The British Empire [see video] comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world’s population at the time, and covered more than 33 million km2: approximately a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was often said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous territories.

 Britain may once have had an empire on which the sun never set – but a study shows its true global reach was far more extensive than maps would suggest. Throughout the ages Britain has invaded almost 90 per cent of the world’s countries. An analysis of the histories of almost 200 nations found that only 22 have never experienced a British assault. A 1901 map of the world shows in red the extent of the British Empire but perhaps found the Empire’s global reach may have been underestimated and countries such as Luxembourg as well as Guatemala, Tajikistan and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific should be included. Countries have been included if a military incursion was achieved through force, the threat of force, or by negotiation or payment. Raids by British pirates, privateers and armed explorers have been included if they were acting on the behalf or approval of the government. Therefore, many countries that once formed part of the Spanish empire such as Costa Rica, Ecuador and El Salvador, made the list because of the repeated raids they suffered from state-sanctioned British sailors.

The foundations of the British Empire were laid when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. Henry VII, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. All that is known about Cabot’s first voyage is contained in a letter from John Day (a Bristol merchant) to Christopher Columbus. The letter, written in the winter of 1497/8 notes that: “Since your Lordship wants information relating to the first voyage, here is what happened: he went with one ship, his crew confused him, he was short of supplies and ran into bad weather, and he decided to turn back.” Cabot sailed five years after the European discovery of America, and although he successfully made landfall on the coast [mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus, that he had reached Asia] there was no attempt to found a colony. Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but nothing was heard of his ships again.

The Caribbean initially provided England’s most lucrative colonies but not before several attempts at colonisation failed. The colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations successfully used by the Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labour, and, at first, Dutch ships, to sell the slaves and buy the sugar. To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. England’s first permanent settlement in the Americas was founded in 1607 in Jamestown, led by Captain John Smith.

In addition to survival, the early colonists were expected to make a profit for the owners of the Virginia Company. Although the settlers were disappointed that gold did not wash up on the beach and gems did not grow in the trees, they realized there was great potential for wealth of other kinds in their new home. Early industries, such as glass manufacture, pitch and tar production for naval stores, and beer and wine making took advantage of natural resources and the land’s fertility. From the outset settlers thought that the abundance of timber would be the primary leg of the economy, as Britain’s forests had long been felled. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap American timber was to be the primary enabler of England’s (and then Britain’s) rise to maritime supremacy. However, the settlers could not devote as much time as the Virginia Company would have liked to developing commodity products for export. They were too busy trying to survive.

Plymouth was founded as a haven for puritan religious separatists, later known as the Pilgrims. Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists to risk the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage:  with the surrender of Fort Amsterdam in 1664, England gained control of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, renaming it New York, in exchange for Suriname. Charles II incorporated by royal charter the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), granting it a monopoly on the fur trade in the area known as Rupert’s Land, which would later form a large proportion of the Dominion of Canada. Forts and trading posts established by the HBC were frequently the subject of attacks by the French, who had established their own fur trading colony in adjacent New France. Two years later, the Royal African Company was inaugurated, receiving a monopoly of the trade to supply slaves to the British colonies of the Caribbean.

From the outset, slavery was the basis of the British Empire in the West Indies. Until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic. To facilitate this trade, forts were established on the coast of West Africa. The trade was extremely profitable, and became a major economic activity for such western British cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. For the victims, harsh and unhygienic conditions on the slaving ships and poor diets meant that the average mortality rate during the Middle Passage was one in seven.

England, Portugal and the Netherlands sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted until 1714. At the concluding Treaty of Utrecht, Philip renounced his and his descendants’ right to the French throne and Spain lost its empire in Europe. From France, Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia, and Gibraltar became a critical naval base allowing Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean. Spain also ceded the rights to the lucrative asiento (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America) to Britain. In North America, France’s future as a colonial power was effectively ended with the recognition of British claims to Rupert’s Land, and the ceding of New France and Florida to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Along with its victory over France in India, the Seven Years’ War therefore left Britain as the world’s most powerful maritime power.

The loss of such a large portion of British America, at the time Britain’s most populous overseas possession, is seen as the event defining the transition in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa. Adam Smith‘s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had argued that colonies were redundant, and that free trade should replace the old mercantilist policies that had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, dating back to the protectionism of Spain and Portugal. The growth of trade between the newly independent United States and Britain after 1783 seemed to confirm Smith’s view that political control was not necessary for economic success.

Exploration of the Pacific

Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various criminal offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year across the Atlantic. Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the 13 Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to the newly discovered lands of Australia. The western coast of Australia had been discovered for Europeans by the Dutch explorer Willem Jansz in 1606 and was later named New Holland by the Dutch East India Company, but there was no attempt to colonise it. James Cook discovered the eastern coast of Australia while on a voyage to the South Pacific Ocean, claimed the continent for Britain. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Britain continued to transport convicts to New South Wales until 1840.

Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica, and a foreign policy of “splendid isolation“. Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain’s dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been characterised by some historians as “Informal Empire“.

The British Raj  was British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947 included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom as well as the princely states ruled by local rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. British politician Edmund Burke vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings had ruined the Indian economy and society saying the new economy was a form of “plunder” and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of the Mughal Empire. Historians[1] accuse the British of depleting the food and money stocks and of imposing high taxes that helped cause the Bengal famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal.

Britain attempted to impose a puppet regime on Afghanistan under Shuja Shah. The regime was short lived and proved unsustainable without British military support. By 1842, mobs were attacking the British on the streets of Kabul and the British garrison was forced to abandon the city.

The Suez Canal connected the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean. Initially the Canal was opposed by the British but once opened, its strategic value was quickly recognised and became the “jugular vein of the Empire”. In 1875 the government bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Isma’il Pasha’s 44% shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million (£330 million in 2013). Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882. By the turn of the 20th century, fears had begun to grow in Britain that it would no longer be able to defend the entirety of the empire. Germany was rapidly rising as a military and industrial power. Recognising that it was overstretched in the Pacific and threatened at home by the Imperial German Navy, Britain formed an alliance with Japan in 1902 and with its old enemies France and Russia. Britain’s fears of war with Germany were realised in 1914. Britain quickly invaded and occupied most of Germany’s overseas colonies in Africa. In the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand occupied German New Guinea and Samoa respectively.

The British declaration of war on Germany and its allies also committed the colonies and Dominions, which provided invaluable military, financial and material support. Over 2.5 million men served in the armies of the Dominions, as well as many thousands of volunteers from the Crown colonies. The contributions of Australian and New Zealand troops during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on the national consciousness at home, and marked a watershed in the transition of Australia and New Zealand from colonies to nations in their own right. The important contribution of the Dominions to the war effort was recognised in 1917 by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he invited each of the Dominion Prime Ministers to join an Imperial War Cabinet to co-ordinate imperial policy.

Under the terms of the concluding Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, the empire reached its greatest extent with the addition of nearly 5 million km² and 13 million new subjects. The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were distributed to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates. Britain gained control of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togo, and Tanganyika.

The Dominions themselves also acquired mandates of their own: the Union of South Africa gained South-West Africa [modern-day Namibia], Australia gained German New Guinea, and New Zealand Western Samoa. Nauru was made a combined mandate of Britain and the two Pacific Dominions. Plans for a post-war division of the Ottoman Empire, which had joined the war on Germany’s side, were secretly drawn up by Britain and France. This agreement was not divulged to the Sharif of Mecca, who the British had been encouraging to launch an Arab revolt against their Ottoman rulers, giving the impression that Britain was supporting the creation of an independent Arab state.

Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO [16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935] was an archaeologist and British Army officer renowned especially for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, and the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title which was later used for the 1962 film based on his First World War activities. He became a practising archaeologist in the Middle East, working at various excavations. In the summer of 1909, he set out alone on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Syria, during which he travelled 1,600 km on foot. Lawrence graduated with First Class Honours after submitting a thesis entitled The influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the end of the 12th century.

During the war, Lawrence fought alongside Arab irregular troops under the command of Emir Faisal, a son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, in extended guerrilla operations against the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence’s major contribution to the revolt was convincing the Arab leaders to co-ordinate their actions in support of British strategy. Lawrence was involved in the build-up to the capture of Damascus. Much to his disappointment he was not present at the city’s formal surrender, having arrived several hours after the city had fallen to the 10th Australian Light Horse Brigade. In newly liberated Damascus, which he had envisaged as the capital of an Arab state, Lawrence was instrumental in establishing a provisional Arab government but when French Forces, entered Damascus, they destroyed Lawrence’s dream of an independent Arabia.

In 1919, the frustrations caused by delays to Irish home rule led members of Sinn Féin to establish an Irish assembly in Dublin, simultaneously commencing a guerrilla war against the British administration. The Anglo-Irish War ended in 1921 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating the Irish Free State, a Dominion within the British Empire, constitutionally linked with the British Crown.

A similar struggle began in India when the Government of India Act 1919 failed to satisfy demand for independence. Concerns over communist and foreign plots ensured that war time strictures were renewed which led to tension, particularly in the Punjab region culminating in the Amritsar Massacre.  Egypt continued to be a British client state until 1954 and British troops remained to defend the Suez Canal zone. The 1917 Balfour Declaration stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in Palestine, and Jewish immigration allowed. This led to increasing conflict with the Arab population, who openly revolted in 1936.

As the threat of war with Germany increased during the 1930s, Britain judged the support of the Arab population in the Middle East as more important than the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and shifted to a pro-Arab stance, limiting Jewish immigration and in turn triggering a Jewish insurgency. The ability of the Dominions to set their own foreign policy, independent of Britain, was recognised at the 1923 Imperial Conference.  After pressure from Ireland and South Africa, the 1926 Imperial Conference issued the Balfour Declaration, declaring the Dominions to be “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another” within a “British Commonwealth of Nations“. The parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland were now independent of British legislative control, they could nullify British laws and Britain could no longer pass laws for them without their consent. Ireland distanced itself further from Britain with the introduction of a new constitution in 1937, making it a republic in all but name.

 In December 1941, Japan launched, in quick succession, attacks on British Malaya, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, and Hong Kong. Churchill’s reaction to the entry of the United States into the war was that Britain was now assured of victory and the future of the empire was safe, but the manner in which the British rapidly surrendered in the Far East irreversibly harmed Britain’s standing and prestige as an imperial power. Most damaging of all was the fall of Singapore, which had previously been hailed as an impregnable fortress and the eastern equivalent of Gibraltar. The realisation that Britain could not defend its entire empire pushed Australia and New Zealand, which now appeared threatened by Japanese forces, into closer ties with the United States. This resulted in the 1951 ANZUS Pact between Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America.

 Decolonisation and decline [1945–1997].

Though Britain and the empire emerged victorious from the Second World War, it was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted by a $US 4.33 billion loan (US$56 billion in 2012) the last instalment of which was repaid in 2006. At the same time, anti-colonial movements were on the rise in the colonies of European nations. The “wind of change” ultimately meant that the British Empire’s days were numbered, and Britain adopted a policy of peaceful disengagement from its colonies. This was in contrast to other European powers such as France and Portugal, which waged costly and ultimately unsuccessful wars to keep their empires intact. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK itself fell from 700 million to five million.

India’s two major political parties, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, had been campaigning for independence for decades, but disagreed as to how it should be implemented. Increasing civil unrest and the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy during 1946 led to a promise of independence no later than 1948. When the urgency of the situation and risk of civil war became apparent, the newly appointed Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, hastily brought forward the date to 15 August 1947. The borders drawn by the British to broadly partition India into Hindu and Muslim areas left tens of millions as minorities in the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. Millions of Muslims subsequently crossed from India to Pakistan and Hindus vice versa, and violence between the two communities cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Burma, which had been administered as part of the British Raj, and Sri Lanka gained their independence the following year.

The British Mandate of Palestine, where an Arab majority lived alongside a Jewish minority, presented the British with a similar problem to that of India. The matter was complicated by the Holocaust, while Arabs were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. Frustrated by the intractability of the problem, attacks by Jewish paramilitary organisations and the increasing cost of maintaining its military presence, Britain announced in 1947 that it would withdraw in 1948 and leave the matter to the United Nations to solve. The UN General Assembly subsequently voted for a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Malayan Emergency, as it was called, began in 1948 and lasted until 1960, but Britain granted independence to the Federation of Malaya within the Commonwealth. In 1963, the 11 states of the federation together with Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo joined to form Malaysia, but in 1965 Chinese-majority Singapore was expelled from the union following tensions between the Malay and Chinese populations.

Nasser unilaterally nationalised the Suez Canal and Britain colluded with France to engineer an Israeli attack on Egypt that would give it an excuse to intervene militarily and retake the canal. Eisenhower applied financial leverage by threatening to sell US reserves of the British pound and thereby precipitate a collapse of the British currency. Though the invasion force was militarily successful in its objectives, UN intervention and US pressure forced Britain into a humiliating withdrawal of its forces. The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain’s limitations to the world and confirmed Britain’s decline wounding British national pride, leading one MP to describe it as “Britain’s Waterloo”.  Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen the British political establishment as “Suez syndrome”, from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982. Britain’s remaining colonies in Africa, except for  were all granted independence by 1968, however British withdrawal from Africa was not a peaceful process. Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight-year Mau Mau Uprising. In Rhodesia a civil war lasted until 1979 as the new nation of Zimbabwe.

End of empire

Britain retained sovereignty over 14 territories outside the British Isles, which were renamed the British Overseas Territories in 2002. British sovereignty of several of the overseas territories is disputed by their geographical neighbours: Gibraltar is claimed by Spain, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are claimed by Argentina, and the British Indian Ocean Territory is claimed by Mauritius and Seychelles. The British Antarctic Territory is subject to overlapping claims by Argentina and Chile, while many countries do not recognise any territorial claims in Antarctica.The New Hebrides achieved independence [as Vanuatu] in 1980, with Belize following the next year. With the passage of the British Nationality Act 1981 the process of decolonisation that had begun after the Second World War was largely complete. Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong Island had been ceded to Britain in perpetuity, but the vast majority of the colony was constituted by the New Territories, which had been acquired under a 99-year lease in 1898, due to expire in 1997. A deal was reached in 1984: Hong Kong would become a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China, maintaining its way of life for at least 50 years. The handover ceremony in 1997 marked “the end of Empire”.

The spread of English from the latter half of the 20th century has been helped in part by the cultural influence of the United States, itself originally formed from British colonies. Except in Africa where nearly all the former colonies have adopted the presidential system, the English parliamentary system has served as the template for the governments for many former colonies, and English common law for legal systems.

[1] http://hinduperspective.com/2013/02/19/was-the-british-raj-beneficial-for-india/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

With conquests in the Balkans by Murad I, the Ottoman sultanate was transformed into an empire. It overthrew the Byzantine Empire in 1453 with Mehmed II‘s conquest of Constantinople. During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful multinational, multilingual empire controlling much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa that lasted more than five hundred years to November 1923, succeeded by the Republic of Turkey.

After the Fall of Constantinople, Mehmed would go on to conquer the last vestiges of Byzantine rule and absorb them into the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of Constantinople bestowed immense glory and prestige on the country. Mehmed II advanced toward Eastern Europe as far as Belgrade, and attempted to conquer it in 1456. Hungarian commanders successfully defended the city and Ottomans retreated with heavy losses . Mehmed II invaded Italy in 1480. The intent of his invasion was to capture Rome and “reunite the Roman Empire”. During his reign, Selim I [Memed’s grandson] was able to expand the empire’s borders greatly to the south and east. He defeated the Mameluks and conquered most of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt, including the holy city of Jerusalem and Cairo, the residence of the Abbasid caliph.

With the heart of the Arab World now under their control, the Ottomans became the dominant power in the region and in the Islamic world. Selim took the title of Caliph of Islam and was also granted the title of Servant of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina by the Sharif of Mecca in 1517. Selim’s expansion into the Middle East represented a sudden change in the expansion policy of the empire, which had been at expense of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. On the eve of his death in 1520, the Ottoman Empire spanned about 4 million km² having tripled in size during Selim’s reign.

Suleiman the Magnificent.

By 1521 Suleiman had completed the conquest of Serbia capturing the city of Belgrade. Then he captured Rhodes, defeated Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, and set up Ottoman rule in Hungary controlling most of Hungary. Walachia and Moldavia also became tributary principalities of the Ottoman Empire.

The Shi’ite Safavid Empire ruled Persia and modern day Iraq. Suleiman waged three campaigns against the Safavids. In the first, the historically important city  Baghdad fell; later campaigns resulted in the first formal diplomatic recognition of the Safavid Empire by the Ottomans. Huge territories of North Africa up to west of Algeria were annexed. The Barbary States of Tripolitania, Tunisia and Algeria became autonomous provinces of the Empire. Piracy carried on by the Barbary pirates of North Africa remained part of the wars against Spain. Ottoman navies also controlled the Red Sea, and held the Persian Gulf until they were defeated by the navy of the Portuguese Empire. In 1535 Charles V won an important victory against the Ottomans at Tunis, but in 1538, his fleet was defeated by Khair ad Din, securing the eastern Mediterranean for the Turks for 33 years. The Mehmed IV reign was significant as he changed the nature of the Sultan’s position forever by giving up most of his executive power to his Grand Vizier.

 The discovery of new maritime trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16^th century. Vassal states allied with the Ottomans defied the Portuguese economic monopoly by employing a new coinage which followed the Ottoman pattern, thus proclaiming of economic independence from the Portuguese. The Sultanate of women was a period in which the mothers of young sultans exercised power on behalf of their sons. The most prominent women of this period were Kösem Sultan; political rivalry culminated in her murder in 1651. During the Köprülü Era effective control of the Empire was exercised by a sequence of Grand Viziers. The Köprülü Vizierate saw renewed military success with authority restored in Transylvania, the conquest of Crete and expansion into Polish southern Ukraine, with the strongholds and territories ceding to Ottoman control.

This period of renewed assertiveness came to a calamitous end in May 1683 when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War. The Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna. The Ottomans surrendered control of significant territories.   Mustafa II led the counterattack against the Habsburgs in Hungary, but was undone at the disastrous defeat at Zenta [11 September 1697]. Educational and technological reforms were made, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University. In 1734 an artillery school was established to impart Western-style artillery methods, but the Islamic clergy successfully objected.

In many cases, after the Ottomans conquered a territory, they did more than just rule over the land; they formally annexed it as an official province. The Ottoman battles against east European Christian territories were deemed Holy Wars, and therefore all those lands were annexed and eventually recognized as such by subsequent treaties. Ironically, all the battles against Moslem territories were considered equally justified by the Ottomans, and although these lands belonged to other Moslems, they were also annexed and internationally recognized as such. To justify such hegemony against fellow Moslems, the Ottoman sultan obtained specious religious rulings, such as those against the Safavid Shi’a, declaring waging war against them to be more important than fighting the infidels.

With so much conquest, the Ottomans were constantly adding provinces. In 1527, an Ottoman roster named only 12 provinces stretching from Asia Minor to Egypt. By 1609, the sultan’s chancery clerk, Ayn Ali, listed 32 provinces, from Bosnia to Tripoli, from Tunis to Syria. Hence, after the sultan’s military overran Mesopotamia, its three main regions routinely became three separate provinces of the empire. Beginning in 1535, those three provinces were named for their largest cities: Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the middle, and Basra in the south.

But not all provinces were equal members of the Empire. Ottoman provinces were highly organized and administered, whether they were central to the empire’s existence or merely maintained as a remote source of taxes and tribute. For many years, the sultan exercised absolute control over everyone and every place. But he greatly delegated his authority to governors-general, one for each province. The more important the province, the more prestigious and valued was the appointment. Each governor-general was administratively all-powerful in his own territory. He was expected to raise and finance territorial armies for the sultan. In exchange, the governor-general was empowered to grant and revoke patronage, impose and waive the death penalty on individuals, decide law cases, and collect fines, the proceeds of which he kept personally. Governors-general could extract a wealth of taxes, tribute, and other emolument from the far-off regions they oversaw. Hence, a governor-general could accrue great personal fortune at the expense of his province. These positions were generally, but not always, appointed, rather than hereditary. Thus, each governor-general was constantly subservient and dependent upon the pleasure of the sultan for his personal fortune.

Administratively, nearly all provinces were sectioned into districts known as sanjuks, generally organized around the largest town or city. The Ottomans were intensely bureaucratic. Sanjuk registrars periodically swept through their districts compiling detailed censuses of all peasant possessions, farm goods, marriages and deaths, and household members. Ideally, everyone was to be registered. Everything was to be taxed. The governor-general’s relation to his province was generally one of dispassionate financial exploitation. To help him ensure the regular flow of tax and tribute and to maintain order, the governor personally designated fiefs and sanjuk governors throughout his province. These subordinates would not only rule their fiefdom and sanjuk, they would organize the army units needed to defend the borders. The term sanjuk means flag, and each fief would assemble for battle under its own flag. Moreover, the fiefs were subdivided into sub-fiefs, ruled by a local cavalryman controlling small areas of just a few villages. In many ways, the Ottoman structure was merely an Islamic variant on the military and nobility systems of feudalism, and serfdom that so thoroughly exploited the Christian masses of Europe.

A mixture of local and imported fiefs and sanjuk governors maintained a certain tension between local strongmen and imposed overseers. It was all designed to avert insurrection and promote the uninterrupted flow of wealth out of every corner of the province and into the sultan’s coffers through these governmental and political middlemen. In fact, each fief and sub-fief was assigned an appraised value in silver coins, dependent on the revenues that could be reliably drained from the peasants and city dwellers. Commerce and wealth became so important to the Ottomans that thousands of families were coercively moved to help develop the capital city’s economy. For example, some 30,000 individuals from the Balkans were forcibly transplanted to several dozen empty villages near Istanbul for commercial development.

The ghazi days were over. Jewish merchants and traders, as well as other non Moslems, were welcomed and allowed to thrive as dhimmis, a protected class within an Islamic society. As long as Jews, Christians, and other infidels acknowledged the primacy of the Islamic state, they could prosper unmolested. Greater Istanbul became a true metropolis, thriving on and tolerant of diverse ethnic groups. By the late 1500s, some 40 percent of its citizens were non Moslem. The city’s population may have neared 800,000, ranking it the second largest in Europe. Commerce became the lifeblood, bread, and salt of the empire. Every precious aspect of trade was highly regulated, from production to price, from purity to point of purchase. Weights and measures were elevated to a strict state function. Government-licensed brokers, and indeed government monopolies, were mandated for certain stuffs. Many goods were so intensely controlled, they could enter Istanbul only at certain gates; from there, they were tracked by trade patrols until they reached the retailers. Smuggling and profiteering were severely punished, from fines and seizures to flogging, and worse. Professional and trade guilds formed, and these crossed religious lines, emphasizing commercial caste, not mosque or church. Indeed, the sultan decreed that specific professions, in addition to social groups,were required to wear apparel that clearly identified their trades.

By the late 1600s, some 2,000 ships docked annually at Istanbul, transiting everything from wine to livestock to all corners of the earth. Anything that made life sensual and spiced, durable and desired, transited through the empire. The Ottomans introduced coffee to the world. The first two coffeehouses opened in Istanbul and soon after, coffee became a major export to Europe and even to the colonies in America. The great Ottoman commercial engine, goods in, goods out, made it possible to exchange raw materials and manufactured goods worldwide on a level previously unknown, spurring industrialization in Europe, especially in Great Britain. Commercial wealth was the Ottoman way. By the mid 17th century, Istanbul, the new center of the Islamic world. not only boasted 152 mosques, but also a magnificent multi- domed bazaar hosting about 1,000 shops, plus an additional 800 shops spread throughout the city, along with 54 mills, 13 bathhouses, and an entire network of warehouses, bakeries, and workshops. Riches beyond belief inured to the new caliphs of commerce. About a thousand magnificent mansions and palaces for the sultan, his families, his court, and his ennobled pashas exalted Istanbul and its patterned skyline.

But did the almost surreal affluence of Istanbul ever trickle down to the outer provinces? All magnificent empires and nations possess destitute corners. In the far-flung Ottoman Empire, Mesopotamia inhabited the neglected frontier. Sanjuk governors and fief holders embraced no allegiance to their subjects and freely moved through the political hierarchy, as any other detached politico would, jockeying for better appointments and greater proximity to the sultan. Provincial officials were often replaced more than once per year. With the generation of tribute and taxes being a salient feature of any province, the three Mesopotamian provinces ranked low in the realm. In fact, in 1528, a third of the empire’s income arose from just two wealthy provinces: Syria and Egypt. The chief value of Mesopotamia to the empire was not in heightening the sultan’s tower of material wealth, but in creating a strategic, perhaps even desolate, Sunni buffer against the still-viable Shi’a threat residing in Safavid Persia.

Ibrahim Muteferrika convinced the Grand Vizier and the clergy on the efficiency of the printing press, and was later granted permission to publish non-religious books despite opposition from calligraphers and religious leaders. Selim III made the first major attempts to modernize the army, but reforms were hampered by the religious leadership and the Janissary corps. Jealous of their privileges and firmly opposed to change, the Janissary created a revolt. Costing Selim his throne and his life, but were resolved in spectacular and bloody fashion by his successor, the dynamic Mahmud II, who eliminated the Janissary corps in 1826.

The Osmanli were descended from rugged steppe horsemen, but once they embraced the limitless riches of imperial commerce and tribute, they found regal life appealing. Sultans and their pashas lavished troves of money on themselves in ways unimaginable to their impoverished subjects. Rivaling the most ostentatious excesses of the czars and European monarchs, the Ottomans constructed a complex servant pecking order comprised of numerous imperial door holders, food tasters, coachmen, and even pickle holders. Each was dressed in elaborate, turbaned vestments. With iron regimentation, they reported to a hierarchy of servitor captains and other superiors, given such honorifics as Chief Turban Folder, Chief Attendant of the Napkin, and Senior of the Dishes.

The sultan’s extravagant kitchen demands taxed an entire empire. One order alone requisitioned about 113,000 kilograms of clarified butter from the Crimean port of Caffa. Whole colonies of Russian prisoners were resettled to help produce cereals. One festival banquet called for 118 kilograms of pepper to season lamb and soup, plus more than 12,000 kilograms of honey to smother the baklava. Even though they functioned as a Sunni caliphate, the Turkish appetite for culinary extravagance rivaled even their devotion to Islamic holy sites. The Islamic injunction of cleanliness was the inspiration to update the old Roman and Byzantine bath into a whole new lifestyle, the Turkish bath. It became not only a place to wash, but also a rendezvous for the important to see and be seen. Long trains of attendants, men and women, helped as pashas and viziers came into royal contact with water. Rubdowns, scrubs, and skin treatments, as well as ointments, special ornate slippers, a rack full of exquisite bathing wraps, and coteries of servants created an elite atmosphere that elevated the hamam from religious ritual to social club. Eventually, a community of such bathhouses served not only the ruling class, but pretenders and imitators as well.

Then there were the harems. Within the sultan’s magnificent palaces were accommodations for hundreds of concubines, ladies in waiting, and slave girls, white and black, maintained for sexual pleasure, day and night. The term harem comes from the Arabic and Semitic haram, that is, forbidden or untouchable. Confined to special windowless, sunless, and blandly walled quarters within the palace’s inner sanctum, the harem was accessible only through the fabled Gate of Bliss. Entry was restricted to a favored few in the palace. Harem women, even though confined, were tutored and attended to by a hierarchy of several hundred white and black eunuchs. No man could gaze upon a woman in the sultan’s harem. However, with his penis and testicles surgically removed, a eunuch was deemed to be less than a man. The Chief Black Eunuch functioned as the supreme overseer and caretaker of the entire harem and its thousands of occupants. At times, the harem’s population approached 4,000. Its women were constantly in demand. For instance, as a young man of 24 years of age, Sultan Ibrahim the Debauched was renowned for having sex with 24 women in a single day. For such occasions, he wore a special orgy robe, decorated with priceless gems. When harem women were discarded or no longer useful, some were set free, but many were simply sewn into bags and thrown into the Bosporus Strait. Sultan Ibrahim alone ordered eunuchs to cast hundreds of bound consorts into the strait to drown.

Harems became more than just prurient pleasure palaces within the palaces. The female members of the royal family also took up sheltered residence there, just as they would in the separate women’s quarters of most Islamic homes, albeit on a massively more gilded basis. Because the sultan and his circle spent so much time enveloped in the ecstasy and familial harmony of the harem, the women’s abode took on political significance as well. It was from the harem that top echelons of the Sublime Porte, the European name for the Ottoman government, could be more subtly influenced. Harem women came to wield genuine political power. Moreover, the stories of wild debauchery, perversion, and unbridled sexual indulgence in the harem led European capitals to believe that on occasion more could be accomplished in the chambers beyond the Gate of Bliss than through traditional diplomatic channels. Consequently, foreign ambassadors to the Sublime Porte were clever enough to cultivate contacts within the harem establishment to augment their regular representations and démarches. Eventually, the Ottoman harem became one of several central factors precipitating the decay and fall of the empire itself, as well as its ability to rule Mesopotamia.

First, harems were massively expensive, requiring the devotion of whole fortunes. The humblest slave girl cost 500 German talers, each valued at 26 grams of silver. Whatever her station, every female was dressed in the finest robes, shawls, slippers, and accessories, generally jewel-emblazoned, each one more spectacular than the next, in a circular competition among concubines and their armies of servants to achieve preeminence. If freed, slave women departed with their opulent possessions. Hence the investment was never-ending. One 17th century French diplomat observed in a report that the imperial treasurer’s chief task was to look for new slave girls and to dress them.

The financial excesses of the harem were only symptomatic of the irrational fiscal policies that gripped every aspect of the Ottoman Empire. More important was the issue of succession and governance itself. Here the harem played a pivotal role. Under Ottoman practice, a sultan could sire legitimate children with any of the four wives allowed by Islam and any of hundreds of slave concubines. The sultan’s sons by slave women stood equal to those of regular wives, as long as the monarch acknowledged them. Such acknowledgment automatically conferred special status upon the concubine, since she now became the mother of an heir to the throne. Incessant procreation, nine or more simultaneous concubine pregnancies were not unusual, created a plethora of potential heirs, born of either the sultan’s slaves or his four wives. Indeed, the distinction blurred, since many Ottoman sultans were in fact the offspring of slave mothers. In the first generations, when a sultan died, his many contending sons would launch horrific civil wars, which by their violence threatened the very existence of the empire. The solution? Murder the family. To save the realm, when sultans approached death, they systematically murdered their sons, save one, the designate. Or the newly ascended son would kill his brothers. Fratricide became an institutional Ottoman tradition, endorsed by the empire’s Islamic scholars. In the 1400s, Sultan Mehmed formally wrote such killings into law:

“For the welfare of the state, the one of my sons to whom God grants the sultanate, may lawfully put his brothers to death. A majority of the ulema [body of Koranic sages] considers this permissible.”

Fratricide continued unabated throughout most of the 1500s. Selim murdered his brothers in 1511. Suleiman killed his son in 1553 and his brother in 1561. Most heirs were strangled, but other methods were employed. Murad V’s five brothers were assassinated by bow and arrow, all on a single day in December 1574. A few decades later, Mehmed III commanded a full palace massacre: the simultaneous execution of his 19 brothers and more than 20 sisters. The same day Murad was crowned sultan in 1574, his father’s coffin, with the coffins of five princes behind it,was paraded through the streets of Istanbul as an outward sign of accession. On Mehmed III’s accession in 1595, the sight of 19 coffins wending through the city was apparently too much for the weeping residents and palace. Thereafter, young princes were exiled not to provinces where they could function as governors and learn something of the affairs of state, but to the harems, where they could do virtually nothing. From the 1600s, with a few exceptions, those who would become Ottoman rulers spent nearly their entire lives from boyhood in the claustrophobic confines of the harem. Their small suites, isolated from the rest of the palace,were termed kafes, or cages, where they were spoiled, surfeited, sexed, and schooled. But when the time came to assume the throne, they knew nothing of government, finance, military, statecraft, or the real world. These were the people who ruled the Ottoman Empire.

True power in the realm devolved to others, such as well-placed harem women and various segments of the military establishment. Among the soldier classes rising in importance were the elite Janissary guards. The Janissaries, in particular,were a volatile and unpredictable group. When the empire began running out of Moslem warriors, it formed the Janissaries, drawn in large measure from Christian boys “levied” from their eastern European villages. In an Ottoman protocol called the Collection, children were selected pro rata, systematically taken from their families, and raised as a special standing army. The abducted ones were nicknamed New Troops, Yen Ceri in Turkish, transliterated Janissary. From time to time, they would stage their own revolts.

The empire slowly began disintegrating. Shortly after Sultan Suleiman I died in 1566, the Ottomans started losing battles and were not infrequently forced into land-ceding treaties. Bands of unpaid soldiers roamed the countryside as bandits and raiders. Local insurgencies erupted throughout the dominion, including in Basra, which was constantly beset by Bedouin pillagers. Governance of the remote provinces became even more arbitrary, centering on tax, tribute, and suppressing rebels. It rarely related to the inhabitants or their welfare. In Mesopotamia, this meant a continuation of irrelevant, exploitative authority, characterized by conspiracy, betrayal, assassination, and chaos both in the capital and in the provinces. For example, in 1622, the Janissaries stationed in Baghdad rebelled and took possession of the city. When the sultan sent a regular force to confront the rebel contingents, the Janissaries made an alliance with the empire’s Shi’a rivals in Persia, paving the way for an invasion from the east. So the sultan bribed the captain of the Janissaries, Bakr Subashi, offering to make him governor of Baghdad if only he remained loyal. Bakr agreed, reneging on his promise to the Persians. But that quid pro quo was thwarted because Bakr’s son then secretly allied with Shah Abbas of Persia against his father. Bakr’s counter-treachery facilitated the Persian entry into Baghdad. When Abbas finally took the city on January 12, 1624, he massacred all the Sunnis. Then, for good measure, he turned on his Janissary allies, boiling them in oil on mere principle.

During this period, other Janissary units in Istanbul deposed the sultan for his military blunders, and finally assassinated his mentally retarded successor. This was stunning proof that Istanbul could hardly control its provinces, east or west. Nor was there economic incentive. Basra, once a teeming port, now stagnated under the Portuguese blockade, making it even less valuable to the Sublime Porte. At one point in the mid-1600s, one caravan, made up of hundreds of camels, each laden with valuable goods, arrived in Istanbul every eight days from the Turkish port of Izmir, whereas Basra could dispatch only two per year. Moreover, the administrative structure and financial value of the southern half of Mesopotamia was so paltry that the payment system needed to maintain local cavalrymen, which was so entrenched in other provinces, simply did not exist in either Baghdad or Basra. Ottoman armies, whether loyal to the Sublime Porte or to their own selfish pecuniary interests, recaptured Baghdad for the last time in 1638. In retribution for Abbas’s persecution of Sunnis, Turkish forces promptly massacred most of the city’s Shi’a. To reduce further insurrections, Ottoman contingents then sought out Shi’a throughout the three Mesopotamian provinces and systematically slaughtered them as well. The next year, in 1639, the weakened empire finally sued for peace with Persia, signing a treaty that established a formal border, recognized internationally. That border agreement, with several bloody interruptions, has lasted to modern times.

The slow-motion collapse of the empire continued as Suleiman II assumed power in November 1687. Suleiman II had been confined to his kafe from age six. After four decades, he was abruptly pulled from the harem, sobbing and unwilling to leave, but nonetheless instructed by palace officials to accept the sultanate. Gaunt and petrified, the middle-aged pasha, who had virtually never roamed beyond the outer courtyard of the palace, pleaded for execution rather than ascent to the throne.

“If my death has been commanded,” begged Suleiman II, “say so. Let me perform my prayers, then carry out your orders. Since my childhood, I have suffered forty years of imprisonment [in the kafe].”

Emphasizing that he was totally unequipped to run an empire, Suleiman II added, “It is better to die at once than to die a little every day.” His request to be murdered was ignored and he was installed as the new sultan. During his reign, he quelled another rebellion and enacted modest reforms, and he died in 1691.

During the 1700s, the empire slumped further and further into paralysis. It had been careening toward bankruptcy for nearly a century. The harems, the military units, the grandiose architectural projects, the palace’s largess, and callow management frittered away their fabulous fisc. As early as 1623, Sultan Murad IV informed the Janissaries that his treasury was incapable of paying them. The unpredictable soldiers agreed to remain in cohesive units, but demanded that gold and silver from the palace be melted down, converted to coins, and distributed among their ranks. Despite the towering outward extravagance of the Turkish lifestyle, the financial realities manifested in telling ways. Hoarding became commonplace. In 1863, vizier Kara Mustafa was beheaded for the military defeats at Vienna. Mustafa’s head was brought to the sultan on a silver plate. When Mustafa’s home was searched for loot, 3,000 gold purses were discovered buried beneath his cemented bath. Earlier that same year, when an Austrian soldier in Venice impaled and disemboweled an Ottoman officer, six gold ducats were discovered secreted in the officers stomach.

Yet the pasha class, like many compulsive bankrupts,was incapable of reducing its outlandish wastefulness. Sultan Mustafa, retarded but still all-powerful, threw coins into the sea so fish could have ‘spending money.’ Sultan Ahmet I embarked on a seven-year construction project to erect the wondrous Blue Mosque, designed by the greatest Ottoman architect of the day. To finish the edifice, Ahmed plundered monies and materials from across the empire and even pulled tiles off other buildings to complete the 21,000 needed just to decorate the gallery. Expensive and unprofitable warring with neighboring empires, from the Hapsburgs to Russia, continuously squandered men and money. In 1695, the Sublime Porte was so anxious to generate cash, it introduced the concept of ‘tax farming,’ that is, granting notable provincial families the right to collect farm taxes in their area in exchange for advance payment of the estimated revenue.

Within a few years, this concept was rooted throughout the empire, from the Balkans in the west to the Arab territories in the east. By making the lucrative tax farm grants a matter of imperial fiat, renewable from time to time, Istanbul hoped to maintain a semblance of loyalty at the extremities of its receding dominion. Central allocations for provincial administration ceased because the funds did not exist. So governors were appointed to run their provinces and sanjuks as potentates, ravishing whatever tax, tribute, penalty, and baksheesh they could wring from the local people. Using such money lures to maintain order was preferable to Istanbul, because military efforts to project authority were no longer reliable. In 1690, just before tax farming was introduced, Bedouin tribes attempted to overrun Basra, weakened by a fresh outbreak of plague. The defense was left to the local authorities, who successfully mustered the citizenry. In the early 1700s, Baghdad was consigned to the descendants and extended family of Suleiman, which maintained the province as Ottoman at least in name. Hasan Pasha Mustafa, who became governor of Baghdad in 1704, tried to suppress continuing Bedouin marauders, but the skirmishes continued without resolution for nearly two decades. Then in 1723 when the shah of Persia was ousted, Istanbul asked Mustafa to invade, hoping to take advantage of the instability in the Shi’a nation. The four-year campaign was fruitless, resulting in many deaths and nothing more than a flimsy peace accord.

Defeat and dissolution [1908–1922].

The Crimean War was part of a contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. The financial burden of the war led the Ottoman state to issue foreign loans, caused an exodus of the Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire in continuing waves of emigration. The Circassians were ethnically cleansed and exiled from their homelands and fled to the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman bashi-bazouks brutally suppressed the Bulgarian uprising of 1876, massacring up to 100,000 people in the process. The Russo-Turkish War ended with a decisive victory for Russia. As a result Ottoman holdings in Europe declined sharply; Bulgaria was established as an independent principality, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro gained complete independence.

In return for British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s advocacy for restoring the Ottoman territories on the Balkan Peninsula, Britain assumed the administration of Cyprus and sent troops to Egypt in 1882, with the pretext of helping the Ottoman government, effectively gaining control in both territories. During the Italo-Turkish War the Ottomans lost Libya and its Balkan territories. Fearing religious persecution, around 400,000 Muslims fled to Turkey. According to estimates, the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans led to the death of several million individuals and the expulsion of a similar number. By 1914, the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of nearly all of Europe and North Africa.

In November 1914, the Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. There were several important Ottoman victories in the early years of the war, such as the Battle of Gallipoli and the Siege of Kut, but there were setbacks as well, such as the disastrous Caucasus Campaign against the Russians. As the Russian Caucasus Army continued to advance into eastern Anatolia, the Ottoman government started the deportation of its ethnic Armenian population, resulting in the death of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in what became known as the Armenian Genocide. Large-scale massacres were also committed against the Empire’s Greek and Assyrian minorities as part of the same campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The Arab Revolt which began in 1916 turned the tide against the Ottomans at the Middle Eastern front. The Armistice of Mudros ended the hostilities and was followed with occupation of Constantinople and subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.  The last quarter of the 19^th and the early part of the 20^th century saw some 7–9 million Turkish-Muslim refugees from the lost territories of the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans and the Mediterranean islands migrate to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace.  The occupation of Constantinople and İzmir led to the establishment of a Turkish national movement, which won the Turkish War of Independence under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal [later given the surname “Atatürk”]. The sultanate was abolished and the last sultan, Mehmed VI left the country on 17 November 1922. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

The caliphate was abolished in 1924.

AKA The Manchu dynasty, it was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912. It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted almost three centuries and formed the territorial base for the modern Chinese state. The reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796) saw the apogee and initial decline of prosperity and imperial control.

The early Manchu rulers also established two foundations of legitimacy which help to explain the stability of their dynasty. The first was the bureaucratic institutions and Confucian culture. The second was their Manchu identity which allowed them to appeal to Mongol, Tibetan and Uighur constituents. The Qing rulers were simultaneously emperors of the Han Chinese, khans of the Mongols, and Buddhist sage rulers, patrons of Tibetan Buddhism, for the newly conquered areas of Central Asia. The Kangxi Emperor also welcomed to his court Jesuit missionaries, who had first come to China under the Ming. Missionaries held significant positions as military weapons experts, mathematicians, cartographers, astronomers and advisers to the emperor. After the Spanish acquisition of the Philippines, the exchange of goods between China and Europe accelerated dramatically. From 1565, the annual Manila Galleon brought in enormous amounts of silver to China, from Spanish silver mines in South America. Trade further benefited after the Qing dynasty relaxed maritime trade restrictions. Guangzhou [Canton] was the port of preference for most foreign trade; however, foreign traders were only permitted to do business through merchants known as the Cohong . Foreigners could only live in one of the Thirteen Factories, near Shameen Island, and were not allowed to enter, much less live or trade in, any other part of China.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in the European market created a trade imbalance because the market for Western goods in China was virtually non-existent; the British East India Company (E.I.C.) had a matching monopoly of British trade and began to auction opium grown on its plantations in India to independent foreign traders in exchange for silver. The opium was then transported to the China coast and retailed the drug inside China. This reverse flow of silver and the increasing numbers of opium addicts alarmed Chinese officials.

The population rose to 400 million, but taxes and government revenues, fixed at a low rate, virtually guaranteed fiscal crisis. Corruption set in, rebels tested government legitimacy, and ruling elites were unable to change their mindset in the face of changes in the world trade system. Following the Opium War[1], European powers imposed unequal treaties, free trade, extraterritoriality and treaty ports under foreign control. In 1839, the emperor, rejecting proposals to legalize and tax opium, solved the problem by abolishing opium trade. Around 20,000 chests were confiscated without compensation, trade blockaded, and merchants confined to their quarters. The British government, although not officially denying China’s right to control imports of the drug, objected to this arbitrary seizure and used its naval and gunnery power to inflict quick and decisive defeat.

Once the British took Canton, they sailed up the Yangtze and captured the emperor’s tax barges, a devastating blow since it slashed the revenue of the imperial court in Beijing to just a fraction of what it had been. By the middle of 1842, the British had defeated the Chinese and occupied Shanghai. The war finally ended with the signing of China’s first Unequal Treaty, the Treaty of Nanking.

The Boxer Rebellion[2] was an anti-imperialist uprising which took place towards the end of the Qing dynasty. The uprising took place against a background of severe drought, and the disruption caused by the growth of foreign spheres of influence. After several months of growing violence against the foreign and Christian presence in Shandong and the North China plain, in June 1900 Boxer fighters, convinced they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, converged on Beijing. Foreigners and Chinese Christians sought refuge in the Legation Quarter where they were under siege for 55 days. The Eight-Nation Alliance, brought 20,000 armed troops to China, defeated the Imperial Army, and captured Beijing. Uncontrolled plunder of the capital and the surrounding countryside ensued, along with the summary execution of those suspected of being Boxers. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 provided for the execution of government officials who had supported the Boxers, provisions for foreign troops to be stationed in Beijing, and 450 million taels of silver [more than the government’s annual tax revenue] to be paid as indemnity over the course of the next thirty-nine years. The war marked the start of what 20^th century nationalists called the “Century of Humiliation”. The ease with which the British forces defeated the numerically superior Chinese armies damaged the dynasty’s prestige. The interpretation of the war which was long the standard in the People’s Republic of China was summarized as: The Opium War, “in which the Chinese people fought against British aggression, marked the beginning of modern Chinese history and the start of the Chinese people’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism.”

The government then initiated unprecedented fiscal and administrative reforms, including elections, a new legal code, and abolition of the examination system. Sun Yat-sen[3] and other revolutionaries competed with reformers and monarchists to transform the Qing empire into a modern nation. After the death of the Empress Dowager and the Emperor in 1908, the hard line Manchu court alienated reformers and local elites alike. Local uprisings led to the 1911 Revolution.[4]

The last emperor abdicated on February 12, 1912.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhai_Revolution

 

The Russian Empire was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union. At one point in 1866, it stretched from eastern Europe, across Asia, and into North America. At the beginning of the 19^th century, Russia was the largest country in the world, extending from the Arctic Ocean to the north to the Black Sea on the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east.

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By the 16^th century, the Russian ruler had emerged as a powerful, autocratic figure, a Tsar. By assuming that title, the sovereign of Moscow tried to emphasize that he was emperor on par with the Byzantine emperor or the Mongol khan. The development of the Tsar’s autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV, known as the Terrible. Although apparently intelligent and energetic, Ivan suffered from breakdowns of paranoia and depression, and his rule was disrupted by acts of intense violence, including a hostility toward his advisers, the government, and the boyars. In 1565 he divided Russia into two parts: his private domain (or oprichnina) and the public realm (or zemshchina). Ivan chose some of the most prosperous and important districts of Russia and in these areas, he attacked boyars, merchants, and common people, summarily executing some and confiscating land and possessions. Thus began a decade of terror in Russia which culminated in the Massacre of Novgorod.

Ivan IV was succeeded by his son Fedor, who was mentally deficient. Actual power went to Fedor’s brother-in-law, the boyar Boris Godunov [who is credited with abolishing Yuri’s Day, the only time of the year when serfs were free to move from one landowner to another]. In 1589 the creation of the patriarchate climaxed the evolution of a separate and totally independent Russian Orthodox Church. In 1598 Fedor died without an heir, ending the Rurik Dynasty. A national assembly proclaimed Boris Godunov tsar, although various boyar factions refused to recognize the decision. Widespread crop failures caused the Russian famine of 1601–1603.

The autocracy survived the Time of Troubles and the rule of weak or corrupt tsars because of the strength of the government’s central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to serve, regardless of the ruler’s legitimacy or the boyar faction controlling the throne. The number of government departments increased from 22 in 1613 to 80 by mid-century. By that time, the boyars had largely merged with the new elite, who were obligatory servitors of the state, to form a new nobility. The state required service primarily in the military because of permanent warfare on southern and western borders and attacks of nomads. In return, the nobility received land and peasants.

The state fully sanctioned serfdom, and runaway peasants became state fugitives. Peasants living on state-owned land were not considered serfs, but organized into communes, which were responsible for taxes and other obligations. Like serfs, however, state peasants were attached to the land they farmed. Middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes, and, like the serfs, they were forbidden to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and to special taxes. By chaining much of Russian society to specific domiciles, the legal code subordinated the people to the interests of the state. Under this code, increased state taxes and regulations heightened the social discontent that had been simmering since the Time of Troubles. A major uprising occurred in the Volga region in 1671 when Stenka Razin, a Cossack from the Don River region, led a revolt that drew together wealthy Cossacks and escaped serfs seeking free land. Tsarist troops finally defeated the rebels after they had occupied major cities along the Volga in an operation whose panache captured the imaginations of later generations of Russians. Razin was publicly tortured and executed.

Upon Alexei’s death, there was a period of dynastic struggle between his children by his first wife and his son by his second wife the future Peter the Great. Peter ruled from 1682 until 1725. In numerous successful wars he expanded the Tsardom into a huge empire that became a major European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political system with a modern, scientific, Europe-oriented, and rationalist system.

Russia continued its territorial growth through the 17^th century. In the southwest, it acquired Ukraine, and the who remained fiercely independent, staged a number of rebellions against the Poles. Expansion, particularly its incorporation of eastern Ukraine, had unintended consequences. Most Ukrainians were Orthodox, but their close contact with the Roman Catholic Polish also brought them Western intellectual currents. Through the Academy in Kiev, Russia gained links to Central European influences and to the wider Orthodox world. Although the Ukrainian link induced creativity in many areas, it also weakened traditional Russian religious practices and culture. Other more direct channels to the West opened as international trade increased and more foreigners came to Russia. The Tsar’s court was interested in the West’s more advanced military technology. By the end of the 17^th century, Ukrainian, Polish, and West European penetration had weakened the Russian culture amongst the elite and prepared the way for a radical transformation. Merchants, traders, and explorers pushed eastward toward the coast of the Pacific Ocean and in 1648 the Cossacks opened the passage between America and Asia, and by the middle of the 17^th century, Russians had reached the Amur River and the outskirts of the Chinese Empire. After a period of conflict with the Qing dynasty, Russia made peace with China  and gained access to the region east of Lake Baikal and the trade route to Beijing.

Shortly after the death of Empress Elizabeth, Sophia, who had taken the Russian name Catherine upon her marriage, overthrew her unpopular husband, with the aid of her lover, Grigory Orlov, and reigned as Catherine the Great. Catherine’s son, Paul I, who succeeded his mother in 1796, was murdered in his palace in Saint Petersburg in 1801. Alexander II, son of Nicholas I, became the next Russian emperor in 1855, in the midst of the Crimean War. By paying attention to the army, giving much freedom to Finland, and freeing the serfs in 1861, he gained popular support. Despite his popularity however, his family life began to unravel and Alexander turned to a mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgoruki, with whom he had several bastards, which alienated him from most of his legitimate children. Before Princess Catherine could be elevated in rank Alexander was assassinated by a hand-made bomb hurled by Ignacy Hryniewiecki.

Alexander III, the second-to-last Romanov emperor, was responsible for conservative reforms in Russia. Fearful of the fate which had befallen his father, he strengthened autocratic rule in Russia and many of the reforms the more liberal Alexander II had pushed through were reversed. His eldest son, Nicholas, became emperor upon Alexander III’s death due to kidney disease at age 49 in November 1894. Nicholas reputedly said, “I am not ready to be tsar….” In 1916, when Nicholas took control of the army at the front lines during World War I, Alexandra sought to influence government affairs even more than she had done during peace time. His well-known devotion to her injured both his and the dynasty’s reputation during World War I, due both to her German origin and her unique relationship with Rasputin. Alexei, the long-awaited heir to the throne, inherited haemophilia and suffered agonizing bouts of protracted bleeding, the suffering of which was partially alleviated by Rasputin’s ministrations. Nicholas and Alexandra also had four daughters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia).

The February Revolution of 1917 resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II delegated to the Provisional Government pending a future democratic referendum. Nicholas and his family were placed under house arrest until they were sent into exile in Siberia in August 1917. The October Revolution saw the ousting of the Provisional government by the Bolsheviks, and the Romanovs were moved to the Russian town of Yekaterinburg. On the night of July 17, 1918, Bolsheviks shot Nicholas, his immediate family, and four servants in the cellar. In July 1991, the crushed bodies of Nicholas II and his wife, along with three of their five children and four of their servants, were exhumed Because two bodies were not present, many people believed that two Romanov children escaped the killings. A Russian scientist made photographic superimpositions and determined that Maria and Alexei were not accounted for. Later, an American scientist concluded from dental, vertebral, and other remnants that it was Anastasia and Alexei who were missing. Much mystery surrounded Anastasia’s fate. Several impostors claimed to be the Grand Duchess. Extensive DNA testing has confirmed these remains to be those of Nicholas II, his wife and three children. The remains were transferred with full military honour guard and accompanied by members of the Romanov family from Yekaterinburg to St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg they were interred in a special chapel in the Peter and Paul Cathedral near the tombs of their ancestors.

Late summer of 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced a discovery by one of his workers in the area where the remains were found was near the old Koptyaki Road, under what appeared to be double bonfire sites about 70 m from the mass grave in Pigs Meadow. The archaeologists said the bones were from a boy who was about thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman approximately twenty-three years old. The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes. Also, striped material was found that appeared to have been from a blue-and-white striped cloth; Alexei commonly wore a blue-and-white striped undershirt. Research on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was conducted in American and European laboratories. The DNA of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a great-nephew of the last Tsarina, was used by forensic scientists to identify her body and those of her children.

The Soviet Union had its roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks, the majority faction of the Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, then led a second revolution which overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic beginning a civil war between pro-revolution Reds and counter-revolution Whites.

The Red Army entered several territories of the former Russian Empire, and helped local Communists take power through soviets that nominally acted on behalf of workers and peasants. In 1922 the Communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian republics. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, a troika collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed political opposition, committed the state to Marxism–Leninism  and initiated a centrally planned economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation which laid the basis for its later war effort and dominance after World War II.  However, Stalin established political paranoia, and introduced arbitrary arrests on a massive scale after which the authorities transferred many people, including military leaders, Communist Party members and ordinary citizens to correctional labour camps or sentenced them to execution.

 In the beginning of World War II the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Germany; the treaty delayed confrontation between the two countries but was disregarded in 1941 when the Nazis invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of combat in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually drove through Eastern Europe and captured Berlin in 1945, inflicting the vast majority of German losses. Soviet occupied territory conquered from Axis forces in Central and Eastern Europe became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc.

Siege of Leningrad

The capture of Leningrad, historically and currently known as Saint Petersburg[1], was one of three strategic goals in the German Operation Barbarossa and the main target of Army Group North. The strategy was motivated by Leningrad‘s political status as the former capital of Russia and the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution, Historic Centre and Related Groups of Monuments [the name used by UNESCO when it collectively designated the historic core of the city], its military importance as a main base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet and its industrial strength, housing numerous arms factories. According to a directive sent to Army Group North,

“After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban centre. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.” 

 Hitler’s ultimate plan was to raze Leningrad to the ground and give areas north of the River Neva to the Finns. The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. On Hitler’s express orders, most of the palaces including the amber room[2] – disappeared during the siege and recreated in 2003. Before the room was lost, it was considered an “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Knowledge of its current whereabouts remains a mystery.

The 872 days of the siege caused unparalleled famine[3] in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of as many as 1½ million soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1.4 more, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment. Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery alone in Leningrad holds half a million civilian victims of the siege. Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Catherine Palace, Peterhof, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina, and other historic landmarks located outside the city’s defensive perimeter were looted and then destroyed, with many art collections transported to Nazi Germany.

Leningrad gave its name to the Leningrad Affair [1949–1952 a product of rivalry between Stalin’s successors where one side was represented by the leaders of the city Communist Party organization, the second most significant one in the country after Moscow. The entire elite leadership of Leningrad was destroyed, including the former mayor Kuznetsov, the mayor and all their deputies; 23 leaders were sentenced to death and 181 to prison or exile. About 2,000 ranking officials across the USSR were expelled from the party and the Komsomol and removed from leadership positions. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, a period of moderate social and economic liberalization occurred under the administration of Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union then went on to initiate significant technological achievements of the 20^th century, including launching the first ever satellite and world’s first human spaceflight, which led it into the Space Race.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis marked a period of extreme tension, resumed when the Soviet Union began providing military assistance in Afghanistan at the request of its new socialist government in 1979. Taraki’s Government initiated land reform which attempted to limit those whose landholdings exceeded a limit had their property requisitioned by the government without compensation. Contrary to expectations the reform was neither popular nor productive. Agricultural harvests plummeted and the reform itself led to rising discontent.

Each year, the Afghan army lost an estimated 15,000 soldiers, 10,000 from desertion and 5,000 from casualties sustained in battle. Everyone between 19 and 39 was eligible for conscription, the only exceptions were certain party members, Afghans who studied abroad, mostly in the Eastern Bloc, and one child families. Unfortunately for the government, most people tried to evade conscription so it was forced to use army or police gangs to recruit civilians. Even so, some people carried fake papers so they could evade conscription. A side effect of the lack of recruits was that veterans were forced into longer service, or re-recruited. Of the 60 people who graduated from Kabul University in 1982, 15 of them fled to Pakistan or began working for the mujahideen.

During the civil war, and the ensuing Soviet war, most of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed, and normal patterns of economic activity were disrupted. The GNP fell substantially because of the conflict; trade and transport were disrupted along with the loss of labour and capital. The 5 Year Plan, which was introduced in 1986, continued until one month before the government’s fall. According to the plan, the economy, which had grown less than 2 percent annually until 1985, would grow 25 %: industry would grow 28%; agriculture 16%; domestic trade by 150% and foreign trade by 15%. As expected, none of these targets were met, and 2% growth annually, which had been the norm before the plan, continued under [4]. Beginning with the Soviet intervention in 1979, successive wars virtually destroyed the nation’s education system. Most teachers fled during the wars to neighbouring countries. The withdrawal of Soviet combatant forces from the Afghanistan was successfully executed in 1989 and saw the last Soviet general officer to walk from Afghanistan back into Soviet territory through the Afghan-Uzbek Bridge.

Afghanistan: the war we hardly knew.[5]

When you think about the major conflicts the Australians army, the ADF and its predecessors have been involved in over the last century they’ve been essentially all very well documented by journalists and historians. Look back to World War One; we have Bean that great historian who wrote such a gripping account. In the Second World War there was Gavin Long’s 22 volume history. David Horner wrote on the peace keeping operations but there’s nothing on Afghanistan or Iraq or East Timor and really we have to ask the question why? What are we hiding?

The answer appears to be that the ADF is gripped with an irrational fear of the media and appears more concerned about their own reputation than they are about the truth. War is not all heroics. There will be bad stories alongside the good ones. Locking the media out of operations isn’t going to stop the bad stories being written but it will, and certainly has, prevented the Australian public getting a full and contextualised understanding of our longest military campaign.

Australians can simultaneously have the highest respect for our troops and the work they do, and possess a cynical, but realistic view of a culture mired in medieval violence, subjugation and misogyny. Afghanistan is a trainwreck, we had to go to support America as part of our bilateral defence relationship, and the place will probably slowly crumble back to the 13^th century. The people can’t be helped, and don’t want our help, despite the sad, occasional flowerings of democracy and fair treatment. An utter waste of money and lives.

When asked in a Lowy Institute poll in 2013 whether the 12-year-long war in Afghanistan had been worth it, 61% of Australians responded with a resounding no. Yet in two successive parliamentary debates on Afghanistan, all but a handful of politicians have argued that Australia’s national interests were best secured by putting military lives on the line in Uruzgan. Once al-Qaeda was decimated in Afghanistan, and the threat of terrorism in Australia was reduced, Australian governments on both sides struggled to articulate why our military remained. At one stage we were there to reconstruct Uruzgan provinces, so ravaged by war. At another, we were part of a national effort to build a new and more sophisticated Afghan nation. At the end, our mission was simply to train our Afghan replacements.

A recently concluded review in the United Kingdom articulates that when politicians send their military to war, they must be better at making the case for their deployment or face ultimate mission failure. This lesson is yet to be learned in Australia. Knowledge of military strategy within the Australian Parliament is so low, it is bordering on being dangerously negligent. [See video].

The end of the Soviet Union.

The last Soviet leader,  sought to reform the Union and move it in the direction of Nordic-style social democracy, introducing the policies of glasnost and perestroika in an attempt to end the period of economic stagnation and democratize the government. However, this led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements. Central authorities initiated a referendum, boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favour of preserving the Union as a renewed federation.

In August 1991, a coup d’état was attempted by hardliners against Gorbachev, with the intention of reversing his policies. The coup failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin[6] playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup, resulting in the banning of the Communist Party. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the remaining twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states; the Russian Federation replaced the Soviet Union.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room

[3] http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/leningrad.htm

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Najibullah

[5] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-14/brissenden-afghanistan-the-war-we-hardly-knew/5090826

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin

But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then southeastward
through the Khyber Pass into India. It was India which received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and Chinese strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down through the Punjab into the great plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Asoka was broken up, and for a time the history of India passes into darkness. A dynasty founded by one of the raiding peoples ruled for a time over North India and maintained a certain order. These invasions went on for several centuries.

At the height of its power around 1700, the Empire controlled most of the Indian Subcontinent with its population estimated as between 110 and 130 million over a territory of over 4 million km² .The “classic period” of the Empire started in 1556 with the accession of Akbar the Great and ended with the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, although the Empire continued for another 150 years.

The Mughal state’s economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture and mandating that taxes be paid in silver currency, caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17^th century was a factor in India’s economic expansion, resulting in great patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture. Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Maratha[2], the Rajput[3], and the Sikh[4], gained military and governance ambitions during Mughal rule. Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites along the coasts of southern and eastern India.  The Mughal emperors were Central Asian Turkic-Mongols from modern-day Uzbekistan, who claimed direct descent from both Genghis Khan and Timur. At the height of their power in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, they controlled Bengal in the east to Kabul & Sindh in the west, Kashmir in the north to the Kaveri basin[5] in the south. Its population at that time has been estimated at a quarter of the world’s population.

Humayun[6], who was driven out of India and into Persia by rebels, during his exile in Persia established diplomatic ties between the Safavid and Mughal Courts, and led to increasing Persian cultural influence in the Mughal Empire. The restoration of Mughal rule began after Humayun’s triumphant return from Persia in 1555, but he died from a fatal accident shortly afterwards. Humayun’s son, Akbar, succeeded to the throne and consolidated the Mughal Empire in India.

Through warfare and diplomacy Akbar[7] was able to extend the empire and controlled almost the entire Indian subcontinent north of the Godavari river. He created a new class of nobility loyal to him from the military aristocracy of India’s social groups, implemented a modern government, and supported cultural developments. At the same time, Akbar intensified trade with European trading companies, allowed free expression of religion, and attempted to resolve socio-political and cultural differences in his empire by establishing a new religion. He left his successors an internally stable state, which was in the midst of its golden age, but before long signs of political weakness would emerge. The reign of Shah Jahan, the fifth emperor, was the golden age of Mughal architecture. He erected several large monuments, the most famous of which is the Taj Mahal at Agra, as well as other World Heritage Sites include Humayun’s Tomb, Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort, the Agra Fort, the Moti Masjid, the Jama Masjid, and the Lahore Fort.

The Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its territorial expanse during the reign of Aurangzeb and also started its terminal decline in his reign due to Maratha military resurgence under Shivaji Bhosale[8]. Shivaji established a competent and progressive civil rule with the help of a disciplined military and administrative organisations. He innovated military tactics, pioneering the guerrilla warfare methods which leveraged strategic factors like geography, speed, and surprise and focused pinpoint attacks to defeat his larger and more powerful enemies. By the mid18^th century, the Marathas had routed Mughal armies, and won over several Mughal provinces from the Deccan to Bengal, leading to the breakup of the empire and declaration of independence of its former provinces by the Nawab[9] of Bengal and other states.

In 1739, the Mughals were crushingly defeated and Delhi was sacked. During the following century Mughal power became limited and the last emperor, Bahadur Shah only had authority over the city of Shahjahanabad. He issued a firman supporting the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and was therefore tried by the British East India Company for treason, imprisoned, exiled to Rangoon and the last remnants of the empire were taken over by the British.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajput

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaveri

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humayun

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivaji

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawab

The Maya, Aztec and Inca civilizations occupied relatively small areas and, compared to other Empires, had little affect over small numbers of people. However singly and combined, they developed extraordinary cultures with the only known fully developed writing system of the time, as well as for art, architecture, mathematical, agricultural [corn, peppers, potatoes, chocolate, tobacco and tomatoes] and astronomical systems. God knows what Europeans ate before the New World was discovered.

Maya.

Initially established about 2000 BC many Maya cities reached their highest state of development from 250 to 900, and continued until the arrival of the Spanish. The Maya civilization shares many features with other Mesoamerican civilizations due to the high degree of interaction and cultural diffusion that characterized the region. Advances such as writing, epigraphy, and the calendar did not originate with the Maya; however, their civilization fully developed them.

The Maya civilization extended throughout the present-day southern Mexican states and extended throughout the present day nations of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. The people developed an agriculturally intensive, city centred civilization consisting of numerous independent states. This includes Caracol, Tikal, Palenque, Copán, Xunantunich and Calakmul, among others. During this period the Maya population numbered in the millions.

They created a multitude of kingdoms and small empires, built monumental palaces and temples, engaged in highly developed ceremonies, and developed an elaborate hieroglyphic writing system. The Maya civilization participated in long distance trade with many of the other Mesoamerican cultures and other groups in central and gulf coast Mexico. In addition, they had trade and exchanges with more distant, non-Mesoamerican groups, for example the Caribbean islands. Archaeologists have found gold from Panama in the Cenote of Chichen Itza[1]. Important trade goods included cacao, salt, seashells, jade, and obsidian.

Shortly after their first expeditions to the region, the Spanish initiated a number of attempts to subjugate the Maya who were hostile towards the Spanish crown. This campaign, sometimes termed “The Spanish Conquest of Yucatán”, would prove to be a lengthy and dangerous exercise for the conquistadores from the outset, and it would take some 170 years and tens of thousands of Indian auxiliaries before the Spanish established substantive control.

Maya art

Maya art of the Classic era [c. 250 to 900 AD] is of a high level of aesthetic and artisanal sophistication, from the lay-out and architecture of court towns down to the decorative arts. The stucco and stone reliefs of Palenque and the statuary of Copán, particularly its impressive stelas, show a grace and accurate observation of the human form that reminded early archaeologists of Classical civilizations of the Old World. There are a number of examples of the advanced mural painting of the Classic Maya, most completely preserved in a building at Bonampak[2]. A rich blue colour (‘Maya Blue’) survived through the centuries due to its unique chemical characteristics.

Of the many folding books, only three survive, of which the Dresden Codex[3] is artistically superior. With the progressive decipherment of the Maya script, it was also discovered that the Maya were one of the few civilizations where artists attached their name to their work. Depending on the location of natural resources such as fresh-water wells, or cenotes, the city grew by using sacbeob [limed causeways]  to connect great plazas with the platforms that created the sub-structure for nearly all Maya buildings. At the heart of the Maya city were large plazas surrounded by the most important buildings, such as the royal acropolis, great pyramid temples and occasionally ball-courts.

An integral aspect of the Mesoamerican lifestyle, the courts for their ritual ball-game were constructed throughout the Maya realm. Enclosed on two sides by stepped ramps that led to ceremonial platforms or small temples, the ballcourt itself was of a capital “I” shape and could be found in all but the smallest of Maya cities.

The Maya writing system [often called hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the Ancient Egyptian writing] was a combination of phonetic symbols and logograms. It is the only writing system of the Pre-Columbian New World which is known to represent the spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than a thousand different glyphs. National Geographic published the findings of Maya writings that could be as old as 400 BC. In the succeeding centuries the Maya developed their script into a form which was far more complete and complex than any other that has yet been found in the Americas.

Although many Maya centres went into decline or were completely abandoned during or after this period, the skill and knowledge of Maya writing persisted among segments of the population, and the early Spanish conquistadors knew of individuals who could still read and write the script. Unfortunately, the Spanish displayed little interest in it, and as a result of the dire impacts the conquest had on Maya societies, the knowledge was subsequently lost, probably within only a few generations.

Mayan astronomy

The Maya produced accurate astronomical observations; their charts of the movements of the moon and planets were used to predict eclipses and other celestial events such the heliacal and cosmic risings and settings of Venus. The accuracy of their astronomy and the “theoretical” calendar derived from it was superior to any other known seventeen hundred years ago. The Dresden Codex contains the highest concentration of astronomical phenomena observations and calculations of any of the surviving texts. Examination and analysis of this codex reveals that Venus was the most important astronomical object to the Maya, even more important to them than the sun.

Maya calendar.

In common with the other Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya had measured the length of the solar year to a high degree of accuracy, far more accurately than that used in Europe as the basis of the Gregorian calendar. They did not use this figure for the length of year in their calendars, however; the calendars they used were crude, being based on a year length of exactly 365 days, which means that the calendar falls out of step with the seasons by one day every four years.

 Observatories. The Maya were keen astronomers and had mapped out the phases of celestial objects, especially the Moon and Venus. Round temples, often dedicated to Kukulcan[4], are perhaps those most often described as “observatories” by ruin tour guides, but pyramids of other shapes may well have been used for observation as well. The night sky was considered a window showing all supernatural doings. The Maya configured constellations of gods and places, saw the unfolding of narratives in their seasonal movements, and believed that the intersection of all possible worlds was in the night sky.

There is a massive array of supernatural characters in the Maya religious tradition, only some of which recur with regularity. The life-cycle of maize lies at the heart of Maya belief. This philosophy is demonstrated on the belief in the Maya maize god as a central religious figure. The Maya bodily ideal is also based on the form of this young deity, which is demonstrated in their artwork. Although it was not quite as prominent in Mayan culture as the Aztecs, the Maya practiced human sacrifice to an extent. In some Maya rituals people were killed by having their arms and legs held while a priest cut the person’s chest open and tore out his heart as an offering. This is depicted on ancient objects such as pictorial texts, known as codices.

Within a century or so the flourishing Classic Maya civilization fell into a permanent decline, so that once great cities were abandoned and so disappear from human memory for centuries.

‘This was surely one of the most profound social and demographic catastrophes of all human history’.

The question, then, which has preoccupied scholars ever since the re-discovery in the 19^th century CE of mysterious ruins built by, at the time, an equally mysterious civilization, is why did this happen? Disease, a social revolution, drought, famine, foreign invasion, over-population, disruption in trade routes, earthquakes, and even hurricanes were held responsible. From the mid to late 8^th century CE relations between city-states deteriorated. There was a decline in trade and an increase in armed conflicts. We know that the death rate increased and from 830 CE no new buildings were constructed. As the Maya were fond of writing dates on their monuments and stelae, it is interesting to note that no dates after c. 910 CE are seen in the lowlands sites.

There is also evidence of large areas becoming completely depopulated and royal dynasties and elites disappearing without trace. The collapse was neither unique – smaller scale abandonment of Maya cities had occurred several times before over the centuries – nor was it  sudden but rather a process of decline which occurred over a period of 150 years. An ever increasing population may well have driven the Maya to deforest areas which were subsequently eroded. Sapodilla was the architect’s choice for such details as lintels but was then replaced by the inferior wood. Had the Maya exhausted their supply of Sapodilla?

Maya historians have generally settled on a combination of three main factors which could have caused the Maya collapse: warfare between city-states, overpopulation, and drought. Warfare had been a part of Maya culture for centuries, but its intensification and scale increased prior to the collapse so that cities began to build fortifications. Previously, warfare had often been token, in that defeat might result in only a small number of important figures being taken as captives. The conquest of territory and the capture of sacrificial victims now became a priority – the former perhaps to increase agricultural production and acquire resources and the latter to appease the gods and return to the more stable times of earlier centuries.

Over-population may well have put an unbearable strain on the agricultural production; the Maya lowlands suffered a sustained series of droughts between 800 and 1050 CE. For those regions which did suffer a water shortage, the lack of rain and repeated crop failures make it entirely conceivable that either the lower levels of society – 90% of the population were farmers – rebelled against the ruling class. With the consequent collapse of the social structure and city infrastructure, those who could may well have migrated however there is no archaeological record of a large population movement, only that after the collapse, the 60,000 square miles of the Maya lowlands was deserted.

Aztec.

From the 13^th century, the Valley of Mexico was the heart of Aztec civilization: here the capital of the Aztec Triple Alliance, the city of Tenochtitlan, was built upon raised islets in Lake Texcoco. The Triple Alliance formed a tributary empire expanding its political hegemony far beyond the Valley of Mexico, conquering other city states throughout Mesoamerica. At its pinnacle, Aztec culture had rich and complex mythological and religious traditions, as well as reaching remarkable architectural and artistic accomplishments.

It was never a true territorial empire with military garrisons in conquered provinces, but rather controlled its client states by installing friendly rulers in conquered cities, and by constructing marriage alliances between the ruling dynasties. Client states paid tribute to the Aztec emperor in an economic strategy making them depend on the imperial centre for the acquisition of luxury goods. The political clout of the empire reached far south into Mesoamerica conquering cities as far south as Guatemala and spanning from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. The empire reached its maximal extent in 1519 just prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

Two of the primary architects of the Aztec empire were the half-brothers Tlacaelel and Montezuma I. Tlacaelel reformed the Aztec state and religion. He rewrote the history of the Aztec people which led directly to the curriculum taught to scholars and promoted the belief that the Aztecs were always a powerful and mythic nation. One component of this reform was the institution of ritual war (the flower wars) as a way to have trained warriors, and created the necessity of constant sacrifices to keep the Sun moving.

Despite the decline of the Aztec empire, most of the Mesoamerican cultures were intact after the fall of Tenochtitlan. Indeed, the freedom from Aztec domination may have been considered a positive development by most of the other cultures. The upper classes of the Aztec empire were considered noblemen by the Spaniards and generally treated as such initially. All this changed rapidly and the native population were soon forbidden to study by law, and had the status of minors.

Conquistadores.

The conquistadors were professional warriors, using European tactics, firearms, and cavalry. Their units specialized in forms of combat that required long periods of training that were too costly for informal groups. Their armies were mostly composed of Iberian and other European soldiers. The two most famous conquistadors were Hernán Cortés who conquered the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro who led the conquest of the Incan Empire. They were second cousins born in Extremadura, as were many of the Spanish conquerors.

In 1504, Cortés left Spain to seek his fortune in New World. He travelled to Hispaniola. Settling in the new town of Azúa, Cortés served as a notary for several years and joined an expedition of Cuba led by Diego Velázquez. In 1518, Cortés was to command his own expedition to Mexico, but Velázquez cancelled it. Cortés ignored the order and set sail for Mexico with more than 500 men and 11 ships, reach the Mexican coast in 1519. There, he encountered Geronimo de Aguilar, a Spanish Franciscan priest who had survived a shipwreck, and a period in captivity with the Maya, before escaping. Aguilar had learned the local language and was able to translate for Cortés.

In March 1519, Cortés formally claimed the land for the Spanish crown. Then he proceeded to Tabasco, where he met with resistance and won a battle against the natives. He received twenty young indigenous women from the vanquished natives and he converted them all to Christianity.  Among these women was La Malinche, his future mistress and mother of his son Martín. Malinche knew both the Nahuatl language and the Chontal Maya, thus enabling Cortés to communicate with the Aztecs through Aguilar. At San Juan de Ulúa on Easter Sunday 1519, Cortés met with the  Aztec Empire[5] governor’s. In July his men took over Veracruz. By this act, Cortés dismissed the authority of the Governor of Cuba to place himself directly under the orders of King Charles. In order to eliminate any ideas of retreat, Cortés scuttled his ships.

Cortés and his men, accompanied by about 1,000 Tlaxcalteca, marched to Cholula, where, either in a pre-meditated effort to instil fear upon the Aztecs waiting for him at Tenochtitlan or, wishing to make an example, massacred thousands of unarmed members of the nobility gathered at the central plaza, then partially burned the city.

On November 8 1519, they were peacefully received by Montezuma II[6] who deliberately let Cortés enter the Aztec capital, hoping to get to know their weaknesses and crush them later. Montezuma gave lavish gifts of gold to the Spaniards which, rather than placating them, excited their ambitions for plunder. In his letters to King Charles, Cortés claimed to have learned that he was considered by the Aztecs to be either an emissary of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl or the god himself. Meanwhile, Velázquez sent another expedition, to oppose Cortés, arriving in Mexico with 1,100 men. Cortés overcame Narváez, despite his numerical inferiority, and convinced the rest of Narváez’s men to join him. In Mexico, one of Cortés’s lieutenants Pedro de Alvarado, committed The massacre in the Main Temple, triggering a local rebellion.

Montezuma was killed; the Spaniards claimed he was stoned to death by his own people. Faced with a hostile population, Cortés fled for Tlaxcala managing a narrow escape across the Tlacopan causeway, while their rear guard was being massacred. Much of the treasure looted by Cortés as well as his artillery was lost. With the assistance of his allies, Cortés finally prevailed with reinforcements arriving from Cuba. Cortés began a policy of attrition, cutting off supplies and subduing the Aztecs’ allied cities. The siege of Tenochtitlan ended with Spanish victory and the destruction of the city. Finally, with the capture of Cuauhtémoc,[7] the Aztec Empire disappeared, and Cortés claimed it for Spain, renaming it Mexico City.

King Charles appointed Cortés as governor, captain general and chief justice of “New Spain”. But also, much to the dismay of Cortés, four royal officials were appointed at the same time to assist him in his governing. Cortés initiated the construction of Mexico City, destroying Aztec temples and buildings and then rebuilding on the Aztec ruins what soon became the most important European city in the Americas. Cortés managed the founding of new cities and extended Spanish rule to all of New Spain, imposing the encomienda system in 1524. He reserved many encomienda for himself and for his retinue. Although Cortés had flouted the authority of Diego Velázquez in sailing to the mainland and then leading an expedition of conquest, his spectacular success was rewarded by the crown with a coat of arms.

In 1528, Cortés presented himself with great splendour before Charles V’s court. Denying he had held back on gold due the crown, he showed that he had contributed more than the quinto. He was decorated with the order of Santiago and was rewarded in 1529 by being named the “Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca”, one of the wealthiest region of New Spain, and Cortés had 23,000 vassals in 23 named encomienda in perpetuity. In 1536 Cortés explored the north-western part of Mexico and discovered the Baja California peninsula. Cortés also spent time exploring the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Gulf of California was originally named the Sea of Cortes by its discoverer Francisco de Ulloa in 1539. This was the last major expedition by Cortés. On December 4, 1547 he was buried in the mausoleum of the Duke of Medina in Seville. Three years later his body was moved and in 1566 sent to New Spain and buried in the church of “San Francisco de Texcoco”, where his mother and one of his sisters were buried.

The viceroy moved the bones of Cortés along with those of his descendants to the Franciscan church in México where they stayed for 87 years. In 1794, his bones were again moved to the “Hospital de Jesus” [founded by Cortés], where a statue by Tolsa and a mausoleum were made. In 1823, after the independence of México, it seemed that his body would be desecrated, so the mausoleum was removed, the statue and the coat of arms were sent to Palermo. It was not until 1946 that they were rediscovered and authenticated by INAH. When the bones were first rediscovered one supporter of an indigenous vision of Mexico “proposed that the remains be publicly burned in front of the statue of Cuauhtemoc, and the ashes flung into the air.”

Cortés and the “Spiritual Conquest” of Mexico.

During the Age of Discovery, the Catholic Church had seen early attempts at conversion in the Caribbean islands by Spanish friars, particularly mendicant orders. Cortés made a request to the Spanish monarch to send Franciscan and Dominican friars to Mexico to begin the work of converting vast populations indigenous to Christianity. In his fourth letter to the king, Cortés pleaded for friars rather than diocesan or secular priests because those clerics were in his view a serious danger to the Indians’ conversion.

Francisco Pizarro[8] was born, an illegitimate child, c 1476, in Trujillo, Spain, an area stricken by poverty. Pizarro grew up illiterate, and while herding his father’s pigs, heard tales of the New World and was seized by a lust for fortune and adventure. In 1510, he accompanied Spanish explorer Alonzo de Ojeda on a voyage to Colombia. He sailed to Cartagena and joined the fleet of Martín Fernández and, in 1513, accompanied Balboa to the Pacific. In 1514, he was rewarded for his role in the arrest of Balboa with the positions of mayor and magistrate in Panama City, serving from 1519 to 1523. Reports of Peru’s riches and Cortés’s success in Mexico tantalized Pizarro and he undertook two expeditions to conquer the Incan Empire in 1524 and in 1526. Both failed as a result of native hostilities, bad weather, and lack of provisions.

Pizzaro reached Seville in early summer of 1528. King Charles I, who was at Toledo, had an interview with Pizarro and heard of his expeditions in South America, a territory the conquistador described as very rich in gold and silver which he and his followers had bravely explored “to extend the empire of Castile.” The Kingwas impressed and promised to give his support for the conquest of Peru. It would be Queen Isabel, however, who, in the absence of the King, would sign the Capitulación de Toledo a license which authorized Francisco Pizarro to proceed with the conquest of Peru. Pizarro was officially named the Governor, Captain general, “Adelantado”, and Alguacil Mayor, of the New Castile for the distance of 200 leagues along the newly discovered coast, and invested with all the authority and prerogatives, his associates being left in wholly secondary. One of the conditions of the grant was that within six months Pizarro should raise a sufficiently equipped force of two hundred and fifty men, of whom one hundred might be drawn from the colonies.

Those who decided to stay with Pizarro and later became known as “The Famous Thirteen“ while the rest of the expedition left. When a Dominican friar explained the need to pay tribute to the Emperor, Atahualpa, replied “I will be no man’s tributary.” His complacency, because there were fewer than 200 Spanish as opposed to his 50,000 man army sealed his fate and that of the Incan empire. The Spanish entered Cuzco on 15 Nov. 1533. Pizarro founded the city of Lima in Peru’s central coast, an act he considered as one of the most important things he had created in life. Over time, tensions increasingly built up between the conquistadors who had originally conquered Peru and those who arrived later. As a result, conquistadors divided into two factions, one run by Pizarro, and the other Almagro. Hernando Pizarro captured and executed Almagro, three years later in Lima, members of the defeated party avenged Almagro’s death by assassinating Francisco Pizarro.

De Soto[9] sailed to the New World in 1520 and participated in Gaspar de Espinosa’s expedition to Veragua, and in the conquest of Nicaragua under Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba. There he acquired am encomienda and a public office in Nicaragua. Brave leadership, unwavering loyalty, and ruthless schemes for the extortion of native villages for their captured chiefs became de Soto’s hallmarks during the Conquest of Central America. He gained fame as an excellent horseman, fighter, and tactician, but was notorious for the brutal treatment of Native Americans.

The Inca Empire: Children of the Sun

When Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed in Peru in 1532, he found unimaginable riches. The Inca Empire was in full bloom. The streets may not have been paved with gold, but their temples were. The Coricancha, or Temple of Gold, boasted an ornamental garden where the clods of earth, maize plants complete with leaves and corn cobs, were fashioned from silver and gold. Nearby grazed a flock of 20 golden llamas and their lambs, watched over by solid gold shepherds. Inca nobles strolled around on sandals with silver soles protecting their feet from the hard streets of Cuzco.

The Inca called their empire Tahuantinsuyu[10], or Land of the Four Quarters. It stretched 2,500 miles from Quito, Ecuador, to beyond Santiago, Chile. Within its domain were rich coastal settlements, high mountain valleys, rain-drenched tropical forests and the driest of deserts. The Inca controlled perhaps 10 million people, speaking a hundred different tongues. It was the largest empire on earth at the time. The administrative, political, and military centre of the empire was located in Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13^th century, and the last Inca stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572. Yet when Pizarro executed its last emperor, Atahualpa, the Inca Empire was only 50 years old. The Inca Empire was an amalgamation of languages, cultures and peoples. The components of the empire were not all uniformly loyal, nor were the local cultures all fully integrated. The Inca empire as a whole had an economy based on exchange and taxation of luxury goods and labour.

The following quote reflects a method of taxation:

“For as is well known to all, not a single village of the highlands or the plains failed to pay the tribute levied on it by those who were in charge of these matters. There were even provinces where, when the natives alleged that they were unable to pay their tribute, the Inca ordered that each inhabitant should be obliged to turn in every four months a large quill full of live lice, which was the Inca’s way of teaching and accustoming them to pay tribute”.

Estimates of the number of people inhabiting Tawantinsuyu at its peak range from as few as 4 million people, to more than 37 million. The reason for these various estimates is that in spite of the fact that the Inca kept excellent census records using their quipu, knowledge of how to read them has been lost, and almost all of them had been destroyed by the Spaniards in the course of their conquest.

Andean civilization probably began about 7600 BCE. Based in the highlands of Peru, an area now referred to as the punas, the ancestors of the Incas began as a nomadic herding people. Geographical conditions resulted in a distinctive physical development characterized by a small stature and stocky build. Men averaged 1.57 m and women averaged 1.45 m. Because of the high altitudes, they had unique lung developments with almost one third greater capacity than other humans. The Incas had slower heart rates, blood volume of about 2 litres more than other humans, and double the amount of haemoglobin which transfers oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body.

Archaeologists have found traces of permanent habitation as high as 5,300 m above sea level in the temperate zone of the high altiplano. While the Conquistadors may have been a little taller, the Inca surely had the advantage of coping with the extraordinary altitude. It seems that civilizations in this area before the Inca have left no written record, and therefore the Inca seem to appear from nowhere, but the Inca were a product of the past. They borrowed architecture, ceramics, and their empire-state government from previous cultures.

When Pizarro returned to Peru in 1532, a war of the two brothers between Huayna Capac’s sons and unrest among newly conquered territories, and perhaps more importantly, smallpox, which had spread from Central America, had considerably weakened the empire. The Spanish horsemen, fully armoured, had great technological superiority over the Inca forces. The traditional mode of battle in the Andes was a kind of siege warfare where large numbers of draftees were sent to overwhelm opponents.

Architecture was by far the most important of the Inca arts, with textiles reflecting motifs that were at their height in architecture. The main example is the capital city of Cusco. The site of Machu Picchu was constructed by Inca engineers. The stone temples constructed by the Inca used a mortar-less construction that fit together so well that a knife could not be fitted through the stonework. After the fall of the Inca Empire many aspects of Inca culture were systematically destroyed, including their sophisticated farming system, known as the ‘vertical archipelago’ model of agriculture. Spanish colonial officials used the Inca labour system for colonial aims, sometimes brutally. One member of each family was forced to work in the gold and silver mines, the foremost of which was the titanic silver mine at Potosí. When a family member died, which would usually happen within a year or two, the family would be required to send a replacement.

The effects of smallpox on the Inca empire were even more devastating. Beginning in Colombia, smallpox spread rapidly before the Spanish invaders first arrived. The spread was probably aided by the efficient Inca road system. Within a few years smallpox claimed between 60% and 90% of the Inca population, with other waves of European disease weakening them further. Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618 – all ravaged the remains of Inca culture.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cenote

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonampak

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Codex

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukulkan

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Empire

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moctezuma_II

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuauhtémoc

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pizarro

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire

Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile, populous and fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to the east. Two great empires now dominated the world, this new Roman Empire and the renascent Empire of China. Rome extended its power to the Euphrates, but it was never able to get past that boundary. It was too remote. Beyond the Euphrates the former Persian and Indian dominions of the Seleucids fell under a number of new masters.

The Tang dynasty was followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Historians generally regard the Tang as a high point in Chinese civilization, and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty. The Tang capital at Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) was the most populous city in the world in its day.

The Lǐ family (李) founded the dynasty, seizing power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire. In censuses of the 7th and 8th centuries, records estimated the population at about 50 million people. Yet, even when the central government was breaking down and unable to compile an accurate census of the population in the 9th century, it is estimated that the population had grown by then to about 80 million people.  With its large population base, the dynasty was able to raise professional and conscripted armies of hundreds of thousands of troops to contend with nomadic powers in dominating Inner Asia and the lucrative trade-routes along the Silk Road. Various kingdoms and states paid tribute to the Tang court, while the Tang also conquered or subdued several regions which it indirectly controlled through a protectorate system. Besides political hegemony, the Tang also exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighboring East Asian states such as those in Japan and Korea.

Chinese culture flourished and further matured during the Tang era; it is traditionally considered the greatest age for Chinese poetry. Two of China’s most famous poets, Li Bai and Du Fu, belonged to this age, as did many famous painters such as Han Gan, Zhang Xuan, and Zhou Fang. Scholars of this period compiled a rich variety of historical literature, as well as encyclopedias and geographical works. Many notable innovations occurred under the Tang, including the development of woodblock printing. Buddhism became a major influence in Chinese culture, with native Chinese sects gaining prominence. However, in the 840s the Emperor Wuzong of Tang persecuted Buddhism, which subsequently declined in influence.

China, now under the Han dynasty, extended its power across Tibet and over the high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But there, too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far. China at this time was the greatest, best organized and most civilized political system in the world. It was superior in area and population to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It was possible then for these two vast systems to flourish in the same world at the same time in almost complete ignorance of each other. The means of communication both by sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and organized for them to come to a direct clash. Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way, and their influence upon the fate of the regions that lay between them, upon central Asia and India, was profound.

A certain amount of trade trickled through, by camel caravans across Persia, for  example, and by coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea. Roman troops under Pompey followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and marched up the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a Chinese expeditionary force under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and sent emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many centuries were still to pass before definite knowledge and direct intercourse were to link the great parallel worlds of Europe and Eastern Asia.

To the north of both these great empires were barbaric wildernesses. What is now Germany was largely forest lands; the forests extended far into Russia and made a home for the gigantic aurochs, a bull of almost elephantine size.

 

Then to the north of the great mountain masses of Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and then forests and frozen lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of Asia was the great triangle of Manchuria. Large parts of these regions, stretching between South Russia and Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions of exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly in the course of a few centuries They are lands treacherous to man.

The Mongol Empire emerged from the unification of Mongol and Turkic tribes in modern day Mongolia, and grew through invasions, after Genghis Khan had been proclaimed ruler of all Mongols in 1206. At its greatest extent it stretched from the Danube to the sea of Japan and from the Arctic to Cambodia, covering 22% of the Earth’s total land area, and held sway over a population of over 100 million people, the largest contiguous land empire in history.

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Historians regard the Mongol raids and invasions as some of the deadliest conflicts in human history.

“One empire in particular exceeded any that had gone before, and crossed from Asia into Europe in an orgy of violence and destruction. The Mongols brought terror to Europe on a scale not seen again until the twentieth century.”

The Mongolian plateau was occupied mainly by five powerful tribal confederations: the Jin Dynasty rulers, known as the Golden Kings, successfully resisted the Mongol confederation, by following a policy of divide and rule, encouraging disputes among the tribes, especially between the Tatars and Mongols. There was long-standing enmity between the two because Mongol nomads wanted land to graze while the Chinese feudal lords wanted to tax them, imposing forced manual labor upon their nomadic way of life. Living on the Central Asian steppes was complicated by cold temperatures that resulted in large number of livestock being lost during the winter, which made subsistence difficult, while nomads were not allowed emergency shelter in feudal lord controlled lands. The nomads on the steppes did not practice farming and as a result they were highly dependent on seasonal and weather changes. For instance, the average winter temperature in Mongolia can be −30 °C , which usually freezes the soil. The southern area of Gobi is uninhabitable for long durations because it is an extremely inhospitable desert. During the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13^th century, the usually cold, parched steppes of central Asia enjoyed their mildest, wettest conditions in more than a millennium. It is thought that as a result, a rapid increase in the number of war horses and other livestock significantly enhanced Mongol military strength.

In 1206, Temujin was crowned at a Kurultai [general assembly], assuming the title of “Genghis Khan”, marking the start of the Mongol Empire. Temüjin grew up observing the tough political climate of Mongolia, which included tribal warfare, thievery, raids, corruption, and continual acts of revenge between the various confederations, compounded by interference from Chinese dynasties to the south. Temüjin’s mother taught him about the unstable political climate of Mongolia, especially the need for alliances. Temüjin rewarded those who had been loyal to him and placed them in high positions, placing them as heads of army units and households, even though many of his allies had been from very low rank clans.

He proclaimed new laws of the empire and codified everything related to the everyday life and political affairs of the nomads. He forbade the selling of women, theft of other’s property, fighting between the Mongols, and the hunting of animals during the breeding season. As an incentive for absolute obedience and following his rule of law, the Yassa code, Temüjin promised civilians and soldiers wealth from future possible war spoils. As he defeated rival tribes, he did not drive away enemy soldiers. Instead, he took the conquered tribe under his protection and integrated its members into his own tribe. He would even have his mother adopt orphans, bringing them into his family. These political innovations inspired great loyalty among the conquered people, making Temüjin stronger with each victory.

The success of Mongol tactics hinged on fear: to induce capitulation amongst enemy populations. Although perceived as being bloodthirsty, the strategy of “surrender or die” recognized that conquest by capitulation was more desirable than being forced to continually expend soldiers, food, and money to fight every army and sack every town and city along the campaign’s route. The Mongols frequently faced states with armies and resources greater than their own. In the beginning, Temüjin started off with a band of youths and some women, then he had troops of 20,000 initially facing city states of the Jin domain with a 2 million strong army each city being populated with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and simply invading everyone was out of the question. Furthermore, a supine nation was more desirable than a sacked one.

The linchpin of Mongol success was the widespread perception amongst their enemies that they were facing an insurmountable juggernaut that could only be placated by surrender. The Mongols may have counted on reports of horrifying massacres and torture to terrify their foes. The goal was to convince those under siege that the costs of surrendering were not enough to risk an un-winnable war, given the guarantee of complete annihilation if they lost. As Mongol conquest spread, this form of psychological warfare proved effective at suppressing resistance. It was perceived that a single act of resistance would bring the entire Mongol army down on a town to obliterate its occupants.

Ancient sources described Genghis Khan’s conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in certain geographical regions, causing great demographic changes in Asia. According to an Iranian historian, the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv, more than a million in Nishapur and the total population of Persia may have dropped by as much as 90% as a result of mass extermination and famine. China reportedly suffered a drastic decline in population during the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reported approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.

Some historians argue that the Bubonic Plague, spread by the Mongols, was the main factor behind the demographic decline during this period. The Mongols practiced biological warfare by catapulting diseased cadavers into the cities they besieged. It is believed that fleas remaining on the bodies of the cadavers may have acted as vectors to spread the bubonic plague. About half the population of Russia may have died during the Mongol invasion of Rus. Historians estimate as much as half of Hungary’s population of two million were victims of the Mongol invasion of Europe. Mongol campaigns caused extensive destruction; the cities of Herat, Kiev, Baghdad, Nishapur, Vladimir and Samarkand suffered serious devastation by the Mongol armies. For example, in the Siege of Baghdad (1258) libraries, books, literature, and hospitals were burned: some of the books were thrown into the river, in quantities sufficient to “turn the Euphrates black with ink for several days”. The Mongols’ destruction of the irrigation systems of Iran and Iraq turned back centuries of effort to improving agriculture and water supply in these regions. The loss of available food as a result may have led to the death of more people from starvation in this area than actual battle. Mongols were known to burn farmland to starve the populace. Other tactics included diverting rivers into and from cities and towns, and catapulting diseased corpses over city walls to infect the population.

Genghis Khan died on August 18, 1227, and according to Mongol tradition, was buried in a secret location; by then the Mongol Empire ruled from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea, an empire twice the size of the Roman Empire and Muslim Caliphate. Genghis named his third son, the charismatic Ögedei, as his heir. Among his first actions, Ögedei sent troops to subjugate the Bashkirs, Bulgars, and other nations in the Kipchak  controlled steppes In the east, as the empire grew, Ögedei established a Mongol capital at Karakorum in north-western Mongolia.

The Golden Horde comprised the north-western sector of the Mongol Empire also known as the Kipchak Khanate. The Horde’s military power peaked during the reign of Uzbeg (1312–41), who adopted Islam. Its territory at its peak included most of Eastern Europe from the Urals to the bank of the Danube River, Giovanni Carpini, the Pope’s envoy to the Great Khan, traveled through Kiev and wrote:

….. the Mongols attacked Russia, where they made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia and put the inhabitants to death. Kiev had been a thickly populated town, but now it was reduced almost to nothing, for there are scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery.

The advance into Europe continued with Mongol invasions of Poland and Hungary. When the western flank of the Mongols plundered Polish cities, a European alliance between the Poles, the Moravians, and the Christian military orders of the Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights and the Templars assembled sufficient forces to halt, although briefly, the Mongol advance at Legnica. After their victories over European Knights, Mongol armies quickly advanced across Bohemia, Serbia, Babenberg Austria and into the Holy Roman Empire.

Before they could continue into Vienna and Albania, news of Ögedei’s death brought a halt to the invasion. As was customary in Mongol military tradition, all princes of Genghis’s line had to attend the kurultai to elect a successor and the Mongol army withdrew from Central Europe the next year. When a kurultai was held on July 1, 1251, the assembled throng proclaimed Möngke Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. This marked a major shift in the leadership of the empire, transferring power from the descendants of Genghis’s son Ögedei to the descendants of his other son Tolui. Möngke eliminated the estates of the Ögedei family and shared the western part of the empire with his allies. After a bloody purge, Möngke ordered an amnesty for his opponents, but thereafter the power of the throne remained firmly with the descendants of Tolui.

Möngke was tolerant of other religions leading to the building of Buddhist monasteries, mosques, and Christian churches in the Mongol capital Karakorum.

One famous example was a silver tree with pipes that dispensed various drinks, topped by a triumphant angel, crafted by Guillaume Boucher, a Parisian goldsmith. Möngke also ordered an empire-wide census in 1252 that took 6 years to complete, including Novgorod in the far northwest of Russia. At the kurultai in Karakorum in 1258 he approved new invasions of the Middle East and south China. The center of the Islamic Empire at the time was Baghdad, which had held power for 500 years. When its caliph refused to submit, Baghdad was besieged and captured in 1258, an event considered as one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Islam, and sometimes compared to the rupture of the Kaaba.

With the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate Hulagu [Möngke’s brother] had an open route to Syria and moved against the other powers in the region. In 1260 Mongol forces combined with those of their Christian vassals in the region, including the army of Armenia and the Franks of Antioch. This force conquered Muslim Syria, a domain of the Ayyubid dynasty. They took the city of Aleppo and, under the Christian general Kitbuqa, took Damascus. A Christian Mass was celebrated in the Grand Mosque of the Umayyads, and numerous mosques were profaned.

The Umayyad Mosque, located in the old city of Damascus, is one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world. It is considered by some Muslims to be the fourth-holiest place in Islam. After the Arab conquest of Damascus in 634, the mosque was built on the site of a Christian basilica dedicated to John the Baptist (Yahya), honoured as a prophet by Christians and Muslims alike. A legend dating to the 6^th century holds that the building contains the head of John the Baptist. The mosque is also believed by Muslims to be the place where Jesus (Isa) will return at the End of Days. The tomb of Saladin adjoins the north wall. This is considered holy by the Muslims because Muhammad recited passages from the Quran at this site.

The Mamluks advanced from Egypt and engaged the Mongol army just north of Galilee, at the Battle of Ain Jalut. The Mongols were defeated, and this pivotal battle marked the western limit for Mongol expansion. In a separate part of the empire, another brother of Hulagu and Möngke, Kublai Khan, continued his advance into the area of China near the Yangtze River seeking the final conquest of the Song Dynasty.

In 1271 Kublai renamed the regime in China as the Yuan Dynasty and sought to sinicize his image as Emperor of China to win the control of the Chinese people. Kublai moved his headquarters to Dadu, [the modern city of Beijing]. Eventually successful in their campaigns against China, the Mongols became the first non-Chinese to conquer all of China. Nearly a century of conquest and civil war was followed by relative stability, international trade and cultural exchanges flourished between Asia and Europe. Patterns of Yuan royal textiles could be found on the opposite side of the empire adorning Armenian decorations; trees and vegetables were transplanted across the empire; and technological innovations spread from Mongol dominions towards the West

The original foundation of the military organisation was an extension of the nomadic lifestyle of the Mongols. Other elements were invented by Genghis Khan, his generals, and his successors. Technologies useful to attack fortifications were adapted from other cultures, and foreign technical experts integrated into the command structures. For the larger part of the 13^th century, the Mongols lost only a few battles and in many cases, won against significantly larger opposing armies. Their first defeat in the West came in 1223 at the hands of the Volga Bulgars. The second one was at the Battle of Ain Jalut against the first army which had been specifically trained to use their own tactics against them.

As the power of the Mongols declined, chaos erupted throughout the empire as non-Mongol leaders expanded their own influence. The Golden Horde lost all of its western dominions [including modern Belarus and Ukraine] to Poland and Lithuania and princes in the Chagatai Khanate warred with each other so that it disintegrated.  Each Mongol soldier typically maintained 3 or 4 horses, changing horses allowed them to travel at high speed for days without stopping or wearing out the animals. Their ability to live off the land, and in extreme situations off their animals [mare’s milk especially], made their armies far less dependent on the traditional logistical apparatus of agrarian armies. In some cases, as during the invasion of Hungary, they covered up to 160 km per day, which was unheard of by other armies of the time.

A warrior relied on his herd to provide him with staple foods of milk and meat; hide for bowstrings, shoes, and armor; dried dung to be used as fuel for his fire; hair for rope, battle standards, musical instruments and helmet decorations; milk also used for shamanic ceremonies to ensure victory; and for hunting and entertainment that often served as military training. If he died in battle, a horse would sometimes be sacrificed with him to provide a mount for the afterlife. All horses were equipped with stirrups. This technical advantage made it easier for the Mongol archers to turn their upper body, and shoot in all directions, including backwards.

 The Great Wall of China.

In 1368 Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang ousted the Mongol led Yuan dynasty from China to inaugurate the Ming dynasty. In the early years of his reign Hongwu’s border policy established mobile armies along the northern frontier guarded the safety of China. The inner line was the forerunner to the Ming Great Wall. Despite withdrawal from the steppe, the Ming military remained in a strong position until the Tumu Crisis where over half of the campaigning Chinese army perished and the Mongols captured the Zhengtong Emperor.

This military debacle shattered the Chinese military might that given pause to the Mongols since the beginning of the dynasty, and the Ming were on the defensive from this point on. The deterioration of the military position in the steppe gave rise to nomadic raids into Ming territory, including the crucial Ordos region. Over the late 15^th and 16^th centuries, the choice was between an offensive strategy or concede the steppe to the nomads. It was calculated that the wall project would not be as costly as the offensive strategy, and that it would be a temporary measure that would allow the Ming to restore its military and economic strength. The court and emperor approved the plan, and completed the project in 1474. This wall stretched from Ningxia province to Shaanxi, a total of more than 2000 li [about 1100 kilometers]. This defense system proved its initial worth in 1482, when a large group of Mongol raiders were trapped within the double lines of fortifications and suffered a defeat by the Ming generals.

With the Ordos now adequately fortified, the Mongols avoided its walls by riding east to invade Datong and Xuanfu two major garrisons guarding the corridor to Beijing where no walls had been built. From 1544 to 1549, a defensive building program took place on a scale unprecedented in Chinese history. Firearms and artillery were first mounted on the walls and towers around this time, for both defense and signaling purposes. At its height, the Xuan–Da portion of the Great Wall totaled about 850 kilometers.

Image Source.

In 1550, having once more been refused a request for trade, Altan Khan circled around Weng Wanda’s wall to the northeast of Beijing, passed through the defenses and raided the suburbs. The Ming court watched the suburbs burn as they waited for reinforcements to drive the invaders out. The raid took more than 60,000 lives and an additional 40,000 prisoners. Starting in 1577, the Ming became committed to closing all gaps along the frontier around Beijing whilst strengthening the walls. As a result, the earthen defenses around Beijing were torn down and replaced with stone bricks and sanhetu an early sort of concrete made of lime, clay tiles, and sand. Areas of difficult terrain once considered impassable were also walled off, leading to the well-known vistas of a stone-faced Great Wall snaking over dramatic landscapes that tourists still see today.

Increasingly isolated from their subjects, the Mongols lost most of China to Ming forces and fled to their homeland Mongolia. After the overthrow of the Yuan Dynasty, the Golden Horde lost touch with Mongolia and China, while the two main parts of the Chagatai Khanate were defeated by Timur.

Tamerlane, one of history’s most brutal butchers, died on February 18th, 1405. In January the Scourge of God caught a cold. One of history’s most brutal butchers, now in his seventies, had set out with an army 200,000 strong from Samarqand, his capital, to invade the Chinese Empire, 3,000 miles away. It was a freezing cold winter, with the country deep in snow, the rivers frozen solid and the army halted in Kazakhstan. The doctors’ efforts to cure their master, including packing him in ice, failed and it became clear that he was dying. The Chinese expedition was abandoned and the body was taken back to Samarqand to be interred beneath the dome of the Gur Amir mausoleum in a steel coffin under a slab of black jade six feet long, which was then the largest piece of the stone in the world.

An inscription records:

‘This is the resting place of the illustrious and merciful monarch, the most great Sultan, the most mighty warrior, Lord Timur, Conqueror of the World.’

In Europe the name Timur iLeng, Timur the Lame, became Tamerlane. Lame he was, mighty he was, merciful he was not; the millions he slaughtered – ‘buried alive, cemented into walls, massacred on the battlefield, sliced in two at the waist, trampled to death by horses, beheaded, hanged’ – would have had a different opinion. Of Mongol ancestry from what is now Uzbekistan, he began as a sheep-rustler and bandit, and was injured in a skirmish which left him lame in his right leg and unable to raise his right arm. Building up a force of horsemen, Timur took service under an invading Mongol chieftain, seized Samarqand, took a wife descended from Genghis Khan and went on to an astonishing career of conquest until he ruled from Damascus to Delhi. Efficiently organised armies under his horse-tail standard covered immense distances. He destroyed the Golden Horde, conquered Persia and Mesopotamia, invaded Russia, Georgia, India, Syria and Turkey. At Baghdad he had 90,000 of the inhabitants beheaded so that he could build towers with their skulls. At Sivas in Turkey, where he promised no bloodshed in return for surrender, he had 3,000 prisoners buried alive and pointed out that he had kept to the letter of his oath.

His atrocities were intended to strike terror into the hearts of opponents, and cities which surrendered promptly were sometimes spared a sack. He was a Muslim and he justified his campaigns against Christians and Hindus as spreading the true faith, while when he attacked and slaughtered fellow-Muslims, as he very frequently did, they were always described as ‘bad Muslims’. Timur’s armies were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which were laid waste by his campaigns. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population. Nonetheless, Timur was a patron of art and learning and he turned Samarqand into an exquisitely beautiful city. After his Indian campaign in 1399 ordered the construction of Bibi-Khanym Mosque in his capital. The mosque was built using precious stones captured during his conquest of India; 90 captured elephants were employed to carry the loot. The mosque fell into disuse and crumbled to ruins over the centuries. Its demise was hastened because builders pushed the construction techniques of the time to the very limit and it eventually collapsed in 1897 in an earthquake.

The Mongols had long moved with the rhythms of the “desert pump”, the desert expanding with heat and drought, then contracting as cooler rains made way for resurgent vegetation. Based on the best records available; tree-ring sequences read from preserved Siberian pines; higher temperatures and drought on the Mongol’s home steppes, all coincided with the string of great victories that established Genghis Khan’s magnificent empire. Still thirsting for more fertile land, the Mongols made it to Europe in 1241 and defeated Henry the Bearded in Silesia. Two factors, one human and one climatic, intervened at this moment. Genghis’s successor as Great Khan, his son Ögötai, died. Batu Khan, who sought the office of Great Khan himself, abandoned his plans to invade Europe and returned to the steppes to press his claim to the throne. When he got there, he found vastly improved grazing conditions brought on by cooler, wetter weather. The new productivity of the land having muted Batu’s incentive to drive west, Europe remained barely touched by the Mongol Empire.

Gur-e Amir is Persian for “Tomb of the King”. This architectural complex with its azure dome contains the tombs of Tamerlane, his sons and grandsons Ulugh Beg and Muhammad Sultan. Also honored with a place in the tomb is Timur’s teacher Sayyid Baraka. Ulugh Beg was an astronomer, mathematician and sultan. He was also notable for his work in astronomy related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry. He built the great Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarkand between 1424 and 1429, considered by scholars to have been one of the finest observatories in the Islamic world at the time and the largest in Central Asia. He also built the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (1417–1420) in Samarkand and Bukhara, transforming the cities into cultural centers of learning in Central Asia.

It is recorded that Haroun al Raschid sent ambassadors from Baghdad with a splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy Roman Empire by the ears as to which was the proper protector of the Christians in Jerusalem. These presents remind us that while Europe in the 9th century was still a disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a great Arab Empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything Europe could show. Here literature and science still lived; the arts flourished, and the mind of man could move without fear or superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa where the Saracen dominions were falling into political confusion there was a vigorous intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed by these Jews and Arabs during these centuries of European darkness. They guarded the neglected seeds of science and philosophy.

Not strictly a single entity, it was a multi-ethnic complex of territories in central Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806. It is important to the development of medieval history because without a military organization and without a grand strategy, the Carolingians would not have successfully become kings of the Franks, and legitimized by the bishop of Rome. Furthermore, it was ultimately because of their efforts and infrastructure that Charlemagne was able to become such a powerful king and be crowned Emperor of the Romans in 800 A.D. Without the efforts of his predecessors, he would not have been as successful as he was and the revival of the Roman Empire in the West would likely to have not occurred. The largest territory of the empire after 962 was the Kingdom of Germany, though it included the Kingdoms of Bohemia, Burgundy and Italy as well as numerous other territories. Under the Carolingians, the Frankish kingdom spread to encompass an area including most of Western Europe; the division of the kingdom formed the basis for modern France and Germany. The religious, political, and artistic evolutions originating from a centrally positioned Francia made a defining imprint on the whole of Europe. On Xmas day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Emperor, reviving the title in Western Europe after more than three centuries. The title continued in the Carolingian family a continuous existence of the empire for over eight centuries.

The precise term Holy Roman Empire was not used until the 13^th century, but the concept that he held supreme power inherited from the emperors of Rome was fundamental to the prestige of the emperor. The empire never achieved the extent of political unification formed in France, evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains.

In 799, Pope Leo III had been mistreated by the Romans, who tried to put out his eyes and tear out his tongue. Leo escaped and fled to Charlemagne, asking him to intervene in Rome and restore him. Charlemagne agreed, travelled to Rome, and held a council on 1 December. At Mass as Charlemagne knelt at the altar to pray, the Pope crowned him “Emperor of the Romans” in Saint Peter’s Basilica. In so doing, the Pope was effectively nullifying the legitimacy of Empress Irene of Constantinople. Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus to Constantine VI, had the effect of setting up two separate [and often opposing] Empires and two separate claims to imperial authority.

Irene was related to a noble Greek family and, although she was an orphan, her uncle was possibly general of Hellas at the end of the 8th century. She was brought to Constantinople by Emperor Constantine V and was married to his son Leo IV . Although she appears to have come from a noble family, there is no clear reason why she would have been chosen as Leo’s bride, leading to speculation that she was selected in a bride-show, in which eligible young women were paraded before the bridegroom until one was finally selected. Irene gave birth to a son, the future Constantine VI and when her father-in-law died in r 775, her husband succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty-five.  When Leo died in 780, Irene became regent for their nine-year-old son Constantine. Irene was almost immediately confronted with a conspiracy that tried to raise  the half-brother of Leo IV, to the throne. To overcome this challenge, she had Nikephoros and his co-conspirators ordained as priests, a status which disqualified them from ruling.

As Constantine approached maturity he began to grow restless under her autocratic sway. An attempt to free himself by force was met and crushed by the Empress, who demanded that the oath of fidelity should thenceforward be taken in her name alone. The discontent which this occasioned swelled in 790 into open resistance, and the soldiers, headed by the army of the Armeniacs, formally proclaimed Constantine VI as the sole ruler. A hollow semblance of friendship was maintained between Constantine and Irene, but the rival factions remained, and in 797 Irene, by cunning intrigues with the bishops and courtiers, organized a conspiracy on her own behalf. Constantine fled for aid to the provinces, but participants in the plot seized him. Constantine was carried back to the palace at Constantinople where his eyes were gouged out, and he died from his wounds several days later. A solar eclipse and darkness lasting 17 days were attributed to the horror of Heaven. Irene’s unprecedented position as an Empress ruling in her own right was emphasized by the coincidental rise of the Carolingian Empire in Western Europe, which rivaled Irene’s Byzantium in size and power. In 802 the patricians conspired against her and Irene was exiled to Lesbos and forced to support herself by spinning wool. She died the following year.

For centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole. What is known, from the Byzantine chronicles is that Charlemagne’s reaction to his coronation was to take the initial steps toward securing the throne by sending envoys of marriage to Irene, and that Irene reacted somewhat favourably to them.  In 813, Charlemagne called Louis the Pious, king of Aquitaine, his only surviving legitimate son, to his court. There he crowned Louis as co-emperor and sent him back to Aquitaine. He then spent the autumn hunting before returning to Aachen. He was buried the same day as his death, in January 814, in Aachen Cathedral. In 1165, Frederick I re-opened the tomb again and placed the emperor in a sarcophagus beneath the floor of the cathedral. Fifty years later Frederick II re-interred him in a casket made of gold and silver.

If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and establish one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it was vitally necessary that it should have a strong, steady and continuous direction. In those great days of its opportunity it needed before all things, that the Popes when they took office should be able men in the prime of life, that each should have his successor designate with whom he could discuss the policy of the church, and that the forms and processes of election should be clear, definite, unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained. It was not even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very great papal statesman Hildebrand [Pope Gregory VII, ] did much to regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman cardinals and he reduced the Emperor’s share to a formula of assent conceded to him by the church, but he made no provision for a successor designate and he left it possible for the disputes of the cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in some cases it was kept vacant, for a year or more.

The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in the whole history of the papacy up to the 16th century. From quite early times onward there were disputed elections and two or more men each claiming to be Pope. The church would then be subjected to the indignity of going to the Emperor or some other outside arbiter to settle the dispute. And the career of everyone of the great Popes ended in a note of interrogation. At his death the church might be left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated body. Or he might be replaced by some old rival eager only to discredit and undo his work. Or some enfeebled old man tottering on the brink of the grave might succeed him.

It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organization should attract the interference of the various German princes, the French King, and the Norman and French Kings who ruled in England; that they should all try to influence the elections, and have a Pope in their own interest established in the Lateran Palace at Rome. And the more powerful and important the Pope became in European affairs, the more urgent did these interventions become. Under the circumstances it is no great wonder that many of the Popes were weak and futile. The astonishing thing is that many of them were able and courageous men. One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of this great period was Innocent III who was so fortunate as to become Pope before he was thirty eight.

He and his successors were pitted against an even more interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II; Stupor mundi he was called, the Wonder of the World. The struggle of this monarch against Rome is a turning place in history. In the end Rome defeated him and destroyed his dynasty, but he left the prestige of the church and Pope so badly wounded that its wounds festered and led to its decay.

Otto and his son and grandsons (Otto II and Otto III) regarded the imperial crown as a mandate to control the papacy. They dismissed popes at their will and installed replacements more to their liking. This power, together with territories covering much of central Europe, gave the German empire and the imperial title great prestige in the late 10^th century. The struggle for dominance between emperor and pope came to a head in two successive reigns, of the emperors Henry III and Henry IV, in the 11^th century.

In 1046 Henry III deposed three rival popes.

Benedict IX was not a good pope. By all accounts he was immoral and irresponsible, living a dissolute life. In 1044, a rival family overthrew Benedict and installed Sylvester III. Benedict’s faction, however, regrouped and re-took the city from Sylvester. There were now two papal claimants. Benedict’s uncle, Gratian, was so distressed by the scandal that he tried to persuade Benedict to step down. Apparently, the only form of persuasion that Benedict responded to was money, and so Gratian “bought” the papacy from him, becoming Pope Gregory VI. A short time later, Benedict decided that this sale had been a mistake and reclaimed his throne. Now there were three claimants. By this time the power of the Western Empire, headed by Henry III, had re-established itself in the North and was in the process of major secular and ecclesiastical reforms. Outraged by the affairs in Rome, Henry intervened by calling a council. The council declared Benedict IX and Sylvester III deposed, while Gregory VI resigned on account of his simoniacal [simony – the selling of clerical posts], election. Pope Clement II, a favourite of the emperor, was then elevated to the papacy.

Over the next ten years he personally selected four of the next five pontiffs. But after his death these abuses of the system caused Pope Nicholas II, elected in 1058, to start a process of reform which restricts the choice of a new pope to a conclave of cardinals, thus ruling out any direct lay influence. Nicholas took two further political steps, unusual at this period, but which later became commonplace for the medieval papacy, he granted land, already occupied, to recipients of his own choice; and involved those recipients in a feudal relationship with the papacy, or the Holy See, as the feudal lord. In 1061 the assembled bishops of Germany, the emperor’s own faction, declared all the decrees of this pope null and void. Battle was joined. This ushered a long period of conflict between the emperors and the Roman popes. Seven out of the next ten popes faced antipopes. This conflict ended with the victory of the reform party. Not only did the papacy retain control of itself; it asserted control over the spiritual dimensions of the clergy throughout the Church, including the bishops.This was crucial to extending the reform movement out of Rome and throughout the Church, which became the program for the next 160 years.

From 1140 to about 1378, the Roman Church was constructed as a centralized power, headed by the pope, and with a hand in affairs throughout Europe. The pope had universal jurisdiction both in theory and in practice; a vast judicial system was constructed, with the papal curia as the court of last appeal, and with an intricate legal code of statute and procedure, known as canon law, that would become the model for all modern legal systems.

Apostolic power was interwoven into the governing systems of local churches and princes, penetrating all aspects of the social life of Europe. Christendom wide institutions of remarkable scale, like the Crusades and the inquisitions against heresy, relied on apostolic power and were directed by the papacy. During this period, the Roman Church became not just the spiritual but the legal and institutional head of Christendom. The papacy was an extremely powerful institution, engaged directly in international politics with such powerful personalities as King Philip the Fair of France  [see the destruction of the Knights Templar]  and King Edward I [Longshanks] of England.

It also ran a massive ecclesiastical structure that was itself full of factions and political difficulties. The Western Schism began when the French cardinals, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI was invalid, elected Clement VII as Pope, led to three rival lines of claimants to the papacy: the Roman line, the Avignon line [Clement VII took up residence in Avignon, France], and the Pisan line. The Pisan line was named after the town of Pisa, Italy, where the council elected Alexander V as a third claimant. To end the schism, in May 1415, the Council of Constance deposed John XXIII of the Pisan line. Pope Gregory XII of the Roman line resigned. The scandal of the Western Schism created anti-papal sentiment and fed into the Protestant Reformation at the turn of the 16^th century.

St. Peter’s Basilica.

Designed principally by Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, Carlo Maderno and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, St. Peter’s is the most renowned work of Renaissance architecture and remains one of the largest churches in the world. By Catholic tradition, the basilica is the burial site of its namesake Saint Peter, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus and, also according to tradition, the first Pope and Bishop of Rome. Tradition and strong historical evidence hold that Saint Peter’s tomb is directly below the altar of the basilica. For this reason, many Popes have been interred at St. Peter’s since the Early Christian period. There has been a church on this site since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and Charlemagne was crowned by Leo III in 800. By the end of the 15^th century, having been neglected during the period of the Avignon Papacy, the old basilica was in bad repair. Pope Nicholas V commissioned work on the old building from Alberti and Rossellino who also designed a plan for an entirely new basilica. Included was the demolition of the Colosseum and by the time of his death, 2,522 cartloads of stone had been transported for use in the new building. The foundations were completed for a new transept and choir to form a domed Latin cross with the preserved nave and side aisles of the old basilica.

One method employed to finance the building was the granting of indulgences in return for contributions. A major promoter of this method of fund-raising was Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, who had to clear debts owed to the Roman Curia by contributing to the rebuilding program. To facilitate this, he appointed the German Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel, whose salesmanship provoked a scandal. A German Augustinian priest, Martin Luther, wrote to Archbishop Albrecht arguing against this “selling of indulgences”. He also included his “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, which came to be known as The 95 Theses. This became a factor in starting the Reformation, the birth of Protestantism.

Era of Teutonic Prussia

Originally, the Teutonic Order created the Estate to appease the local citizens, but over time the relations between the Order and the Estates grew strained, as the Order of Knights treated the local population with contempt. Different Prussian holders of the privilege of coinage [among them the Order and some cities], actually committed to issue a Prussian currency of standard quality, because the currency had been debased  and circulation expanded in order to finance the wars between Poland and Teutonic Prussia. However, this expansion disturbed the equilibrium of coins circulated by inflating all other prices.

As Prussia became increasingly tied economically and politically with Poland, and the wars became more and more devastating to the borderlands, and as the policies and attitude of the King of Poland were more liberal towards the Prussian burghers and nobility than that of the Order, the rift between the Teutonic Knights and their subjects widened. At first, the estates opposed the Order passively, by denying requests for additional taxes and support in Order wars with Poland; by the 1440’s Prussian estates acted openly in defiance of the Teutonic Order, rebelling against the knights and siding with Poland militarily.

Brandenburg and Prussia: 1657 – 1701

Since 1525 part of Prussia, on the Baltic, was a hereditary duchy belonging to the Hohenzollern family, held as a fief of the Polish crown. In 1618 the Hohenzollern line died out and the duchy passed to a Hohenzollern cousin, the elector of Brandenburg. On the coast between Brandenburg and the elector’s new possession of ducal Prussia there lay another part of Prussia known as royal Prussia, it included the valuable harbor of Gdansk. Royal Prussia is fully integrated into the Polish kingdom. Ducal Prussia, by contrast, is largely German as a result of German settlers being brought there in the 13th century to till the soil and to control the pagan Prussians. This ethnic division, with a Polish region between two German ones, is one of the more disastrous accidents of history.

The isolation of the Germans in ducal Prussia was irrelevant while Europe still had a patchwork of allegiances, but by the 17th century there was a trend towards independent states. Inevitably political pressure built up between Brandenburg and ducal Prussia particularly after Brandenburg acquired another long stretch of Baltic coast [eastern Pomerania] in 1648. The elector Frederick William of Brandenburg succeeded, through a well judged blend of warfare and diplomacy, in severing the feudal link between his duchy and the Polish kingdom. Poland was forced to concede its loss of ducal Prussia in 1657 and the international community recognized Prussia as an independent duchy. This achievement enabled Frederick William’s son, Frederick III to achieve the crucial next step.

In 1700 the Austrian emperor, Leopold I, needed Frederick’s assistance in the War of the Spanish Succession. The sweetener is a significant new title. Apart from the Habsburg emperors’ kingdom of Bohemia, there were no German kings within the Holy Roman empire. Using the legal nicety that Prussia was outside the empire, Leopold allowed Frederick to call himself the “king in Prussia”. The new king crowned himself, as Frederick I of the Prussian dynasty, in Königsberg in 1701.

The Prussian machine: 1701 – 1740

The new king in Prussia gained growing prestige and power during the 18th century from the reform of the administration and the army. Frederick William’s established a permanent system of taxation, thus removing from the estates general their main source of power; and spent a large slice of the resulting revenue on a standing army. This combination of an absolute monarch with a large and efficient army became characteristic of Prussia. By the time of the Great Elector’s grandson, the Prussian army amounted to 80,000 men, consisting of 4% of the population. The system devised for keeping this many men under arms made it possible to maintain a highly trained citizen army without damage to the economy. Half the army is made up of foreign mercenaries. The other half is a shifting population of peasants from Brandenburg and Prussia. Each peasant is drafted into the army as a young man, but after completion of his training he went home to his everyday work for ten months of each year. Nobles served their turn in the army too, but the mercantile classes were exempt. By means of a tightly controlled and lean bureaucracy, Frederick William I managed to combine this level of mobilization with healthy government finances. In 1740 he bequeathed to his son, Frederick II, a thriving economy, a large cash surplus and Europe’s best trained army. Better known as Frederick the Great, the son used these advantages to immediate effect beginning the real expansion of Prussian influence in both Germany and Europe.

The philosopher king: 1740

Frederick, at the age of eighteen, laid plans with the help of a friend to escape from his father for a visit to England. The scheme was discovered and the prince is treated as a deserter. He was brought before a court martial and imprisoned in a fortress, where he was compelled to watch the execution of his friend. However, when Frederick II inherited the throne of Prussia, at the age of twenty eight, he was an exceptionally cultured young man. For four years he conducted a regular correspondence with Voltaire. He was an accomplished amateur musician, performing on the flute, composing sonatas and concertos.

He authored political essays, including the Antimachiavell which proposed a blueprint for a ruler based on enlightened principles instead of the ruthless self interest admired by Machiavelli. Frederick seemed well equipped to undertake, more fully and energetically than anyone else, the role of ‘enlightened despot’ which represents an 18th century ideal. Charles VI died unexpectedly in 1740 and less than two months later Frederick II astonished Europe by marching a Prussian army into the rich Habsburg province of Silesia. Louis XV, hearing the news, described the young Prussian as a madman. The new Habsburg ruler Maria Theresa [twenty three to Frederick’s twenty eight] was a woman of strong resolve, but Habsburg armies proved no match for Frederick’s Prussians. A series of three victories in 1745 displayed his military skill to such advantage that his contemporaries accorded him the title by which he is known to history, Frederick the Great.

The loss of Silesia naturally rankled with the empress Maria Theresa of Austria [she of the Maria Theresa Thaler] and much of her diplomatic policy during the 1750s was devoted to putting together an alliance which would enable her to recover her lost territory. But Frederick. in a preemptive strike, marched into Saxony with 70,000 Prussian soldiers. This sudden act of aggression launched the Seven Years’ War. In 1757 the Russians advance into Prussia and seemed in a position to crush it, but mysteriously the Russian general withdrew.

Prussia reformed: 1763 – 1786

Frederick the Great used the years after the Seven Years’ War for a thorough revision of his kingdom’s administration. As with the reforms of Joseph II, his younger rival in Austria, the effect of Frederick’s measures was to centralize the machinery of government and to concentrate it ever more in the royal pair of hands. In the shattered Prussian economy after the war, Frederick used state subsidies to restore agriculture and to rebuild towns and villages. He funded these measures by much improved methods of tax collection and the establishment of state monopolies. Public reserves of grain were built up, so that the price of bread was kept down in years of famine. Standards of education were improved, with strict regulation of the part played by the religious orders. There was official encouragement for the sciences and the arts, and a new code of laws.

Three partitions of Poland: 1772 – 1796

Over a period of a quarter of a century Poland was dismembered and consumed by her neighbors. The first official annexation of Polish land was between Russia, Prussia and Austria. By the treaties of 1772 Austria acquired the region round Lvov with Frederick securing royal Prussia [with the exception of the port of Gdansk]. And Russia took a slice of northeast Poland. The next two partitions occurred when Russia found new excuses to intervene in Poland’s internal affairs. After a two month siege, and a massacre of Poles in the suburbs, Warsaw fell to a combined Russian and Prussian army.  The second partition, agreed in 1793, Prussia received Gdansk and a swathe of land stretching south almost to Kracow. Russia took a vast slice of eastern Poland, greater than the territory which Poland retained, in a strip from the Baltic coast down to Kracow. A few years later the final Polish remnant was divided between the three predators. Prussia was extended east to include Warsaw, the Austrian frontier moved north.

In 1814 the Congress of Vienna established the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), a loose league of 39 sovereign states. In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, the German Empire was proclaimed. This empire consisted of four kingdoms, 5 grand duchies, thirteen duchies and principalities, three free cities and one nonautonomous province. The German Empire was responsible for the issuance of coins valued at 1 mark or less. Each of the states had the right to issue gold and silver coins in larger denominations, and many did so. Their issues typically are found in coin catalogs under the heading “German States” [as opposed to “Germany”]. Coins listed under the heading “Germany” date from 1871. The German Empire lasted until 1918, when the monarchy collapsed near the end of World War I. The Weimar Republic [1919-33] arose from a national assembly tasked with writing a new constitution.

In the 6^th century the Khmer established an empire in modern south east Asia. The capital, established in the area of Angkor during the golden age of Khmer civilization, saw the empire at its greatest extent; it held sway over Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. It is included here because in the 20^th century it was used as a model by the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to reconstruct an agrarian society. Yasovarman was one of the great Angkorian kings and suffered leprosy. His greatest achievement was to move the capital from Hariharalaya to Yashodharapura where it remained for 500 years. It was at this new capital where all of the great and famous religious monuments e.g. the Angkor Wat[1], were built. Closer to the Siem Reap River and halfway between the Kulen hills and the Tonlé Sap, the king could reap many benefits provided by both rivers. It was largely formed by Indian cultural influences. Buddhism[2] flourished side by side with the worship of Shiva and of other Hindu[3] gods, while both religions coalesced with the cult of the deified king. In the Angkor period many Indian scholars, artists, and religious teachers were attracted to the Khmer court, and Sanskrit literature flourished with royal patronage. The great achievement of the Khmer was in architecture and sculpture.

The earliest known monuments date from the 7^th century and Khmer architecture reached its height in the 11^th century. Bas-reliefs, lacking in the earliest monuments, came to overshadow in importance statues in the round; in the later stages of Khmer art hardly a wall was left bare of bas-reliefs, which conveyed in the richness of their detail and vitality a vivid picture of Khmer life. Integrated with the architecture of the building, and one of the causes for its fame is Angkor Wat’s extensive decoration, which predominantly takes the form of bas-relief friezes. The inner walls bear a series of large-scale scenes mainly depicting episodes from the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They have been called “the greatest known linear arrangement of stone carving“.

Virtually all of its surfaces, columns, lintels even roofs are carved. There are miles of reliefs illustrating scenes from Indian literature including unicorns, griffins, winged dragons pulling chariots as well as warriors following an elephant-mounted leader and celestial dancing girls with elaborate hair styles. The stones, as smooth as polished marble, were laid without mortar with very tight joints that are sometimes hard to find. The blocks were held together by mortise and Tenon joints in some cases, while in others they used dovetails and gravity. The blocks were presumably put in place by a combination of elephants, coir ropes, pulleys and bamboo scaffolding. The monument was made out of millions of tonnes of sandstone and it has a greater volume as well as mass than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The Angkor Wat Temple consumes about 6 million to 10 million blocks of sandstone with an average weight of 1.5 tons each. In fact, the entire city of Angkor used up far greater amounts of stone than all the Egyptian pyramids combined, and occupied an area significantly greater than modern-day Paris. Moreover, unlike the Egyptian pyramids which use limestone quarried barely half a km away, the entire city of Angkor was built with sandstone quarried 40 km away. The labour force to quarry, transport, carve and install so much sandstone must have run into the thousands including many highly skilled artisans.

The Khmer fought repeated wars against the Annamese and the Champ; in the early 12^th century they invaded Champa[4], but, in 1177, Angkor was sacked in return. After the founding of Ayutthaya [c.1350], the empire was subjected to repeated invasions from Thailand, and Khmer power declined. In 1434, after the Thai captured Angkor, the capital was transferred to Phnom Penh marking the end of the brilliance of the Khmer civilization.

 The Modern Khmer Republic.

 On 9 March 1945, during the Japanese occupation of Cambodia, young king Norodom Sihanouk[5] proclaimed an independent Kingdom of Kampuchea, following a formal request by the Japanese. The new government did away with the Romanization of the Khmer language that the French colonial administration was beginning to enforce and officially reinstated the Khmer script. After Allied military units entered Cambodia, the Japanese military forces present in the country were disarmed and repatriated. The French were able to reimpose the colonial administration in Phnom Penh in October the same year. Sihanouk’s “royal crusade for independence” resulted in grudging French acquiescence to his demands for a transfer of sovereignty. A partial agreement was struck in 1953, Sihanouk declared independence had been achieved and returned in triumph to Phnom Penh.

By the mid-1960s, parts of Cambodia’s eastern provinces were serving as bases for North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (NVA/NLF) forces operating against South Vietnam, and the port of Sihanoukville was being used as a supply base. In 1969, the United States began a 14-month-long series of bombing raids targeted at NVA/VC elements 32 km inside the Cambodian border, areas where the Cambodian population had been evicted by the NVA. Prince Sihanouk, fearing that the conflict between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam might spill over to Cambodia, publicly opposed the idea of a bombing campaign by the United States along the Vietnam-Cambodia border and inside Cambodian territory. He wanted Cambodia to stay out of the Vietnam conflict and was very critical of the United States government and its allies.

Sihanouk wanted the United States and its allies to keep the war away from the Cambodian border and did not allow the United States to use Cambodian air space and airports for military purposes thus upsetting the United States and contributing to their view that Sihanouk as a North Vietnamese sympathizer. While visiting Beijing in 1970 Sihanouk was ousted by a military coup led by General Lon Nol[6] and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak who immediately allied Cambodia with the United States. On October 9, the Cambodian monarchy was abolished, and the country was renamed the Khmer Republic. The new regime immediately demanded that the Vietnamese communists leave Cambodia. Hanoi rejected the new republic’s request for the withdrawal of NVA troops. In response, the United States moved to provide material assistance to the new government’s armed forces, which were engaged against both CPK insurgents and NVA forces. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, desperate to retain their sanctuaries and supply lines from North Vietnam, immediately launched armed attacks on the new government. The North Vietnamese quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching to within 24 km of Phnom Penh. The North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the Khmer Rouge.

In 1972, a constitution was adopted, a parliament elected, and Lon Nol became president. But disunity, the problems of transforming a 30,000 man army into a national combat force of more than 200,000 men, and spreading corruption weakened the civilian administration and army. The Khmer Rouge insurgency continued to grow, aided by supplies and military support from North Vietnam. By 1973, the CPK were fighting battles against government forces with little or no North Vietnamese troop support, and they controlled nearly 60% of Cambodia’s territory and 25% of its population. Lon Nol’s control was reduced to small enclaves around the cities and main transportation routes. More than 2 million refugees from the war lived in Phnom Penh.

The new government sought to completely restructure Cambodian society. Remnants of the old society were abolished and religion was suppressed. Agriculture was collectivized, and the surviving part of the industrial base was abandoned or placed under state control. Cambodia had neither a currency nor a banking system, banks were raided and all currency and records were destroyed by fire thus eliminating any claim to funds. Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered to make the agricultural communism, as Pol Pot envisioned it, a reality. The planned relocation to the countryside resulted in the complete halting of almost all economic activity.

The ideology combined elements of Marxism with an extreme version of Khmer nationalism and xenophobia. It combined an idealization of the Angkor Empire, with an existential fear for the existence of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated under Vietnamese and Siamese intervention. The spill over of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnam War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese feeling. The Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, Vietnamese, and even their partially Khmer offspring for extinction; although the Cham Muslims were treated unfavourably, they were encouraged to “mix flesh and blood”, to intermarry and assimilate. Some people with partial Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry were present in the Khmer Rouge leadership; they either were purged or participated in the ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Thousands starved or died of disease during the evacuation and its aftermath. Many of those forced to evacuate the cities were resettled in newly created villages, which lacked food, agricultural implements, and medical care. Many who lived in cities had lost the skills necessary for survival in an agrarian environment. Thousands starved before the first harvest. Hunger and malnutrition were constant; most military and civilian leaders of the former regime who failed to disguise their pasts were executed. Some of the ethnicities such as the Cham suffered violent persecution, to the point of some referring to it as the “Cham genocide”. In many areas of the country people were rounded up and executed for speaking a foreign language, wearing glasses, scavenging for food, and even crying for dead loved ones. Former businessmen and bureaucrats were hunted down and killed along with their entire families; the Khmer Rouge feared that they held beliefs that could lead them to oppose their regime. A few Khmer Rouge loyalists were even killed for failing to find enough ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to execute. Modern research has located 20,000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease. The whole country became known as “the killing fields”.

The Australia – Cambodia Joint Aid Program Strategy 2010–2015[7] outlines how Australian aid assists the Royal Government of Cambodia and the people of Cambodia to achieve the country’s development goals between 2010 and 2015. Australia’s aid program will focus on areas in which we have experience, credibility and the potential to make the greatest impact. Priority sectors are agriculture and rural development, health, infrastructure, and law and justice. Through our support for these sectors, we seek to balance sustainable strengthening of government systems with greater support for more immediate and practical service delivery.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norodom_Sihanouk

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Nol

[7] http://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/Documents/australia-cambodia-joint-strategy.pdf