Section Four:

"Although men be terrified by the signs appearing about the judgment day, yet before those signs begin to appear the wicked will think themselves to be in peace and security after the death of Antichrist and before the coming of Christ, seeing that the world is not at once destroyed as they thought hitherto."

--St. Thomas Aquinas
  Summa Thelogica

2247 A.D.
Egypt, 1300 B.C.: Officially, the period is called a Renaissance, a return to old patterns. The Renaissance is enforced by draconian police measures new in Egyptian history.

Egypt, 1300 B.C.: Magical and supernatural sanctions are invoked to assist the rule of law.

2257 A.D.
Egypt, 1290 B.C.: Ramses II comes to power, under whom the empire reaches its greatest extent.

2262 A.D.
Egypt, 1285 B.C.: Ramses II manages to avoid being killed at the Battle of Kadesh. Peace is made with Egypt's Asiatic enemies, the Hittites.

2264 A.D.:
China, 36 B.C.: Ch'en T'ang, a minor official, inflicts a stunning defeat on the Central Asian barbarians. The government considers punishing him for adventurism.

2265 A.D.
Rome, 138 A.D.: Antonius Pius becomes emperor, beginning the happiest era in civilized history.

2275 A.D.
Islam, 1649 A.D. Mohammed IV becomes Sultan after assassinating his father, Sultan Ibrahim.

2288 A.D.
Rome, 161 A.D.: General peace and prosperity prevail during most of the reign of the Stoic philosopher and emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

2289 A.D.
Islam, 1663 A.D.: The Turks invade the Holy Roman Empire.

2294 A.D.
Rome, 167 A.D.: Persistent border wars begin in the Balkans, taking up much of the Emperor's time.

2299 A.D.
Jan Sobieski defeats the Turks at Khorzim.

Rome, 180 A.D.: The demented emperor Commodus succeeds his father, Marcus Aurelius. Plague, famine and barbarian incursions break out. Commodus is assassinated after 12 years.

2309 A.D.
Islam: The Turks lay siege to Vienna; their army is routed.

China A.D.
The Former Han Dynasty is overthrown in a court intrigue by the dowager empress's nephew, Wang Mang, who becomes emperor.

The two generations before these catastrophes, however, are often considered the happiest in history. As a rule, the imperial government has the leisure to concern itself with both order and justice. The law tends to become rigid, but in large part because it is no longer problematical. Again, it is a question of ancient questions being answered and the results being reduced to final form. As a rule, the empire is not in an expansionist state of mind during this period. Those that are, like Egypt, soon realize that further adventures do not pay and settle down for a long period of peace. Where external barbarians make a nuisance of themselves, they are dealt with using the minimum of force necessary to maintain imperial prestige. Wisdom in this period consists in doing only what you have to do.

This attitude is possible because society lacks the energy to generate serious disorder. Further, it is necessary because the resources available to the imperial government have begun to decline. This stage of a civilization's life is one of small ambitions, of people who look no higher than to conventional success in established social and administrative hierarchies. This is not a period for empire builders, or even for reformist enthusiasts. Whatever ethnic or income group conflicts may exist in society have become so muted that internal police actions rarely require more than a show of force. Perhaps more important, the imagination necessary to plot revolt, or even to launch significant new economic ventures, is not encouraged by imperial culture. Actually, all civilizations do provide some outlet for people with the frontier spirit, since there are always border lands to be settled. This process, however, has no repercussions on human culture as a whole; it simply keeps the people involved from becoming disruptive. In the nature of things, it is always the border areas of civilization which collapse first when conspicuous decline sets in.

For the first time in the lives of some civilizations, the population of the world goes into a secular decline. Precisely why certain civilizations, such as Rome and China, began to experience prolonged population declines at about this time has long been a matter of debate. Even in civilizations where no manifest declines occur, still the empire never does better than stay stable, often soon being out-populated by barbarian neighbors. Doubtless, as was the case in the West, where better data are available, the declines had in fact begun in certain areas as long ago as the modern era. The usual reasons given are that the very expanse of civilization left it exposed to new diseases from beyond the borders, or that landholding patterns were such as to discourage the breaking up of family plots among many children. All these explanations are inadequate.

The fact of the matter is, the human world begins to shrink in intensity, if not necessarily yet in space. Large, new projects in any sphere of life become rare. Capital expenditures for plant tend more and more to be tied up in the maintenance of old facilities, rather than in the creation of new ones. Indeed, major existing facilities, from viaducts to airports, become proportionately ever more costly to repair as the number of people served by them first levels off and then declines.

The kind of economic decline which occurs in this period is quite different from that represented by the normal business cycle (which in fact continues). Markets and labor slowly disappear. Capital becomes proportionately more abundant for lack of productive enterprises in which to invest it, so much so that the economic life of the period is troubled by an irrational rise in the value of land and tangible assets. The activities of the imperial government, far from absorbing capital needed elsewhere, have instead the effect of masking what would otherwise have been a series of ever-deeper economic slumps.

Indeed, activities at all levels of public life sometimes give the impression of being conducted merely for lack of anything else to keep the participants occupied. Important local citizens and civic associations continue to perform good works and found cultural institutions that duplicate existing facilities and sometimes merely annoy the beneficiaries. Serious culture comes more and more to resemble ritual, even if it has no religious content. Old plays are performed and books are read primarily because they provide a common frame of reference for persons of refined taste. The respect for the canon becomes superstitious. Criticism of these works becomes both more formal and wildly inaccurate, as the learned lose the ability to see what the classics meant when they were new. The tendency grows to look for magical and prophetic qualities in the texts.

There have been many periods in history when societies in comfortable circumstances realized that their happy state was not maintainable, that in fact they stood at the edge of an abyss. For some reason, such sentiments were rare in this period, even in civilizations such as China and the West which were always prone to attacks of apocalyptic anxiety. It is as if the cultural reflexes needed to foresee and deal with impending danger, even in imagination, had atrophied in the long years since world unification. It is, therefore, not a complete surprise that a fairly trivial event, something that in former ages could have been dealt with without much trouble, in this period is yet sufficient to show just how little resilience the structure of civilization retained.

The surest sign of weakness in any society is a dependence on good rulers. In this period, all civilizations but Egypt acquired unsatisfactory ones and promptly paid the price. The successor to Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, succeeded to power in a perfectly regular fashion. Though grossly unsuited for the job, his administration would not have brought ruin to the empire were it not for the fact that none of the ruling strata had the initiative to deal with the multiple (but perfectly manageable) problems with which the empire was faced. His assassination, though perhaps necessary, was not evidence of political imagination. In China, the usurper Wang Mang became emperor through an irregular court intrigue, but Han constitutional punctilio was not so outraged as to necessitate the downfall of the imperial regime. It was his gimcrack "reformist" ideas, which in this age of respect for authority no one could oppose until too late, which did that. In the West, the conversion of the unstable Emperor Friedrich to the New Eugenics faction at court, with the subsequent worldwide revulsion at the methods of the new ministry, simply showed that a government of technocrats is no more resistant to the intrigues of ambitious cranks than is one of soldiers or priests. In Islam, perhaps the saddest case of all, an earnest Sultan decided to renew the jihad against the West in such a way as to establish the supremacy of the Ottoman Empire in western Eurasia once and for all. The attempt was a hundred years too late, and the defeat demoralized the Empire to such an extent that it never really recovered.