Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan (Chapters 1-8)

Bloomsbury's Teacher Notes (pdf)

Preface frames things in a way that aligns with History 8. A few gems: 

• Between Europe and East Asia is the "crossroads of civilization," "the world's central nervous system." 
• Classical history of Rome was "twisted and manipulated to create an insistent narrative where the rise of the west was not only natural and inevitable, but a continuation of what had gone before" (xviii).

Chapter 1: The Creation of the Silk Road

• Persian Empire sprang up from the "crucible" of the Fertile Crescent: open, urban, highly educated, "a beacon of stability and fairness"
• Alexander the Great and the quest to expand to the EAST: legacy of cities to "defend against the threat posed by tribes of the steppes"
• Hellenism: statues of the Buddha as a response to Greek influence of the cult of Apollo
• Han China's campaign to the west (re: horses of Xinjiang, tribute to Xiongnu/Yuezhi/Scythians) opened the way for the "moment of the birth of the Silk Roads"
• Rome's reorientation to the east led to its greatness (Egypt, silk, tax revenues, commercial exchange with India, Trajan's PERSIA CAPTA)
• Rise of Sasanid Persia as Rome declined

"Seeing Rome as the progenitor of western Europe overlooks the fact that it consistently looked to and in many ways was shaped by influences from the east."

Chapter 2: The Road of Faiths

The biggest take-away is this sentence: "The struggles between different faiths were highly political" (29) as different rulers often used religion to legitimize their regimes. A few highlights:

• Spread of Buddhism to central Asia with Kushan Empire (Afghanistan today) and to China's Northern Wei (China) was for political legitimacy
• Buddhism's evolution as reflected in Lotus Sutra, key role played by Sogdian merchants
• Brakes on Buddhism's spread toward the west of its birth came with the rise of Sasanian Persia and its revitalization of Zoroastrianism.
• Christianity's "early progress was far more spectacular and more promising in the east" until Sasanian Zoroastrianism hardened in the 3rd century as a response to the threat Constantine's defense of Christianity. As Rome was a rival to Persia, Constantine's conversion "compromised Christianity's future in the east." (interesting!)

Chapter 3: The Road to a Christian East

The kicker for me was this sentence: "Indeed, even in the Middle Age, there were many more Christians in Asia than there were in Europe" (55). This chapter explains the rise of Christianity in the east (Persia and far beyond, even to Kashgar at the edge of China!) up until the 7th century, often at the expense of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Buddhism. Other key nuggets:

• Fall of Western Rome: environmental issues
• Rome-Persia alliance and 125-mile fortified wall b/w the Caspian and Black Seas couldn't hold back the migration pressure from the east; Alaric's sack of Rome (47)
• Xiongnu/Huns and Attila (some amazing stories on pp. 48-49)
• Echoes Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome, and the End of Civilization -- the collapse did bring a "Dark Age"
• Rome's collapse "took the sting out of Christianity in Asia" and saw a rising/strengthening Persia softening attitudes toward Christianity, though debates roiled about doctrine and heresy.
• A good paragraph on Sogdian (Afghan) traders on p. 56
• Borrowings of religious symbolism (like halos); Gnosticism's fusion of Christian-Buddhist thought

Chapter 4: The Road to Revolution

Despite Christianity's success, the stage was set for Islam's successful emergence in the 7th century. "Muhammad's warnings of imminent doomsday struck and powerful chord [and his] preaching certainly fell on fertile ground" (72)

• Turmoil in the previous century: plague, pressure from aggressive Turks to the east of Persia, ongoing conflict between Persia and Rome (extinguishing the sacred fire story on p. 64, Persia's takeover of Jerusalem in 614, religious wars, etc.)
• Reasons for Islam's success: message of unity (esp. vs. Byzantine/Persian manipulation), timing of Persia's collapse, success attracted supporters, pyramid-scheme allocation of booty, Rome and Persia's too-little-too-late response

Chapter 5: The Road to Concord

This chapter is about the unity that Islam brought to the Afro-Eurasian world, and the Golden Age that emerged:

“The chain of events that began with the intense rivalry between the Roman Empire and Persia had extraordinary consequences. As the two great powers of late antiquity flexed their muscles and prepared for a final showdown, few could have predicted that it would be a faction from the far reaches of the Arabian peninsula that would rise up to supplant both. Those who had been inspired by Muhammad truly inherited the earth, establishing perhaps the greatest empire that the world has seen, one that would introduce irrigation techniques and new crops from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Iberian peninsula, and spark nothing less than an agrarian revolution spanning thousands of miles. The Islamic conquests created a new world order, an economic giant, bolstered by self-confidence, broad-mindedness and a passionate zeal for progress. Immensely wealthy and with few natural political or even religious rivals, it was a place where order prevailed, where merchants could become rich, where intellectuals were respected and where disparate views could be discussed and debated. An unpromising start in a cave near Mecca had given birth to a cosmopolitan utopia of sorts.”

• Muslim relations with Jews/Christians, and how alliances with Jews and Christians helped Islam expand
• p. 81: The idea that Muhammad was illiterate was a defense to insulate him from accusations of plagiarism! There's a claim that the "Qur'an haas as its base a Christian lectionary ... that was adapted and remoulded." 
• Arab expansion as "an almost perfect model" that produced great wealth
• p. 87: "“So close, in fact, did Islam seem that some Christian scholars thought its teachings were not so much those of a new faith as a divergent interpretation of Christianity.” (!?)
• Tours (732) is often touted as a close escape; if Charles Martel hadn't won, Europe might have become Muslim! But from the Muslim p.o.v., western Europe held few prizes, as "wealth and rewards lay elsewhere." As a result, they didn't keep fighting for it but rather turned attention elsewhere instead. 
• Talas river brought Muslims to the edge of China and spurred revolt against Tang Dynasty China. 
• "The least of my territories ruled by the least of my subjects provides a revenue larger than your whole dominion," said the Caliph to the 9th century Emperor in Constantinople (LOL!)
• Islam brought a period of unity in trade, wealth, information/knowledge: Baghdad, paper-making skill, maritime trade system, Chinese envy, translations from various sources to consolidate wisdom while Christian Europe "withered in the gloom ... and a dearth of curiosity."

“This disdain for science and scholarship baffled Muslim commentators, who had great respect for Ptolemy and Euclid, for Homer and Aristotle. Some had little doubt what was to blame. Once, wrote the historian al-Mas ūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’. 92 Science was defeated by faith. It is almost the precise opposite of the world as we see it today: the fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the east – and certainly not in Europe.”

Chapter 6: The Fur Road

This chapter is about trade to the north and the steppes of Eurasia, especially the Volga Bulghars, the Khazars, and the Rus'. "Moving from place to place did not mean that life in tribal societies was disordered," and there were great economic contributions made by the steppes' peoples: horses, grains, hazelnuts, falcons, swords, wax, honey, etc. But "Above all else, however, was the trade in animal pelts.... According to one historian, perhaps as many as half a million pelts were exported from the steppes every year" (aka the "fur road").

Vivid nuggets: 

• Ibn Fadlan's 10th-century travel account with details about the Volga Bulghars
• The story of Khazaria (with its capital at Atil) and the kaghan's conversion to Judaism, as detailed in correspondence between Hasdai ben Shaprut and the Khazar king; the Khazar's Moses coin as a defiant statement of identity
• The role of Jewish merchants as trade brokers (like the Sogdians)
• Rayy as an axis city between the steppes and settled peoples
• Vikings: "in the Viking age the bravest and toughest men did not head west; they headed east and south ... It was the lure of trade and riches in the Islamic world that initially spurred Vikings to set off on the journey south" where they founded a permanent state (Rus'), unlike ephemeral forays to the west. The coin record shows that "the amount of silver coins brought back from trading with the lands of Islam numbered in the tens and perhaps even hundreds of millions."

This chapter makes me want to read lots more about the history of Eurasian steppes people!

Chapter 7: The Slave Road

Slaves were in high demand, an economy supported by Viking Rus' markets (along with slaves from sub-Saharan Africa and taken from Turkic tribes). Comparisons to Rome: "One account that talks of a caliph and his wife owning a thousand slave girls each, while another was said to own no fewer than four thousand. Slaves in the Muslim world were as ubiquitous – and silent – as they were in Rome." 

Slave markets thrived across eastern Europe, abetted by Jewish merchants, and the rise of the European economy was "funded by large-scale human trafficking." This trade began to change nature in the 10th century, as the Khazars and Viking Rus' switched over to "protection rackets" and taxing other goods that flowed through their cities. 

Constantinople = Byzantines vs. Turks: By the 10th century, Baghdad had begun to decline, internal unrest led to the rise of the Fatimids, the Rus' were dominant on the western steppe, and their "attention began to turn away from the Muslim world to the Byzantine Empire and to the great city of Constantinople." Meanwhile, to the east, various Turks began to rise up as "beneficiaries of the weakening centre in Baghdad," chief among which were the Seljuks, who might have been Jewish or Christian, but converted to Islam after taking over Baghdad. The decisive clash came at Manzikert in 1071, where the Turks defeated the Byzantines to win Anatolia (before hoping to hit their real target, Egypt/Fatimids). After a couple decades of peace between the two sides, Byzantine Emperor subsequently called on Pope Urban II for help, setting off a call-to-arms to capture the Holy Land. 

This passage was striking to me, as I think he's implying that the rise of western Europe was fueled by human-trafficking!

"In the eighth to tenth centuries, the base commodity for sale had been slaves. But as the economies of western and eastern Europe became more robust, galvanised by huge influxes of silver coinage from the Islamic world [as payment for slaves], towns grew and their populations swelled. And as they did so, the levels of interaction intensified, which in turn led to the demand for monetisation, that is to say, trade based on coinage – rather than, for example, on furs. As this transition happened and local societies became more complex and sophisticated, stratification developed and urban middle classes emerged. Money, rather than men, began to be used as currency for trade with the east" (126).

Chapter 8: The Road to Heaven
This chapter is about the Crusades:

• The success of the First Crusade was allowed by Muslims, as "There was unspoken acquiescence in Baghdad and Cairo, based on the feeling that perhaps Christian occupation might be better than either Shīa or Sunnī rivals having control of the city" (134). 
• First Crusade unleashed anti-Semitism.
• First Crusade wasn't a success as far as Byzantium was concerned, since western European crusader kings (Bohemond, e.g.) didn't live up to agreements to turn over captured lands to the Emperor, instead keeping the wealth/power of conquest for themselves. This began a period of increasing anti-western sentiment in Constantinople, animosities between western/eastern Christians, rivalries between Byzantines and Italians, etc. 
• Dissenting voices: Roger of Sicily, who didn't want to stir up trouble with Muslims, "causing friction and interrupting trade."
• "[A]lthough the Muslims had long dominated the Mediterranean, they were about to lose control of the waves to a new set of rivals: the city-states of Italy were the latest additions to the great trading networks of the east" (136)
• Italian city-states (esp. Venice) grew rich and powerful by controlling supply lines to the precarious Crusader kings in the eastern Mediterranean, who granted them all kinds of concessions (fees, tax revenues and exemptions, favorable trade agreements, etc.)
• More about money/profit than religion, as Bernard of Clairvaux's call to arms for the Second Crusade illustrates: "To those of you who are merchants, men quick to seek a bargain, let me point out the advantages of this great opportunity. Do not miss them!"
• This was *not* a clash of civilizations! "By and large, however, for all the fiery rhetoric on both sides, relations were remarkably calm and considered. Indeed, in western Europe, there was considerable curiosity about Islam." Contacts with the east spurred scientific/intellectual achievements (Adelard).
• Led to "the economic and social blossoming of Europe in the twelfth century." Cities like Antioch, Acre became important trade centers for buying spices, textiles, and other exotic goods from the east.
• Muslims got rich too! Ramisht of Siraf
• How the whole thing unraveled for the crusaders in later Crusades: loss of Jerusalem to Saladin, antagonistic and overly-aggressive behavior towards Muslims, in-fighting to the point that greedy Venetians attacked a fellow Christian city of Zara and then went on to besiege Constantinople itself!

"The sack and capture of the biggest and most important city in Christendom showed that the Europeans would stop at nothing to take what they wanted – and needed – to get closer to the centre of where the world’s wealth and power lay.... From the very outset, men such as Bohemond had shown that the Crusades – which promised to defend Christendom, to do the Lord’s work and deliver salvation to the many who took the cross – could be hijacked for other purposes. The sack of Constantinople was the obvious culmination of the desire of Europe to connect and embed itself in the east" (151).