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Section
Three:
The Sick Man (2447-2481)
"The Padishah Emperor has commanded me to take this fief and end all dispute."
--Frank Herbert
Dune
Readout
2450 A.D.
Islam, 1824 A.D.: The Greeks defeat the Turks at Mitylene.
2453 A.D.
Islam, 1827 A.D.: The Turkish-Egyptian fleet is destroyed by a
French-British-Russian task force at Navarino.
2456 A.D.
Islam, 1830 A.D.: The French take Algeria.
2457 A.D.
Egypt, 1090 B.C.: Rule of the country is divided between General Heri-Hor and
the merchant princes of Tanis. Ramses XI dies in obscurity, taking the dynasty
with him.
Egypt, 1090 B.C.: The
Twenty-First Dynasty begins. The country remains disunited.
Islam, 1831 A.D.: Muslim
Egyptians briefly hold Syria.
2462 A.D.
Egypt, 1085 B.C.: Egypt is divided into several small states. The power of
Libya grows.
2464 A.D.
Rome, 337 A.D.: In accordance with Diocletian's reform, the empire is divided
into east and west for administrative purposes. Almost continuous civil war
ensues.
2467 A.D.
Islam, 1841 A.D.: The empire's integrity is guaranteed by the Five Powers of
Europe. The era of the Ottoman Empire's role as the Sick Man of Europe begins.
2471 A.D.
Islam, 1845 A.D.: Russia begins a campaign for the liberation of the Balkans,
thereby starting the Crimean War. Turkey is supported by the French and
British.
2477 A.D.
Rome, 350 A.D.: Persians take Armenia.
2481 A.D.
Islam, 1855 A.D.: Russia capitulates, but the Ottoman Empire's hold on the
Balkans is loosened.
Commentary
It has been argued that this phase in a civilization's history constitutes a return to the "Heroic Age," the earliest and usually semi-legendary period of a culture's life. In that distant time, the era of Charlemagne and Agamemnon, the world was not a homogenous civilized society. It was a dangerous place, where adventure could easily be found (indeed, it would often come looking for you), but where intrepid men (and the occasional scheming woman) could by their valor place themselves among the demigods. There were, indeed, people living in these later periods who seem to have been foolish enough to believe something similar. Certainly we find rulers such as Julian the Apostate, who tried to turn the Roman Empire back to Diocletian's somewhat fantasticated "old time religion." The Emperor Julian seems to have spent his conscious life planning to imitate Alexander the Great. In the event, of course, his march to the East produced a defeat for Roman arms remarkable even for this epoch of decay. Still, the men loved him, or at least those who wrote memoirs did.
Certainly, it is a good age for
panegyrics, and not just at the imperial level. This is one of those times when
the irresponsible powerful love to be flattered in historical terms. At any
rate, they cultivate what they imagine, sometimes accurately, to be historical
styles of art and manners.
Indeed, it sometimes becomes
difficult to distinguish the artifacts of this and later periods from those of
the earliest times. There was an enormous reproduction of the art of the Old
Kingdom in the tombs and ceremonial spaces of the post-imperial period in
Egypt, not all of it of negligible quality. The later Empire of the West came
to be dominated by a fine if monotonous Gothic. The superiority of twenty-fifth
century building materials over their medieval counterparts, however, permitted
a revival of stainedglass windows that went far beyond anything attempted in
the High Middle Ages, either in size or attention to detail. The late empire
was, after all, another age of faith.
Some cultures do this kind of
thing better than others, of course. One of the sorry features of late Roman
civilization, for instance, is the simply incompetent execution of statuary and
public building construction. The personal portraiture of the period,
especially that executed on colossal scale, usually meant a grotesque
caricature of the subject. Triumphal arches (for which there was some call,
since most emperors were the victors in civil wars) actually stole bas-reliefs
and other fine features from monuments constructed by the rulers of happier
times.
Considered as a whole,
especially in light of the decrepit state of the imperial economy, there is
still a surprising amount of building during this period. Sometimes, of course,
this is because the empire partly occupies the territory of a young culture.
Spengler, for instance, was of the opinion that Constantine the Great was the
first figure in what would later become Islamic culture. He was analogous in
some ways to the early Holy Roman Emperors in Western culture, from this point
of view. Thus, his vast city building projects, particularly the new capital at
Constantinople, drew their energy more from the eastern peoples who were still half
primitive than from the nearly exhausted civilization represented by the Roman
Empire. Even allowing this to be the case, however, his cities were still
cities of the late Classical style; the distinctive Byzantine spirit which
would later distinguish them still lay some centuries in the future.
The late Islamic empire itself,
the distant heir of Byzantium, lived in a peculiar state of anxiety between its
need to arm itself against the West using Western technique and its
determination to defend its integrity as a cultural and religious entity
against Western intellectual penetration. Because it had already been partly
integrated into the world economic system, its economy was in some ways more
vital than that of any other of the great empires in the final generations
before collapse. The resources available to its government actually increased.
Thus, it could pay for, and even initiate the manufacture, of state-of-the-art
weapons technology.
None of this was enough,
however. The empire could continue to win victories, particularly among
insurgent groups in the core areas, but its economy could not grow as fast as
that of the weakest Western power. In the final analysis, it could not
"modernize," make itself into a creature of the post-Napoleonic West,
without ceasing to be what it was. It thus suffered the indignity (shared by
several empires in other contexts) of being kept alive until such times as its
enemies should be able to decide among themselves how to carve it up. The Turks
were remarkable, if anything, for the number of times their performance on the
battlefield forced the predatory Great Powers to delay the final act.
Most civilizations during this
period do not have even the sometimes dismaying "advantages" offered
by an up and coming neighbor anxious to keep them alive for a time. One
perfectly real advantage of being in the shadow of a more powerful neighbor,
however, is that it greatly concentrates the mind. Thus, some old civilizations
such as Egypt and Rome, who had less impressive if still dangerous neighbors,
felt free to relax for long periods of time into a number of warring
jurisdictions. This was tolerable, perhaps, because the lives of these cultures
had in large measure been simplified. Egypt was becoming what it was to be in
all future ages, a money machine that shipped staples downstream to the cities
of the Delta, which in turn shipped back manufactured items and occasional
doses of law and order. Even when no one was actually in charge of the whole
system, it had become clear to the whole world that the country was essentially
a vast commercial plantation, one that would serve one group of managers as
well as another.
In the Roman Empire, the
northern strip of territories form the western German border, east and south to
Milan (the real capital of the Western Roman Empire), and then around the
Adriatic through the Balkans to Constantinople, because a sort of amphitheater
of civil war. To the south of this strip there were the major cities, and on
the southern rim of the Mediterranean the food producing centers which made
life in the rapidly depopulating northern tier possible. From south to north,
each tier supported the one above it but was otherwise left to its own devices,
so that it was quite possible for reasonable ordinary people to avoid
everything to do with the unpleasantness but pay taxes. The unpleasantness
could even be justified with the excuse that it kept well-seasoned soldiers
within easy striking distance of the dangerous northern frontier (it also
tended to make the more chronically dangerous Persian frontier indefensible,
but you can't have everything).
The twenty-fifth century Empire
of the West, for its part, was less prone to civil war than other
civilizations. Like China, it preferred palace coups and long regencies when
power was to be transferred in an unorthodox fashion. The two major wars of the
period, one launched by an insurgent general, the other by civilian
administrators sworn to uphold the interests of an infant emperor whose claim
to the throne seemed about to be thrust aside, were fantastic naval conflicts
fought by a dozen aircraft carrier groups in the North Atlantic and supported
by directed energy weapons from space. The second of these wars resulted in one
of the two successful invasions ever to be made of North America. In both these
conflicts, civilians even in most of North America were scarcely affected.
Spengler had argued, plausibly
at the time, the next great complex of culture and civilization was to arise in
Russia. However, there was no Russian Constantine the Great. No nominally
Western emperor surreptitiously inaugurated a new Russian world spirit while
seeming to preserve the old. The reason was that Napoleon, unlike Alexander,
had failed in his drive to the east. Russia's fate was unlike that which the
Near East suffered at the hands of Greece. Russia, never conquered from the
West, saw its sovereignty simply dissolved into the Western Imperium with that
of all other sovereignties at the end of modernity. Unlike Constantine's East,
which had been artificially and prematurely urbanized by the spread of
Hellenization, Russia became a steadily more provincial region as the Empire of
the West matured. Its place in the scheme of things was as a wealthy supplier
of grain and raw materials and ambitious emigrants. There was nothing to
recommend it as a new base of power for Western rulers, even to those of
Russian extraction. Thus no citadel against chaos like Constantinople was
established there. There was no counterfeit heart to darken the imagination of
a young culture. The final stages of western civilization passed over the
steppe like a storm, doing little damage. After it was all over, Russia could
begin almost afresh.