavadh and

all the rulers of the earth.

LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND

LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND

_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_

Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread his

power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives in his

declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern standards

unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of very

considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere

religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions,

the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him from God.

Regarded as literature or philosophy the Koran is certainly unworthy of

its alleged Divine authorship.

Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writings have been

allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the

Arabs, much power and inspiration. One is its uncompromising

monotheism; its simple enthusiastic faith in the rule and fatherhood of

God and its freedom from theological complications. Another is its

complete detachment from the sacrificial priest and the temple. It is

an entirely prophetic religion, proof against any possibility of

relapse towards blood sacrifices. In the Koran the limited and

ceremonial nature of the pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond the

possibility of dispute, and every precaution was taken by Muhammad to

prevent the deification of himself after his death. And a third

element of strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the perfect

brotherhood and equality before God of all believers, whatever their

colour, origin or status.

These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs. It has

been said that the true founder of the Empire of Islam was not so much

Muhammad as his friend and helper, Abu Bekr. If Muhammad, with his

shifty character, was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu

Bekr was its conscience and its will. Whenever Muhammad wavered Abu

Bekr sustained him. And when Muhammad died, Abu Bekr became Caliph (=

successor), and with that faith that moves mountains, he set himself

simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to

Allah—with little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs—according to those

letters the prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs

of the world.

42.THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

42.THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA

Throughout the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of Attila were merely precursors of this advance, which led at last to the establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary and Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages akin to Turkish, survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads were, in fact, playing a role towards the Aryanized civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that the Aryans had played to the Ægean and Semitic civilizations ten or fifteen centuries before.

In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now

Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish officials

and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of history,

absorbed into the general population of Persia. There were no more

Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia; Mongolian people had

replaced them. The Turks became masters of Asia from China to the

Caspian.

The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D. that

had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han dynasty in China.

Then came a period of division and of Hunnish conquests from which

China arose refreshed, more rapidly and more completely than Europe was

destined to do. Before the end of the sixth century China was reunited

under the Suy dynasty, and this by the time of Heraclius gave place to

the Tang dynasty, whose reign marks another great period of prosperity

for China.

CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TANG DYNASTY, 616-906

CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TANG DYNASTY, 616-906

Specimens in glazed earthenware, in brown, green and buff, discovered

in tombs in China

_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_

Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was the most

secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty had

extended her boundaries in the north; the Suy and Tang dynasties now

spread her civilization to the south, and China began to assume the

proportions she has to-day. In Central Asia indeed she reached much

further, extending at last, through tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia

and the Caspian Sea.

The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the old

China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school appeared,

there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had revolutionized

philosophical and religious thought. There were great advances in

artistic work, in technical skill and in all the amenities of life.

Tea was first used, paper manufactured and wood-block printing began.

Millions of people indeed were leading orderly, graceful and kindly

lives in China during these centuries when the attenuated populations

of Europe and Western Asia were living either in hovels, small walled

cities or grim robber fortresses. While the mind of the west was black

with theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant

and enquiring.

One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai- tsung, who

began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at Nineveh.

He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was probably seeking an

ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a party of

Christian missionaries (635). They were allowed to explain their creed

to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation of their Scriptures.

He pronounced this strange religion acceptable, and gave permission

for the foundation of a church and monastery.

To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad. They came

to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way from Arabia

along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh, Tai-Tsung gave

these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in their

theological ideas and assisted them to build a mosque in Canton, a

mosque which survives, it is said, to this day, the oldest mosque in

the world.

41.THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

41.THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES

The Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire showed much more political tenacity than the western half. It weathered the disasters of the fifth century A.D., which saw a complete and final breaking up of the original Latin Roman power. Attila bullied the Emperor Theodosius II and sacked and raided almost to the walls of Constantinople, but that city remained intact. The Nubians came down the Nile and looted Upper Egypt, but Lower Egypt and Alexandria were left still fairly prosperous. Most of Asia Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians.

The sixth century, which was an age of complete darkness for the West,

saw indeed a considerable revival of the Greek power. Justinian I

(527-565) was a ruler of very great ambition and energy, and he was

married to the Empress Theodora, a woman of quite equal capacity who

had begun life as an actress. Justinian reconquered North Africa from

the Vandals and most of Italy from the Goths. He even regained the

south of Spain. He did not limit his energies to naval and military

enterprises. He founded a university, built the great church of Sta.

Sophia in Constantinople and codified the Roman law. But in order to

destroy a rival to his university foundation he closed the schools of

philosophy in Athens, which had been going on in unbroken continuity

from the days of Plato, that is to say for nearly a thousand years.

From the third century onwards the Persian Empire had been the

steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires kept Asia Minor,

Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual unrest and waste. In the first

century A.D., these lands were still at a high level of civilization,

wealthy and with an abundant population, but the continual coming and

going of armies, massacres, looting and war taxation wore them down

steadily until only shattered and ruinous cities remained upon a

countryside of scattered peasants. In this melancholy process of

impoverishment and disorder lower Egypt fared perhaps less badly than

the rest of the world. Alexandria, like Constantinople, continued a

dwindling trade between the east and the west.

THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE

THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE

The obelisk of Theodosius in in the foreground statue on left

_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_

Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both these warring

and decaying empires. The last philosophers of Athens, until their

suppression, preserved the texts of the great literature of the past

with an infinite reverence and want of understanding. But there

remained no class of men in the world, no free gentlemen with bold and

independent habits of thought, to carry on the tradition of frank

statement and enquiry embodied in these writings. The social and

political chaos accounts largely for the disappearance of this class,

but there was also another reason why the human intelligence was

sterile and feverish during this age. In both Persia and Byzantium it

was all age of intolerance. Both empires were religious empires in a

new way, in a way that greatly hampered the free activities of the

human mind.

THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIA

THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIA

_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_

Of course the oldest empires in the world were religious empires,

centring upon the worship of a god or of a god-king. Alexander was

treated as a divinity and the Cæsars were gods in so much as they had

altars and temples devoted to them and the offering of incense was made

a test of loyalty to the Roman state. But these older religions were

essentially religions of act and fact. They did not invade the mind.

If a man offered his sacrifice and bowed to the god, he was left not

only to think but to say practically whatever he liked about the

affair. But the new sort of religions that had come into the world,

and particularly Christianity, turned inward. These new faiths

demanded not simply conformity but understanding belief. Naturally

fierce controversy ensued upon the exact meaning of the things

believed. These new religions were creed religions. The world was

confronted with a new word, Orthodoxy, and with a stern resolve to keep

not only acts but speech and private thought within the limits of a set

teaching. For to hold a wrong opinion, much more to convey it to other

people, was no longer regarded as an intellectual defect but a moral

fault that might condemn a soul to everlasting destruction.

THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS COURT

THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS COURT

_Photo: Alinari_

THE ROCK HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA

THE ROCK HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA

_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_

Both Ardashir I who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the third century

A.D., and Constantine the Great who reconstructed the Roman Empire in

the fourth, turned to religious organizations for help, because in

these organizations they saw a new means of using and controlling the

wills of men. And already before the end of the fourth century both

empires were persecuting free talk and religious innovation. In Persia

Ardashir found the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster (or

Zarathushtra) with its priests and temples and a sacred fire that burnt

upon its altars, ready for his purpose as a state religion. Before the

end of the third century Zoroastrianism was persecuting Christianity,

and in 277 A.D. Mani, the founder of a new faith, the Manichæans, was

crucified and his body flayed. Constantinople, on its side, was busy

hunting out Christian heresies. Manichæan ideas infected Christianity

and had to be fought with the fiercest methods; in return ideas from

Christianity affected the purity of the Zoroastrian doctrine. All ideas

became suspect. Science, which demands before all things the free

action of an untroubled mind, suffered a complete eclipse throughout

this phase of intolerance.

War, the bitterest theology, and the usual vices of mankind constituted

Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque, it was romantic; it

had little sweetness or light. When Byzantium and Persia were not

fighting the barbarians from the north, they wasted Asia Minor and

Syria in dreary and destructive hostilities. Even in close alliance

these two empires would have found it a hard task to turn back the

barbarians and recover their prosperity. The Turks or Tartars first

come into history as the allies first of one power and then of another.

In the sixth century the two chief antagonists were Justinian and

Chosroes I; in the opening of the seventh the Emperor Heraclius was

pitted against Chosroes II (580).

At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor (610) Chosroes II

carried all before him. He took Antioch, Damascus and Jerusalem and

his armies reached Chalcedon, which is in Asia Minor over against

Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt. Then Heraclius pressed a

counter attack home and routed a Persian army at Nineveh (627),

although at that time there were still Persian troops at Chalcedon. In

628 Chosroes II was deposed and murdered by his son, Kavadh, and an

inconclusive peace was made between the two exhausted empires.

Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war. But few people as yet

dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the deserts to put

an end for ever to this aimless, chronic struggle.

While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria a message reached him. It

had been brought in to the imperial outpost at Bostra south of

Damascus; it was in Arabic, an obscure Semitic desert language, and it

was read to the Emperor, if it reached him at all, by an interpreter.

It was from someone who called himself “Muhammad the Prophet of God.”

It called upon the Emperor to acknowledge the One True God and to serve

him. What the Emperor said is not recorded.

A similar message came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon. He was annoyed, tore up

the letter, and bade the messenger begone.

This Muhammad, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader whose headquarters

were in the mean little desert town of Medina. He was preaching a new

religion of faith in the One True God.

“Even so, O Lord!” he said; “rend thou his Kingdom from Kavadh.”

40.THE HUNS AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

40.THE HUNS AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE

This appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in Europe may be taken to mark a new stage in human history. Until the last century or so before the Christian era, the Mongol and the Nordic peoples had not been in close touch. Far away in the frozen lands beyond the northern forests the Lapps, a Mongolian people, had drifted westward as far as Lapland, but they played no part in the main current of history. For thousands of years the western world carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan, Semitic and fundamental brunette peoples with very little interference (except for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or so) either from the black peoples to the south or from the Mongolian world in the far East.

It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new westward

drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the consolidation of the

great empire of China, its extension northward and the increase of its

population during the prosperous period of the Han dynasty. The other

was some process of climatic change; a lesser rainfall that abolished

swamps and forests perhaps, or a greater rainfall that extended grazing

over desert steppes, or even perhaps both these processes going on in

different regions but which anyhow facilitated a westward migration. A

third contributary cause was the economic wretchedness, internal decay

and falling population of the Roman Empire. The rich men of the later

Roman Republic, and then the tax-gatherers of the military emperors had

utterly consumed its vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means

and opportunity. There was pressure from the east, rot in the west and

an open road.

The Hun had reached the eastern boundaries of European Russia by the

first century A.D., but it was not until the fourth and fifth centuries

A.D. that these horsemen rose to predominance upon the steppes. The

fifth century was the Hun’s century. The first Huns to come into Italy

were mercenary bands in the pay of Stilicho the Vandal, the master of

Honorius. Presently they were in possession of Pannonia, the empty nest

of the Vandals.

By the second quarter of the fifth century a great war chief had arisen

among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing glimpses of

his power. He ruled not only over the Huns but over a conglomerate of

tributary Germanic tribes; his empire extended from the Rhine cross the

plains into Central Asia. He exchanged ambassadors with China. His

head camp was in the plain of Hungary east of the Danube. There he was

visited by an envoy from Constantinople, Priscus, who has left us an

account of his state. The way of living of these Mongols was very like

the way of living of the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The

common folk were in huts and tents; the chiefs lived in great stockaded

timber halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards.

The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian companions of Alexander

would probably have felt more at home in the camp-capital of Attila

than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent court of

Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning in

Constantinople.

For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership of the

Huns and Attila would play the same part towards the Græco-Roman

civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the barbaric Greeks

had played long ago to the Ægean civilization. It looked like history

repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the Huns were much more

wedded to the nomadic life than the early Greeks, who were rather

migratory cattle farmers than true nomads. The Huns raided and

plundered but did not settle.

For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His armies

devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople, Gibbon

says that he totally destroyed no less than seventy cities in the

Balkan peninsula, and Theodosius bought him off by payments of tribute

and tried to get rid of him for good by sending secret agents to

assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention to the remains of

the Latin- speaking half of the empire and invaded Gaul. Nearly every

town in northern Gaul was sacked. Franks, Visigoths and the imperial

forces united against him and he was defeated at Troyes in a vast

dispersed battle in which a multitude of men, variously estimated as

between 150,000 and 300,000, were killed. This checked him in Gaul, but

it did not exhaust his enormous military resources. Next year he came

into Italy by way of Venetia, burnt Aquileia and Padua and looted

Milan.

HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF

HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF

_(In the British Museum)_

Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and particularly

from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic

and laid there the foundations of the city state of Venice, which was

to become one of the greatest or the trading centres in the middle

ages.

In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate his

marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder confederation

of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear from history, mixed

into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations. But

these great Hun raids practically consummated the end of the Latin

Roman Empire. After his death ten different emperors ruled in Rome in

twenty years, set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops. The Vandals

from Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the

chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring

as emperor under the impressive name of Romulus Augustulus, and

informed the Court of Constantinople that there was no longer an

emperor in the west. So ingloriously the Latin Roman Empire came to an

end. In 493 Theodoric the Goth became King of Rome.

All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs were reigning

as kings, dukes and the like, practically independent but for the most

part professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to the emperor. There

were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such practically independent

brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain and Italy and in Dacia the Latin speech

still prevailed in locally distorted forms, but in Britain and east of

the Rhine languages of the German group (or in Bohemia a Slavonic

language, Czech) were the common speech. The superior clergy and a

small remnant of other educated men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere

life was insecure and property was held by the strong arm. Castles

multiplied and roads fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century

was an age of division and of intellectual darkness throughout the

western world. Had it not been for the monks and Christian

missionaries Latin learning might have perished altogether.

Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely decayed?

It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it together.

Throughout the days of the expanding republic, and even into the days

of the early empire there remained a great number of men conscious of

Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an obligation to be a

Roman citizen, confident of their rights under the Roman law and

willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome. The prestige of Rome

as of something just and great and law- upholding spread far beyond the

Roman boundaries. But even as early as the Punic wars the sense of

citizenship was being undermined by the growth of wealth and slavery.

Citizenship spread indeed but not the idea of citizenship.

The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive organization; it did

not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes of

citizens, did not invite their co-operation in its decisions. There

was no network of schools to ensure a common understanding, no

distribution of news to sustain collective activity. The adventurers

who struggled for power from the days of Marius and Sulla onward had no

idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the imperial

affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation and no one

observed it die. All empires, all states, all organizations of human

society are, in the ultimate, things of understanding and will. There

remained no will for the Roman Empire in the World and so it came to an

end.

But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the fifth century,

something else had been born within it that was to avail itself

enormously of its prestige and tradition, and that was the

Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the empire

died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men, because it had

books and a great system of teachers and missionaries to hold it

together, things stronger than any law or legions. Throughout the

fourth and fifth centuries A.D. while the empire was decaying,

Christianity was spreading to a universal dominion in Europe. It

conquered its conquerors, the barbarians. When Attila seemed disposed

to march on Rome, the patriarch of Rome intercepted him and did what no

armies could do, turning him back by sheer moral force.

The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the entire

Christian church. Now that there were no more emperors, he began to

annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of _pontifex

maximus_, head sacrificial priest of the Roman dominion, the most

ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed.

39.THE BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO EAST AND WEST | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

39.THE BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO

EAST AND WEST

Throughout the third century the Roman Empire, decaying socially and disintegrating morally, faced the barbarians. The emperors of this period were fighting military autocrats, and the capital of the empire shifted with the necessities of their military policy. Now the imperial headquarters would be at Milan in north Italy, now in what is now Serbia at Sirmium or Nish, now in Nicomedia in Asia Minor. Rome halfway down Italy was too far from the centre of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was a declining city. Over most of the empire peace still prevailed and men went about without arms. The armies continued to be the sole repositories of power; the emperors, dependent on their legions, became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire and their state more and more like that of the Persian and other oriental monarchs. Diocletian assumed a royal diadem and oriental robes. 

All along the imperial frontier, which ran roughly along the Rhine and

Danube, enemies were now pressing. The Franks and other German tribes

had come up to the Rhine. In north Hungary were the Vandals; in what

was once Dacia and is now Roumania, the Visigoths or West Goths.

Behind these in south Russia were the East Goths or Ostrogoths, and

beyond these again in the Volga region the Alans. But now Mongolian

peoples were forcing their way towards Europe. The Huns were already

exacting tribute from the Alans and Ostrogoths and pushing them to the

west.

In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the push of a

renascent Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassenid kings,

was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of the Roman

Empire in Asia for the next three centuries.

A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the peculiar

weakness of the empire. The river Danube comes down to within a couple

of hundred miles of the Adriatic Sea in the region of what is now

Bosnia and Serbia. It makes a square re-entrant angle there. The

Romans never kept their sea communications in good order, and this two

hundred mile strip of land was their line of communication between the

western Latin-speaking part of the empire and the eastern

Greek-speaking portion. Against this square angle of the Danube the

barbarian pressure was greatest. When they broke through there it was

inevitable that the empire should fall into two parts.

Map: The Empire and the Barbarians

A more vigorous empire might have thrust forward and reconquered Dacia,

but the Roman Empire lacked any such vigour. Constantine the Great was

certainly a monarch of great devotion and intelligence. He beat back a

raid of the Goths from just these vital Balkan regions, but he had no

force to carry the frontier across the Danube. He was too pre-occupied

with the internal weaknesses of the empire. He brought the solidarity

and moral force of Christianity to revive the spirit of the declining

empire, and he decided to create a new permanent capital at Byzantium

upon the Hellespont. This new-made Byzantium, which was re-christened

Constantinople in his honour, was still building when he died. Towards

the end of his reign occurred a remarkable transaction. The Vandals,

being pressed by the Goths, asked to be received into the Roman Empire.

They were assigned lands in Pannonia, which is now that part of

Hungary west of the Danube, and their fighting men became nominally

legionaries. But these new legionaries remained under their own

chiefs. Rome failed to digest them.

Constantine died working to reorganize his great realm, and soon the

frontiers were ruptured again and the Visigoths came almost to

Constantinople. They defeated the Emperor Valens at Adrianople and made

a settlement in what is now Bulgaria, similar to the settlement of the

Vandals in Pannonia. Nominally they were subjects of the emperor,

practically they were conquerors.

CONSTANTINE’S PILLAR, CONSTANTINOPLE

CONSTANTINE’S PILLAR, CONSTANTINOPLE

_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_

From 379 to 395 A.D. reigned the Emperor Theodosius the Great, and

while he reigned the empire was still formally intact. Over the armies

of Italy and Pannonia presided Stilicho, a Vandal, over the armies in

the Balkan peninsula, Alaric, a Goth. When Theodosius died at the

close of the fourth century he left two sons. Alaric supported one of

these, Arcadius, in Constantinople, and Stilicho the other, Honorius,

in Italy. In other words Alaric and Stilicho fought for the empire

with the princes as puppets. In the course of their struggle Alaric

marched into Italy and after a short siege took Rome (410 A.D.).

The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman Empire

in Europe the prey of robber armies of barbarians. It is difficult to

visualize the state of affairs in the world at that time. Over France,

Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula, the great cities that had

flourished under the early empire still stood, impoverished, partly

depopulated and falling into decay. Life in them must have been

shallow, mean and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted their

authority and went on with their work with such conscience as they had,

no doubt in the name of a now remote and inaccessible emperor. The

churches went on, but usually with illiterate priests. There was

little reading and much superstition and fear. But everywhere except

where looters had destroyed them, books and pictures and statuary and

such-like works of art were still to be found.

The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere this

Roman world was much more weedy and untidy than it had been. In some

regions war and pestilence had brought the land down to the level of a

waste. Roads and forests were infested with robbers. Into such

regions the barbarians marched, with little or no opposition, and set

up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman official titles. If they

were half civilized barbarians they would give the conquered districts

tolerable terms, they would take possession of the towns, associate and

intermarry, and acquire (with an accent) the Latin speech; but the

Jutes, the Angles and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of

Britain were agriculturalists and had no use for towns, they seem to

have swept south Britain clear of the Romanized population and they

replaced the language by their own Teutonic dialects, which became at

last English.

BASE OF THE “OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS,” CONSTANTINOPLE

The obelisk of Thothmes, taken from Egypt to Constantinople by

Theodosius and placed upon the pedestal her shown; an interesting

example of early Byzantine art. The complete obelisk is seen on page

239.

_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_

It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the movements of

all the various German and Slavonic tribes as they went to and fro in

the disorganized empire in search of plunder and a pleasant home. But

let the Vandals serve as an example. They came into history in east

Germany. They settled as we have told in Pannonia. Thence they moved

somewhen about 425 A.D. through the intervening provinces to Spain.

There they found Visigoths from South Russia and other German tribes

setting up dukes and kings. From Spain the Vandals under Genseric

sailed for North Africa (429), captured Carthage (439), and built a

fleet. They secured the mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged

Rome (455), which had recovered very imperfectly from her capture and

looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made

themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other

islands of the western Mediterranean. They made, in fact, a sea empire

very similar in its extent to the sea empire of Carthage seven hundred

odd years before. They were at the climax of their power about 477.

They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country. In

the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered for

the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of energy under

Justinian I.

The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar

adventures. But now there was coming into the European world the least

kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators, the Mongolian

Huns or Tartars, a yellow people active and able, such as the western

world had never before encountered.

38.THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

38.THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY

In the four gospels we find the personality and teachings of Jesus but very little of the dogmas of the Christian church. It is in the epistles, a series of writings by the immediate followers of Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief are laid down. Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was St. Paul. He had never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul’s name was originally Saul, and he was conspicuous at first as an active persecutor of the little band of disciples after the crucifixion. Then he was suddenly converted to Christianity, and he changed his name to Paul. He was a man of great intellectual vigour and deeply and passionately interested in the religious movements of the time. He was well versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism and Alexandrian religion of the day. He carried over many of their ideas and terms of expression into Christianity. He did very little to enlarge or develop the original teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. But he taught that Jesus was not only the promised Christ, the promised leader of the Jews, but also that his death was a sacrifice, like the deaths of the ancient sacrificial victims of the primordial civilizations, for the redemption of mankind.

When religions flourish side by side they tend to pick up each other’s

ceremonial and other outward peculiarities. Buddhism, for example, in

China has now almost the same sort of temples and priests and uses as

Taoism, which follows in the teachings of Lao Tse. Yet the original

teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were almost flatly opposed. And it

reflects no doubt or discredit upon the essentials of Christian

teaching that it took over not merely such formal things as the shaven

priest, the votive offering, the altars, candles, chanting and images

of the Alexandrian and Mithraic faiths, but adopted even their

devotional phrases and their theological ideas. All these religions

were flourishing side by side with many less prominent cults. Each was

seeking adherents, and there must have been a constant going and coming

of converts between them. Sometimes one or other would be in favour

with the government. But Christianity was regarded with more suspicion

than its rivals because, like the Jews, its adherents would not perform

acts of worship to the God Cæsar. This made it a seditious religion,

quite apart from the revolutionary spirit of the teachings of Jesus

himself.

MOSAIC OF SS. PETER AND PAUL POINTING TO A THRONE, ON GOLD BACKGROUND

MOSAIC OF SS. PETER AND PAUL POINTING TO A THRONE, ON GOLD BACKGROUND

From the Ninth Century original, in the Church of Sta. Prassede, Rome

_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_

St. Paul familiarized his disciples with the idea that Jesus, like

Osiris, was a god who died to rise again and give men immortality. And

presently the spreading Christian community was greatly torn by

complicated theological disputes about the relationship of this God

Jesus to God the Father of Mankind. The Arians taught that Jesus was

divine, but distant from and inferior to the Father. The Sabellians

taught that Jesus was merely an aspect of the Father, and that God was

Jesus and Father at the same time just as a man may be a father and an

artificer at the same time; and the Trinitarians taught a more subtle

doctrine that God was both one and three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

For a time it seemed that Arianism would prevail over its rivals, and

then after disputes, violence and wars, the Trinitarian formula became

the accepted formula of all Christendom. It may be found in its

completest expression in the Athanasian Creed.

We offer no comment on these controversies here. They do not sway

history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways history. The personal

teaching of Jesus does seem to mark a new phase in the moral and

spiritual life of our race. Its insistence upon the universal

Fatherhood of God and the implicit brotherhood of all men, its

insistence upon the sacredness of every human personality as a living

temple of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon all the

subsequent social and political life of mankind. With Christianity,

with the spreading teachings of Jesus, a new respect appears in the

world for man as man. It may be true, as hostile critics of

Christianity have urged, that St.. Paul preached obedience to slaves,

but it is equally true that the whole spirit of the teachings of Jesus

preserved in the gospels was against the subjugation of man by man.

And still more distinctly was Christianity opposed to such outrages

upon human dignity as the gladiatorial combats in the arena.

THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST

THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST

_(Sixth Century Ivory Panel in the British Museum)_

Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian religion

spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving together an ever-growing

multitude of converts into a new community of ideas and will. The

attitude of the emperors varied between hostility and toleration.

There were attempts to suppress this new faith in both the second and

third centuries; and finally in 303 and the following years a great

persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. The considerable

accumulations of Church property were seized, all bibles and religious

writings were confiscated and destroyed, Christians were put out of the

protection of the law and many executed. The destruction of the books

is particularly notable. It shows how the power of the written word in

holding together the new faith was appreciated by the authorities.

These “book religions,” Christianity and Judaism, were religions that

educated. Their continued existence depended very largely on people

being able to read and understand their doctrinal ideas. The older

religions had made no such appeal to the personal intelligence. In the

ages of barbaric confusion that were now at hand in western Europe it

was the Christian church that was mainly instrumental in preserving the

tradition of learning.

The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress the growing

Christian community. In many provinces it was ineffective because the

bulk of the population and many of the officials were Christian. In

317 an edict of toleration was issued by the associated Emperor

Galerius, and in 324 Constantine the Great, a friend and on his

deathbed a baptized convert to Christianity, became sole ruler of the

Roman world. He abandoned all divine pretensions and put Christian

symbols on the shields and banners of his troops.

In a few years Christianity was securely established as the official

religion of the empire. The competing religions disappeared or were

absorbed with extraordinary celerity, and in 300 Theodosius the Great

caused the great statue of Jupiter Serapis at Alexandria to be

destroyed. From the outset of the fifth century onward the only

priests or temples in the Roman Empire were Christian priests and

temples.