Section Four:

"Oh Christian era,
Era of chivalry and the barbarians and the machines,
era of science and the saints,
When you go down make a good sunset.
Never linger superfluous, old and holy and paralytic like India,
Go down in conclusive war and a great sunset,
great age go down..."

--Robinson Jeffers
   I Shall Laugh Purely

2487 A.D.
Rome, 360 A.D.: Huns invade Europe.

2501 A.D.
Islam, 1875 A.D.: Risings against the Turks in the Balkans.

2502 A.D.
Islam, 1876 A.D.: Abdul Hamid comes to power, the last Sultan to rule effectively.

2503 A.D.
Islam, 1877 A.D.: Russia invades the Balkans.

2504 A.D.
Islam, 1878 A.D. The Congress of Berlin preserves the Ottoman Empire, at the cost of lessened sovereignty.

2505 A.D.
Rome, 375 A.D.: Visigoths defeat and kill the Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adianople. The empire never regains control of its borders.

2519 A.D.
Rome, 392 A.D.: The Emperor Theodosius the Great comes to power, the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire.

2520 A.D.
China, 220 A.D.: The last Han emperor abdicates.

The majority, impoverished and dwindling in number as population contracts, have long since come to see statecraft and the defense of the empire as the special concern of a class of predatory rulers. They feel no more inclined to work or fight for the maintenance of the imperial regime than country people would be to volunteer to help an exclusive riding club hunt for foxes.

There is, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy and simple confusion in the attitude of both the empire's friends and enemies. The end of the empire as a political event is unimaginable to almost everyone, from the barbarian invaders to the emperor's speechwriters. So long has it existed that its end seems indistinguishable from the end of the world. Occasionally, as in China and the West, the forces which effectively kill the empire in this period are trying to achieve exactly that. More often, however, the barbarians are seeking an autonomy within the empire, recognized by the universal government, and sweetened by "subsidies" which soon become simple payments of tribute. Even the Greeks who repeatedly attempted to bring down the Ottoman Empire envisioned what in essence would have been a revival of the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Istanbul and including not only Greece but both shores of the Aegean and wide regions of Anatolia.

Those who support the empire, who constitute the majority of its people even in the worst cases, similarly equate the collapse of the central authority with intolerable chaos. This loyalty is usually a matter of abstract principle, however. They cheat on their taxes and avoid conscription in droves when the government is foolish enough to attempt it. These things are increasingly easy to do as the bureaucracy suffers more and more from interruptions in communication and the corruption that comes from fixed prices and wages in an inflationary environment. They may, and usually do, hate and fear the current emperor, the provincial governor, or some oppressive policy which applies to their religious or ethnic group. Still, in their mental universe the empire is the guardian of everything good in human life, of learning and the cherished art of the past, of religion and law and justice. The system is too diffuse, however, and the implications of its downfall too incomprehensible, for this sentiment to solidify into anything like the aggressive nationalism of modernity. Individuals and whole cities will perform prodigies of courage and ingenuity to defend their regions and their interests. The empire as a whole, except for a tiny minority with some professional reason to think about its fate systematically, is literally too important to defend.

The fatal misfortunes to which the universal states are subject are various, but such is the similarity of their fates that these events are clearly only occasions for some deeper, common process to manifest itself. It was in the Roman Empire, perhaps, where the blow seemed to be most purely military. For some time, barbarian peoples had been drifting south across the northern border. Often they would be brusquely turned back or, more and more, settled on wasteland inside the border on Roman terms. Eventfully, in the last quarter of the fourth century, an authorized influx of Gothic peoples from north of the Danube went on a rampage because of Roman maladministration and corruption. The army sent to put down this rebellion (since the people were for the most part already on Roman soil, it was hardly an invasion) was led by the emperor himself. To everyone's surprise, not least the barbarians', the Roman army was defeated before the city of Adrianople and the Goths left free, at least briefly, to pillage in the Balkans.

While a degree of control was again established in the northern tier of the empire, the imperial forces were sometimes mere traffic police for new immigrants. The newcomers were only nominally subjects of the empire; the central government treated with their leaders to ensure they would do as little damage as possible to the precariously-supplied cities. By swift degrees, the imperial government passed from the status of ruler to hegemon to referee of the peoples and cities north of the Mediterranean.

The Ottomans, not altogether dissimilarly, reached the stage during this period when they were no longer masters of their own house. Despite their long occupation of the Balkans, few universal states seem to have been so widely and persistently disliked by its subject peoples as the Turks were by a majority of the people in that area. It was, perhaps, precisely because the empire's policy had always been to respect the ethnic and religious identities of its subjects, to keep their essences distinct, that the sort of nationalist animosities which had long since disappeared in other late civilizations were still so virulent in this one. Left to itself, the Balkan revolt of the period, decisively aided by the Russians, could have brought the Ottoman story to an abrupt end. As it was, the execution of the empire was suspended by the Congress of Berlin. Its provinces were disposed of by foreigners of alien culture, while its core territory was increasingly the site of Western enterprises and projects. The Sultan's authority was secure only over those core areas of Anatolia where his own ethnic group predominated. Even the Muslim Arabs to the south were becoming restless. If the Roman Empire could struggle on for a century longer because of the ignorance and incompetence of its barbarians, the Ottoman Empire survived only a bit more than a generation on the sufferance of the West.

In China, we have an appallingly clear example of a civilization which tried, with some success, to bring its own life to an end by blowing itself up. History runs in great cycles, according to Chinese and some Western philosophers. Toward the end of a cycle, the world grows so old and corrupt that the only thing to do with it is to destroy it. According to the Yellow Turban Society of the Latter Han Dynasty, the duty to do this lay with a vanguard. Only a minority of them would survive the destruction, but those who did would become the Seed People of the new age. If the Yellow Turbans were revolutionaries, then they were insurgents after the manner of Pol Pot rather than Lenin, or even than the eschatologically-minded T'ai P'ing rebellion of the nineteenth century. Destruction was the goal and genocide was the instrument.

The Yellow Turban rebellion itself was actually put down in fairly short order. In western China, on the other hand, the Five Pecks of Rice Taoists, who harbored similar sentiments, maintained a sort of millenarian kingdom for thirty years. In any event, the rebellion inaugurated a period of general disorder and indiscipline which the imperial government was wholly incompetent to stem. The last of the Han emperors abdicated at the "suggestion" of his chief general. A curious twilight period followed, during which the depopulated and ravaged civilized world did not yet collapse, but had no visible means of support.

In the West, where time was more often seen as linear than cyclical, the Joachite Rebellion of the early twenty-sixth century actually intended to end human history once and for all. The ideology of this catastrophic cult (which eventually claimed more than half-a-billion adherents) incorporated Marxist elements in a framework provided by the eschatological ideas of the twelfth century abbot, Joachim of Fiore. The time since Christ, according to the movement's prophets, had actually been the Millennium of the Book of Revelation. The Evil One had been imprisoned, his power for harm limited, for 2520 years (seven "perfect" years of 360 days, each day represented by a year in turn; a cosmic week). This epoch saw the victory of Socialism, the most just form of society imaginable in this world. In essence, the age of universal government (even with its free market features) had been the embodiment of the Kingdom of God. Had it not been created precisely by the victory of the people over world finance and national obscurantism? Sometimes the Kingdom had been purer, sometimes more tainted, but it had certainly reached its peak during the era of the universal state. Since that polity was obviously coming to an end, it was clear that the Evil One had been released from his prison for a short while. The synthesis of culture and politics and science which had been achieved after modernity was now exhausted. The time had come to make the world into the beautiful desert described in the last chapters of Revelation. The Elect and the Elect alone would survive to build the New Jerusalem. There would be no other men and no other habitation in all the world.

The New Jerusalem came into being as an insurgents camp in the Midwest of what had been the United States. For the decades in which the insurgency survived, however, it became the capital of a ghostly polity with outposts on every continent. Half of the urbanized areas of the world were destroyed either by the insurgents themselves (who included a quarter of the mutinous armed forces), or by the desperate and confused imperial government. Among the other dreadful features of the period was the only extensive use of nuclear weapons since the First Transition which ended modernity. The imperial regime finally succeeded in restoring "order" over a civilized world which in large part had ceased to exist.