Urban World History

URBAN WORLD HISTORY

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L u c - N o r m a n d T e ll i e r

URBAN WORLD HISTORY An economic and geographical perspective

2009 Presses de l’Université du Québec Le Delta I, 2875, boul. Laurier, bur. 450 Québec (Québec) Canada  G1V 2M2

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Library and Archives Canada cataloguing in publication Tellier, Luc-Normand Urban World History : an economic and geographical perspective Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-2-7605-1588-8 1. Cities and towns - History. 2. Sociology, Urban. 3. Polarization (Social sciences). 4. Space in economics. 5. World history. 6. Economic history. I. Title. HT111.T44 2009

307.7609

C2008-941973-1

We are grateful for the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada under the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Publication of this book was made possible through the financial support of Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC). This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Layout : Alphatek Cartographer : Camille Ouellet-Dallaire Cover : Richard Hodgson

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 PUQ 2009 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, translation, or adaptation without authorization. © 2009 Presses de l’Université du Québec Legal deposit – 1st quarter 2009 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Printed in Canada

Table of Contents

Lisf of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII List of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 1 FROM THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE AND URBANIZATION TO THE FIRST URBEXPLOSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Origins and Beginning of Humankind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Beginnings of Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agriculture and Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agriculture, Mobility, and Urbanization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergence of Urbanization in the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appearance of Pre-urban Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 26 28 29 33 35

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Appearance of Urban Cities in the Sumer Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Appearance of Urbanization in Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 The Strategic Role of the Phoenician Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The Strategic Role of the Persian Gulf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 The Babylonian Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 The Assyrians and the Tigris Axis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 The Expansion of the Babylonian Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The Greek Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Urbanization in the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 The Indus Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Appearance of Urbanization on the Loess Plateau of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 The Emergence of Urbanization in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Agriculture and Pre-Columbian Pottery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Urbanization in the Northern Pre-Columbian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Urbanization in the Southern Pre-Columbian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

CHAPTER 2 UNDERSTANDING THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The First Urban Revolution and Networks’ Critical Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Breaking Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The “Interface” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The “Transshipment” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Central Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Network Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Urban Revolution and Agglomeration Economies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115 117 118 119 120 123 128

CHAPTER 3 THE TWO FIRST ECONOMY-WORLDS: THE ROMAN AND CHINESE EMPIRES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 The Emergence of the Roman Economy-World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Consolidation of the Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Triumph of Christianity and the Decline of the Western Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . The Fall of the Western Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Emergence of the Chinese Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Loess Plateau to the Great Plain of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cities of the Great Plain of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cities of the Red Basin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Greatness of the Chinese Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

134 137 142 145 151 154 155 159 162 164

CHAPTER 4 UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF URBAN EVOLUTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Topodynamic Evolution and Spatial Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Management of Municipal Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Multiplier Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Evolution and Repulsive Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169 172 173 174

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Repulsive Forces and the Aging of Urban Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Repulsive Forces and Polarization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Repulsive Forces and Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

CHAPTER 5 THE GREAT EBB: ISLAM OUT TO CONQUER THE GREAT AND ASIAN CORRIDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 From the Fall of Rome to the Advent of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Baghdad Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Moorish Outpost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . South of the Sahara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Eastern Outposts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Islam Re-Launched by the Turko-Mongol Invasions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Non-Military Progression of Islam in the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

185 189 195 198 202 206 208 215 218

CHAPTER 6 UNDERSTANDING TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Topodynamic Inertia and Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Industrialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Evolution of Socio-Economic Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia and Cumulative Process of Location Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Interaction Between Potentiality and Reality, a Possible Explanation of Topodynamic Inertia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Deterministic Case of Topodynamic Inertia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Topodynamic Inertia in Metropolitan and City Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia in Urbexplosion Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topodynamic Inertia at the World Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reversibility of Topodynamic Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

233 234 235 236 236 238 239 240 241 242

CHAPTER 7 THE GREAT EBB: EUROPE’S FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 The Byzantine Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spanish Reconquista . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Resurrection of the West European Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Forming of France, a Territorial State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Expansion of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gestation of the Northern Europe Urbexplosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

245 253 259 262 281 284 292

CHAPTER 8 THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA AND THE RETURN IN STRENGTH OF THE OCCIDENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Building a Bridge Between Europe and America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 The Re-Alignment of the European Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

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The Rhône, the Rhine, and the St. Gotthard Pass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Pole of Northern Europe: Amsterdam and London. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Territorial States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The American Periphery of the New European Economy-World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

312 315 320 329

CHAPTER 9 THE ADVENT OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION AND THE SECOND URBAN REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Liberalism, Prelude to the Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Motorized Transportation on Urban Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Southeastward Movement in the European Section of the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The Wave of Colonization that Overwhelmed Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The European Expansion in Asia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

358 366 377 383 399

CHAPTER 10 UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF MOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION . . . . . 417 The Impact on Polarization of Evolving from Animal to Motorized Transportation . . . . . . Reference, Attraction, and Repulsion Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of a Single Reference Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Two Reference Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Animal Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Relay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Motorized Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Three Reference Points, or “Triangle” Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of More Than Three Reference Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Explaining the Basic Paradox of Space-Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motors and Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interdependence of Location Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spatial Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Biased Reductions of Space-Friction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Larger Cities Made Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loading/Unloading Costs and Absolute Advantages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

419 419 422 423 425 427 428 429 431 432 432 433 434 435 437 438 439

CHAPTER 11 THE AGE OF AUTOMOBILE AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN CORRIDOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 From London to the Trans-Siberian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Emergence of the American Corridor in North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of the American Corridor on Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From America to Japan and Asia in the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

446 459 487 496

CHAPTER 12 UNDERSTANDING TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 The Creation and Spread of Innovations in the Geographical Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 The True Meaning of Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

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CHAPTER 13 POLES AND ROUTES THROUGH HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 The Evolution of City Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution in the Form of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution of the Form of Communication Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Main Categories of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolution of Centrality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transportation and the Relocation of Activities in the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Are European and Canado-American Cities as Different as It Is Usually Said? . . . . . . . . . . . Developed and developing cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

523 525 530 531 535 538 540 542

CONCLUSION THE BROAD PATTERNS OF HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563 APPENDIX 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 TABLES OF DEMOGRAPHIC EVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Demographic Evolution of Çatalhüyük, Jericho, Jarmo, Eridu, Ur, and Uruk, 7300–300 BC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Memphis, Thebes, Byblos, Ugarit, and Tyre, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Babylon, Ashur, Nimrud, and Nineveh, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Hattusa, Damascus, Jerusalem, Petra, Susa, and Persepolis, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mycenae, Troy, Syracuse, Catania, Taranto, and Ephesus, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Byzantium, Marseille, and Alexandria, 7300–300 BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Ai Khanum, Khotan-Hotian, Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and Kalibangan, 2200 BC–AD 1300 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Changan-Xi’an, Kaifeng, Luoyang, Beijing, Zhengzhou, Nanking, and Chengdu, 2200 BC–AD 1300 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mexico, Cuzco, Chan Chan, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Uxmal, Tikal, and Palenque, 100–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Constantinople, Rome, Carthage, Lyon, Caesarea, and Nisa, 400 BC–AD 500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Baghdad, Constantinople, Córdoba, Cairo, Paris, Fes, Antioch, and Marrakech, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Palermo, Seville, Granada, Adrianople, Sarai, Milan, and Venice, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Isfahan, Kairouan, Thessaloniki, Bruges, Mecca, Prague, and Benin, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

576 576 577 577 578 578 579 579 580 580 581 581 582

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Demographic Evolution of Preslav, Ghent, Cologne, Bologna, M’banza Congo, Kiev, and Amalfi, 450–1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Lisbon, Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Ratisbon, Budapest, and Hamburg, 450–1500. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Vijayanagar, Delhi, Agra, Ahmadabad, and Surat, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Peking-Beijing, Hangzhou, Lahore, Zayton, and Panaji-Goa, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Manila, Jakarta, Samarkand, Malacca, Colombo, and Macau, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Canton-Guangzhou, Tokyo, Kyoto, Pegu-Bago, Ningbo, Nara, and Angkor, 450–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Vienna, Naples, Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels, Rome, and Bordeaux, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Genoa, Florence, Antwerp, Norwich, Cádiz, Versailles, and Basel, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, and Potosi, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Quebec City, 1500–1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of London, Paris, Manchester, Birmingham, Lille, Leeds, Glasgow, and Liverpool, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Bombay, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bangkok, Karachi, Tehran, Hong Kong, Lagos, and Kinshasa, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Barcelona, Hanoi, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Algiers, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Dakar, Belgrade, Ibadan, Tunis, Khartoum, Rotterdam, Zurich, and Kigali, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Madras, Sydney, and Singapore, 1750–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Stockholm, and Essen, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, and Osaka, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Buenos Aires, Peking-Beijing, Chicago, Tianjin, Washington, San Francisco, and Mukden-Shenyang, 1825–2000. . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Santiago, Dallas, Toronto, Detroit, Houston, and Minneapolis, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic Evolution of Atlanta, Seattle, Montreal, Vancouver, Pinkiang-Harbin, and Montevideo, 1825–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

582 583 583 584 584 585 585 586 586 587 587 588 588 589 589 590 590 591 591 592

APPENDIX 2 CITIES BY TYPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 APPENDIX 3 SILK ROAD NETWORK SYNTHESIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603

List of Figures

Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 10.1: Figure 10.2: Figure 10.3: Figure 10.4:

Evolution of the World Rate of Urbanization (cities having at least two thousand inhabitants) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Braudel’s Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Transportation Cost Functions Corresponding to Animal, Relay, and Motorized Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 Finding the Optimal Location: Animal Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426 Finding the Optimal Location: Relay Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 Finding the Optimal Location: Motorized Transportation with Two Attraction Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

List of Maps

Map 1: Map 2: Map 3: Map 4: Map 5: Map 6: Map 7: Map 8: Map 9: Map 10: Map 11: Map 12:

The Three Topodynamic Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Beginnings of Urbanization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The World of Phoenicians and Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 The Assyrian Empire, the New Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Empire of Alexander the Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 The Silk Road, the Straight Road, and the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Two Pre-Columbian Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 The Roman Empire at Its Peak (around AD 100) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 The Great Ebb and the Fusion of the Great and Asian Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 The Great Ebb West of the Persian Gulf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 The Great Ebb West in the Indian Section of the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 The Great Ebb in the Asian Corridor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

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Urban World History

Map 13: Map 14: Map 15: Map 16: Map 17: Map 18: Map 19: Map 20: Map 21:

The Venetian Empire from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . The New Westward Movement in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Five Main Passes of the Alps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Americas between 1492 and 1825 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Epicenter of the Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Great Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The Spreading of European Colonialism through the Asian Corridor . . . . . . . . . . The European Section of the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moscow at a Crossroads of the Network Linking the Saracen Route and the ’’Route from the Varangians to the Greeks’’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map 22: The American Section of the American Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

274 307 313 330 354 384 405 447 456 461

“There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.” Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), 32

Introduction

I

n 1997 and 1998, two books became best sellers. The first one, Guns, Germs and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies, was written by Jared Diamond, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. The book’s basic premise was that the advantage some peoples have had during various epochs over other peoples cannot be ex plained by their genetics, their intelligence, or cultural superiority. It was linked to their geographical location and various environmental factors. Diamond neatly summarized his argument, stating: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”1 The second book was written by David S. Landes, and it bore the title The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. In contrast to Diamond, Landes believes that Max Weber was right, and that the history of economic development demonstrates that culture makes the difference.2 As for geography, he tended to minimize its influence by deriding the French geographer Edmond Demolins who claimed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that, if the history of the world were to start over again in a context where the surface of the earth remained unchanged, it would follow the same broad lines.3 Since the beginning of history, wealthy and healthy peoples have held the conviction that their genes, their race, their culture, or their religion has made them superior to poor and ill peoples. Writing their own history, they

1. 2. 3.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 25. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Edmond Demolins, Comment la route crée le type social (Paris: Didot, “Les grandes routes des peuples, essai de géographie sociale,” 1901), 1-ix.

4

Urban World History

have attempted to persuade others that their wealth and good fortune was derived from their inner fortitude, hard work, and superior intelligence—all internal or “endogenous” factors—and that “exogenous” factors such as geography and environment played only a very minor role in their success. History presented this way, if unchecked and unchallenged, can lead to racial intolerance. The position of this book is much closer to Diamond and Demolins’s in that it argues world history can be better explained by finding and understanding the numerous spatial regularities that mark humanity’s historical evolution, while adopting a neutral perspective with respect to cultures, races, and civilizations. However, rather than highlighting the importance of geography in terms of regional climate, flora, and fauna, as do Diamond and Demolins, this work demonstrates the widespread and determining influence of what will be referred to as “topodynamic inertia”—best described as the tendency for economic development to follow long-standing spatial patterns and trends. Cultures adapt to the spatial economic logic, much more than they determine it. Space is the main organizer and the great mold of socioeconomic phenomena. Economies are based on exchanges, which take place at markets, and the flows of exchanged goods and services follow commercial routes, which are very much influenced by geography. Seas, rivers, plains, caravan routes, canals, roads and railways are all dependent on the form of the continents, their topography, climate, hydrography and vegetation. The resulting commercial routes form networks and the nodes of those play a dominant role in the economic development. Innumerable examples of this will be presented throughout this book. While spatiotemporal regularities can be identified throughout history, it is impossible to propose a coherent and systematic racial explanation of human evolution. All main racial groups have been, in turn, masters and slaves. It must not be forgotten, for example, that in the Roman Empire, and, more recently, in the Ottoman Empire, blond peoples with blue eyes were much more likely to be slaves than masters. In Ancient Egypt, the Semitic Jews were slaves while the Pharaohs of the Nubian dynasty were Negroid, or at least Nilo-Saharan. The non-racial model of history found in this work situates topodynamic inertia within the context of more general topodynamic theory (in ancient Greek, topos means “location,” and dunamis, “force”). This original theory aims to provide a coherent vision of the space-economic evolution of the world since the appearance of urbanization. It is an early contribution to “anoeconomics,” a new part of economic theory (in ancient Greek, ano means “going back through time, and going up through space”). Anoeconomics studies world economic phenomena on a scale that transcends individuals,

5

Introduction

firms, groups, and even states and governments. It is predicated on the “law of economy worlds”4 according to which economic cores exist that dominate large regions of the world, covering various territories and countries. Economy worlds law suggests that wealth is distributed from rich cores to the poor peripheries according to what Landes calls “development gradients”5 whose logic is much more geographical and spatial than national and macroeconomic. Anoeconomics is the natural extension to microeconomics (which focuses on individuals and firms in the context of market supply and demand), mesoeconomics (which deals with regional economies), and macroeconomics (which studies government policies mainly with respect to inflation and unemployment). Adopting an anoeconomic perspective, this work traces patterns of spatial regularities and the evolution of the spatial distribution of world’s populations and productions over the past six thousand years, both on the global and local (city) levels. Once such regularities have been detected, geoeconomic, political, sociological, cultural or racial logics will be looked for in order to explain them. The priority will be given to the search for culturally neutral explanations before resorting to too-often simplistic explanations based on races, cultures, or political systems. What emerges is a theory that shows clearly the predominance of space-economic explanations, and relegates to a secondary position the influence of cultural and socio-political factors on the evolution of wealth and well-being. In short, two questions will be addressed. First, are there geographical regularities in economic development? Second, if such regularities can be identified, how do they relate to economic theory? Other questions will also be addressed, particularly in the theoretical chapters. Why is it that, since the very beginning of urbanization, economic development has been structured by what can be referred to as urban poles? These can be described as urban agglomerations that dominate an urban system or at least a significant part of it. How can we explain that, throughout history, new poles have emerged, and progressively supplanted the old dominating poles? Why is it that dominant economic poles end up declining? Is there an explanation for why dominant poles succeeded one another according to identifiable spatial trajectories? Are spatial regularities better explained by political, sociological and cultural factors, or by space-economic and geographical factors?

4.

5.

This expression comes from Hervé Le Bras, La planète au village: migrations et peuplement en France (La Tour d’Aigues: Datar/Éditions de l’Aube, 1993), 199. Le Bras refers to Fernand Braudel’s concept of “economy world.” Ibid., chap. 16.

6

Urban World History

In exploring these questions, three main regularities are examined. The first delves into the very existence of poles, that is, it grapples with the idea of urbanization as an elementary phenomenon. The second refers to the “polarization of the poles,” which conjoins with the fact that poles polarize each other to produce: 1- urban systems and hierarchies; 2- “urbexplosions,” namely organic urban systems that evolve through time and space; 3- Braudelian “economy worlds.” The third major regularity is related to the historical succession of world’s dominating poles within “topodynamic corridors.” The concept of the urban system is static. It refers to the structural relationships of domination, which link together the urban poles of various sizes within a given regional, national or continental space. For instance, authors can study the French, Canadian, and North-American urban systems as well as Californian or Siberian. Most of the time, urban systems are defined with respect to political units and borders. From a systemic point of view, urban systems can and usually do extend beyond such borders, especially when they grow. This is why the concept of “urbexplosion” is useful. The idea of urbexplosion is dynamic.6 It corresponds to an evolving urban system that has an organic unity characterized by the presence of one or several poles that dominate, simultaneously or successively, the whole system, and by the fact that its external limit evolves through time in order to include many zones belonging to various regions, provinces, or countries. For example, the urbexplosion presently dominated by New York was dominated by Philadelphia, 180 years ago. Its external limit progressively extended to the interior of the continent, both in Canada and in the United States. As a dynamic construct, it even occasionally moved back as a consequence of the expansion of the Chicago or Los Angeles urbexplosions. The concept of the economy world, conceived of by Braudel, inspired by German geographers, and taken up by Wallerstein, is more static than dynamic. It refers to an urban system, or a macro-system made of urban systems, which extends over an important part of the globe, includes a dominat ing core, a semi-periphery as well as a periphery, and has reached such a degree of economic integration and self-sufficiency (autarky) that it constitutes a world in itself. The Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire from the beginning of our era are good examples of economy worlds. The widely used concepts of core and periphery lie at the heart of the notion of economy world.

6.

Luc-Normand Tellier, “Projecting the Evolution of the North-American Urban System and Laying the Foundations of a Topodynamic Theory of Space Polarization,” Environment and Planning A, 27 (1995): 1109–1131.

7

Introduction

To best understand the predominant influence of space, it is necessary to refer to theories focused on the role of geographical space in human economic systems, particularly space-economic theory. Geographical space is very complex, and it is not easy to translate it into mathematical models without losing important aspects of its context and substance. From a mathematical point of view, geographical space can be treated as a plane or spherical space, as bi- or tridimensional, as well as Euclidean, network, or topological space. Each option bears both advantages and disadvantages—each one articulates important aspects of real geographical space while leaving other influential factors in the dark. A given model may be suitable for studying a particular case while insufficient in another case. A good example of this relates to urban system theory. The classical central-place theories of Walter Christaller and August Lösch are premised on the simple concept of Euclidean “as the crow flies” distance, and succeed in illustrating how urban systems can develop in a logical way, while referring to a very abstract and unrealistically homogeneous plane (a “circular isotropic space,” to be more scientific) where all consumers are uniformly distributed.7 In contrast, Vance, and Hohenberg and Lees have created a theory of urban systems called the network system theory, based on network space and in which distances are calculated along networks.8 Both approaches are worthwhile: as a matter of fact, the urban system of France is better understood by means of Christaller’s model whereas the CanadoAmerican system corresponds more to the network system model. Studying a given spatial reality may reveal very different spatial logics depending on the scale used. Surprisingly, Euclidean and network distances have a very different relevancy at various scales. For instance, inside the city, the analysis of individual trips usually requires taking into account network distances instead of “as the crow flies” distances, since citizens normally travel along networks made of corridors, sidewalks, streets, highways, subways, bus routes, elevators, and so on. At the scale of the individual the city is, above all, an entanglement of networks. On the other hand, in studying the city as a whole or the relations between its centre and the suburbs, Euclidean distances remain relevant and essential. In the case of urban systems, the same phenomenon prevails. At the scale of a section of an urban system, for

7.

8.

About central-place theory, see Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and August Lösch, The Economics of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); about the notion of circular isotropic space, see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Boucherville, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1983, second edition). See James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

8

Urban World History

instance at the scale of the Boston-dominated part of the northeast section of the North-American urban system, network distances are more relevant than Euclidean ones. But, at the scale of the entire northeast section of the North-American urban system, Euclidean distances are extremely useful in understanding the global logic of that system. It is interesting to note that passing from Euclidean to network distances may be progressive. One of the best tools to study spatial regularities is the analysis of gravity fields (based on gravity models).9 In such analyses, lower values of the distance exponent yield gravity fields that are better interpreted in terms of Euclidean distances to the centres, whereas higher values of the distance exponent generate maps of gravity fields that must be interpreted in terms of network distances. Passing from static to dynamic analysis makes things even more complicated. Looking at the evolution of urban systems throughout the world, de Vries points out that a great stability of the system at the international scale may be associated with an important instability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales while, inversely, a great instability of the system at the international scale may also be associated with an important stability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales.10 Moreover, as Le Bras remarks, factors that play a determining role in the spatial evolution of a phenomenon depend directly on the scale of the analysis.11 For instance, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale of a continent, the natural growth of population is the key factor while immigration plays a marginal role, whereas, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale a the various cities of a national urban system, natural growth usually is secondary, and immigration is the main factor. To be more specific, if Toronto outstripped 9.

10. 11.

A gravity model conveys the idea that, ceteris paribus, the more people and activities are located at two given locations and the smaller the distance is between those two points, the larger the number of interactions (trips, phone calls, e-mails, trade, exchanges, ideas, etc.) between two locations is likely to be. The impact of distance on the number of interactions varies through time and depending on geographical areas and the type of interactions. See about that: Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique. L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris, Economica, 2006); Audrey Bossuyt, Laurence Broze, and Victor Ginsburgh, “On invisible trade relations between Mesopotamian cities during the Third Millennium BC,” The Professional Geographer, 53 (2001): 374–383; Anne-Célia Disdier and Keath Head, “The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade,” Working Paper no. 186 (Milan: Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano, 2004); Ernesto Stein and Christian Daude, “Longitude Matters: Time Zones and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment,” mimeo (Washington: Inter-American Development Bank, 2002). Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 123. Ibid., 6.

9

Introduction

Montreal in terms of population growth during the last sixty years, it is not because Torontonians have had more children; it is rather because Toronto attracted more immigrants. After having noted that, generally, different factors exert a major influence at different scales, Le Bras underlines that, ultimately, the only factor that plays a role at all scales is space and distance. This point of view underpins the argument throughout this book. The search for spatial regularities requires resorting to different scales of analysis, various concepts of distance—sometimes network distance, sometimes Euclidean distance—as well as using sometime different exponents of distance in the analysis of gravity fields. In sum, the search for regularity requires disparity—the incorporation of dissimilar theories is necessary to create a unified understanding. A range of conceptual tools will be used in this work to bring out consistencies, patterns, logics, and systems, and to explain them in a theoretically and historically coherent way. Strangely enough, the main reason why geographical space has been less and less considered as a valid explanatory element of the world evolution is the fact that geographers themselves too often chose to present space as the main basis of the racial and cultural differences that, supposedly, explained history instead of seeing in space a factor that could, directly, determine the historical evolution. According to “moral” or “mesological” geography, environment and temperament have been associated. Cold climates fostered discipline, zeal for work, and self-control, whereas hot climates generated indolence, laziness, and indiscipline. This type of argument led to elaborate a racist geography that, for a long time, discredited any geographical approach to history, and prevented scholars from realizing that, far from offering a scientific basis to racism, geography could provide the bases for an understanding of history, which, completely, marginalizes the impact of races, and even cultures. Today, the expressions “North” and “South” referring to developed and developing countries are a relic of “moral” geography. It is true that, up until the recent past, rich countries, in terms of per capita income, were to be found in the temperate zones, especially in the northern hemisphere, and the poor countries, in the tropical or semi-tropical zones. However, this is absolutely not a constant of history. Islam was for many centuries at the forefront of civilization when its heart, dominated by Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, lay relatively to the south in zones surrounded with desert. Now, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, that of Singapore, is practically located at the equator. Singapore and Malaysia no more belong to the supposedly poor South, while many northern regions of the ex-USSR are getting poorer, and are less and less part of the rich North. In this book, the influence of geographical space on the historical evolution will refer to climate or physical geography in the wider sense. ***

10

Urban World History

Readers of this book, which stresses the major role of geographical space in the world’s evolution, may be surprised to learn that its writer is no geographer. He rather is an economist who came to space-economy through studies in urbanism. Actually, the classical education of an economist in North America makes no reference to the geographical dimension of economic development. Most of the time, space-economy is considered by mainstream economists as an intellectual curiosity, and it is not included in the degree course of young economists. Geographical space is not only a neglected variable in economics programs, but economic theory even suggests that it is not an important factor in the pursuit of economic development. In order to understand this point, one must go back to the very beginning of the liberal economic thought. Liberalism was born in France, during the eighteenth century, with the Physiocrats who were the first to call themselves “economists” and to propose a theoretical framework that opposed the then dominant mercantilism (or Colbertism), which aimed to maximize national gold stocks by imposing protectionist measures in order to diminish imports. The basic thesis of liberalism argues that the well-being of consumers as a whole is maximized if consumers are entirely free to consume whatever they want, if producers are absolutely free to produce whatever they want in the way they desire, and if trade between all economic agents is absolutely free, provided that pure and perfect competition prevails. This thesis purports to be universal. It pretends to hold true for economic agents of a given region, for those sets of regions within a country, as well as for all the nations of the world. From a commercial point of view, this thesis amounts to saying “trade is better than no trade,” which is the accepted way of saying it. The theory of comparative advantages, first formulated by David Ricardo in 1817, proposes a mathematical model supporting that two countries that produce two different goods with different levels of productivity are better off if they trade, and specialize in the production of the good for which they have a comparative (as opposed to an absolute) advantage. This may sound a little abstract. To explain it, let us take a simple example. Instead of speaking of two countries, let us refer to two people, Joan and Mary, who work for a language school, and who can both teach French and type. The manager of the school has them pass two exams, one for teaching French, and the other for typing. Joan obtains the best results: she gets a grade of 90% in teaching French, and 80% in typing. As for Mary, she gets 75% in teaching French, and 70% in typing. According to the model of absolute advantage, the manager should attribute to Joan the two tasks, since she obtained the best results for the two subjects. Mary would then remain unemployed.

Introduction

11 Quickly, the manager realizes that such a distribution of the tasks on the basis of the absolute advantages is neither desirable nor efficient since it generates unemployment. He then decides to call upon Mary’s services, but he must face a difficult question: what task should Mary carry out given that she is less efficient than Joan in both. The theory of comparative advantages demonstrates that the best solution involving full employment is the one where Mary is given the task for which she is relatively less inefficient, the one for which she has a comparative advantage compared with Joan. In our example, she would be asked to type, since she obtained 87,5% of the Joan’s grade for typing while getting only 83,3% of Joan’s grade in French teaching. This solution ensures that there is full employment, that each person specializes in a given task, and that everybody benefits from the situation. In order to reconstitute David Ricardo’s reasoning, it is simple enough to replace Joan with England, Mary with Portugal, French teaching with woolen cloth, and typing with wine on order to reach Ricardo’s conclusion that England should specialize in producing woolen cloth, and Portugal, in producing wine. According to the theory of comparative advantages, in a situation of world full employment, all the regions of the world must have a comparative advantage in some sector, and development is possible everywhere in all countries, wherever they are, for the best benefit of the whole humanity. The theory of comparative advantages has had a huge effect on the evolution of modern societies. It favored free trade, industrial specialization, and economic development. However, it did not, and cannot fulfill all its promises. The liberalism it inspired did not lead to world full employment, and did not allow all the regions of the world to count on their respective comparative advantages to develop. Most liberal economists recognize this, but generally deny that the failures of the system are indeed the failures of prevailing economic liberal thinking. On the contrary, they point out that the present sub-optimal situation is due to the fact that the liberal recipe is not applied everywhere, appropriate macroeconomic policies are not adopted by all governments, and major obstacles still preclude the universal application of the liberal model. In their opinion, these obstacles radically impair the mobility of persons and know-how as well as, to a lesser extent, the mobility of capital and goods. A spatial economy approach challenges some of the dogmas of the classical liberal economic theory. Among other things, the theory of spatial competition identifies cases where, instead of favoring the achievement of “social optimum” (that is the optimum for the whole society; such an optimum corresponds to the situation where consumers benefit the most from their money spending in terms of the quantity and quality of the goods and services they buy), competition actually prevents it, which invalidates the basic thesis of liberalism. Moreover, taking into account transportation costs

12

Urban World History

leads one to question the classical conclusions of the comparative advantages theory. Nevertheless, spatial economics has never pretended to shake the columns of the liberal temple, and the economist initiated to the mysteries of space-economy rarely attempts to contest traditional micro-economic and macro-economic models. In September 1987, at a regional economics symposium that took place at Lisbon, some Belgian geographers presented two maps of Europe that profoundly disrupted the classical vision of economic development through space. The first map described the spatial distribution of values added, namely the value of the production of goods and services, of seventeen countries of Western Europe in 1980. The pattern of the production distribution was amazingly concentric, the density of production declining in all directions as it moved away from a center located somewhere around the point where the borders of Belgium, Netherlands and Germany meet. In itself, the reported regularity of the spatial distribution of production of so many different countries, countries that have been so often at war during the previous century, was astonishing. What spatial or non-spatial economic theory could explain such a pattern? Was it possible to suggest, without laughing, that, by chance, all the governments of the countries located close to the said center had adopted judicious economic policies for decades while, far from the center, all the governments had been ill advised? Could the observed pattern be explained by the theory of comparative advantages or even by the traditional space-economic theories? Not really. The observed spatial distribution questioned the very popular thesis formulated by Max Weber according to which Protestantism was more propitious to capitalism than Catholicism was. At the center mentioned above, the main towns contradicted Weber’s theory: Liege is mainly Catholic, Maastricht, Catholic in a traditionally Protestant country, and Aachen, mainly Protestant. The periphery included Protestant Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Scotland as well as Catholic Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and southern Italy. Quite naturally, the observed spatial regularity of production presented by the Belgians called for further exploration on a level that surpassed the existing models of analysis, including the contributions or lack thereof of religious and cultural groups. It became crucial that states and macro-economic policies, predicated on an extremely powerful spatial logic, had to be looked into more seriously and differently by scholars. The second map was equally fascinating. It presented the spatial distribution of the population over the same area. The population pattern differed somewhat from the production map. The latter showed an axis of the greatest densities amassing from the northwest to the southeast, and passing through the center of the production pattern. This axis corresponded approximately to the “Blue Banana” extending from northern Italy to southern

13

Introduction

England along the Rhine river; the French often refer to the “Blue Banana” as the “Dorsale” or “Ridge”12), but also included regions outside of the Banana— the regions of Dublin and Manchester, to the northwest, and the regions of Naples and Athens, to the southeast. Both to the northeast and the southwest, population densities systematically decreased as the distance to the axis of the largest densities increased. That the production and population patterns had similarities was no surprise, but their systematic differences puzzled the observers. Why were the production gradients concentric when the population gradients were almost linear? Moreover, extending the population axis to the east produced a stunning axis that went from England to the region where Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France met, to Italy, Greece, Anatolia (Turkey), Phoenicia (Syria and Lebanon), and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Strangely enough, this axis was going back to the very historical sources of the Western civilization whose cradle lay in Mesopotamia, and whose evolution followed a long route through Phoenicia, Anatolia (under Persian influence), Greece, Rome, Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. The axis of the maximum population densities seemed to be a trace, a furrow left behind by the historical evolution of the Western civilization for the last five thousand years. Had our civilization’s history a spatial coherence nobody ever suspected? And did similar spatial consistencies exist elsewhere, in the case of other civilizations? What the two maps revealed was that at the continental and world scales, productions are spatially polarized, as Fernand Braudel correctly pointed out, and that the successive dominating economic poles formed some kind of spatial chain. Such a spatial coherence of economic history cannot be understood in the light of classical liberal economic theories. It even seems to question the comparative advantages theory. One could attempt to reconcile the above with the concepts of absolute and comparative advantages in the following way. As is currently accepted, the free market generates economic cycles in which full employment and unemployment alternate. If one agrees that the closer the economy is to full employment, the more comparative advantages prevail, and that the greater the level of underemployment, the more absolute advantages determine the production spatial distribution, it is natural, through the influence of comparative advantages, for periods of full employment to favor even the peripheral regions having little or no absolute advantages. However, during periods of unemployment, the peripheral zones are affected immediately—the dominance of absolute advantages reappears and those zones having a great number of absolute advantages consolidate their domination. 12.

Roger Brunet, ed., Les villes européennes (Paris : DATAR-Reclus, La Documentation française, 1989).

14

Urban World History

Thus, from one cycle to the next, the zones that benefit from absolute advantages succeed in maintaining their domination while the peripheral zones never make up for lost time and opportunity. In this dynamic process, the very first absolute advantage ends up being centrality in itself—much more so than natural resources, labor productivity or even capital. Consequently, the more economic development progresses under the liberal model, the more the world’s economic activities are polarized, and the more acute become the disparities between centers and peripheries. World full employment becomes increasingly difficult to attain, and the comparative advantages of the peripheral regions become even more illusive. The less full employment—the condition that justifies the comparative advantages theory and, consequently, liberalism itself—the less economic liberalism works. Still, the cumulative process described above is not irreversible as dominating centers succeed one another through history. Such centers are very likely to eventually decline in the same way that, in their ascending phase, they tend to consolidate. Moreover, the process of succession of dominating centers can have its own spatial logic. It can give rise to true historical trajectories, as it happened, for instance, in Canada where the domination over the Canadian economy successively passed from Quebec City to Montreal and Toronto. The same may be observed in Eurasia where, to the west of the Persian Gulf, the main economic pole shifted from Babylon to Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Istanbul, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam and, finally, London. Three main historical trajectories will be identified in this book. They follow three circular topodynamic corridors. The circular form of the corridors requires some explanation. It may seem odd, but on a globe the circle is a natural normal geometrical figure. In fact, in theory, it is much easier to adjust a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere than to adjust a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane. On a plane, the only way to adjust the line is by moving it, whereas, on a sphere, the adjustment can be done both by changing the radius of the circle, and by moving the circle. In practice, adjusting a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere amounts to intersecting a plane with a sphere, and this can only be done through successive approximations, while adjusting a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane is done in a straightforward manner by calculating a linear regression.

15

Introduction

Projection : Mercator

Projection : North Pole Orthographic

Projection : Robinson

Asian Corridor

Great Corridor

Map 1 The Three Topodynamic Corridors

Mongolo-American Corridor

16

Urban World History

The circular representation of the three topodynamic corridors must not obscure the geographical reality that underlies the corridors (see Map 1). Thus, between Ur and London, the Great Corridor is made of Euphrates and Tigris fluvial system, the Syrian Corridor, the ancient Royal Road of Persia (also known as the road of the Lydian Kings), the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, the fluvial network linking the Po, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Seine, the Escaut-Scheldt and the Meuse-Mass, and the Thames and Mersey system. To the east, between Ur and Tokyo, the Great Corridor includes the Persian Gulf, the Indus delta, the Ganges, the Xi River (Pearl River), the Yangtze River, and the Western China Sea. The Great Corridor corresponds to the southern limit of a “chain of mountain ranges” made of the Yunnan Plateau, the Himalaya, the Karakoram, Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges, the Plateau of Iran, and the Zagros, Totos Daglari, Balkans and Alps mountains. Moreover, to a great extent, it coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall. This may have contributed to the fact that agriculture expanded from Mesopotamia to Northern Europe mainly through the Great Corridor. Similarly, the Indus Valley, the Silk Road, the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial Canal of China, the Taiwan Strait, the Southern China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean, the Malabar Coast, and the Gulf of Cambay-Khambhat structure the Asian Corridor. As for the Mongolo-American Corridor, it is constituted of the Gulf Stream, the fluvial complex made of the St. Lawrence River, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, the Atlantic-Pacific-Santa Fe railway linking Kansas City to Los Angeles (which skirts round the Rockies by the south), the maritime route between Los Angeles and Tokyo through the Pacific, the Japan Sea, the Yellow Sea, the Trans-Siberian railroad, the German Mittellandkanal, and the Ruhr Valley. In North America, as in the Eurasian part of the Great Corridor, the Mongolo-American Corridor often coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall. The largest deviation between the geographical reality and the mathematically calculated central circles of the corridors is the Trans-Siberian, which follows a traditional natural trail that, at some points, gets eight hundred kilometers away from the central circle of the Mongolo-American Corridor. The layout of that corridor in Asia follows precisely the historical “steppes corridor” that passes through the Kirghiz Steppe, and served as the spinal column of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire. Except for the Trans-Siberian, most of the above-mentioned elements lie within three hundred kilometers from the three corridors’ central circles. If modern patterns of production spatial distributions are striking in their concentric character, tracing through time the evolution of these distribution patterns leads one to think in terms of trajectories. The most documented case of topodynamic trajectory relates to the shift in the population gravity center of the United States. This centre has been on the move in a systematic

17

Introduction

way since at least 1790 (year of the oldest data)—when it was located around Philadelphia—towards the southwest and Los Angeles. The observed stability of this movement gave birth to the concept of “topodynamic inertia.”13 Such a phenomenon can be spotted at all levels. For instance, at the city level, topodynamic inertia is observed both in the centripetal process of annexation and domination of the suburbs by the center of the city, and in the centrifugal process of urban sprawl. Similarly, in the case of urban systems, inertia is present in the centripetal process of the assertion of a core as well as in the centrifugal process of the extension of the hinterland towards the periphery. Inertia also plays a worldwide role in the succession of the dominating world poles within the topodynamic corridors, and topodynamic evolutions are, for the most part, slow, which makes them a good basis for generating reliable projections. Three topodynamic corridors have occupied a prominent place in the world evolution during the last six thousand years: the Great Corridor, which is the oldest, appearing with the very first urban system; the Asian or Silk Corridor, which is a little younger than the previous one, and the MongoloAmerican Corridor, which has long interacted with the two first corridors, but ended up dominating the world as a result of the appearance of motorized transportation in 1825. It is the description and history of these three corridors as they interweave with the changes and events in world history over the past six millennia that is the specific focus of the argument found in this work. The corridors are representative of spatial-economic routes that triumphed on a world scale because they led to other major routes, forming an interconnectedness, not a dead end. The axes that prevail are the most complex. For instance, the Rhine forms a system with the Po, the Rhône, the Saône, the Seine, the Thames, and the Danube. Similarly, the St. Lawrence River constitutes a network with the Hudson and the Mississippi Rivers in the same way that, very early on, the Persian Gulf, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Syrian Corridor, the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and the Aegean Sea made up an integrated circulation system. Even the continental Silk Road is a crisscross of routes that form a complex system, though similarly intertwined axes of circulation are rare. As will be seen, no topodynamic corridors are found in Africa, in Latin America, in Central America, nor in Oceania. In sum, topodynamic corridors correspond to major communication axes, that in themselves result from the integration on a world scale of complex sub-systems of communication.

13.

See Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, “Understanding Spatial Inertia: Center of Gravity, Population Densities, the Weber Problem and Gravity Potential,” Journal of Regional Science, 35, 1 (February 1995): 155–164, and Luc-Normand Tellier and Martin Pinsonnault, “Further Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Reply,” Journal of Regional Science, 38, 3 (1998): 513–534.

18

Urban World History

Topodynamic corridors correspond to geographical realities, but, as a result, they are areas where world’s wealth and financial power concentrates. For this reason, the corridors have been repeatedly invaded by masses of poor people (generally called “Barbarians”) who arrived as conquerors, as in the case of Huns or Germans, or as immigrants, like the Celts or the Slavs. Very often, for example, the Great and the Asian Corridors have been invaded by tribes that came from the Mongolo-American corridor until that last corridor itself triumphed, and started attracting people. The dominating corridors exert an irresistible attraction force on the rest of the world. That power is observed even in the field of religion. However, all of the sections of a dominating corridor don’t benefit from the same attractiveness. Within each corridor, certain poles dominate the other ones. Moreover, dominating poles are not eternal. They succeed one another, generally according to a foreseeable spatial logic marked by topodynamic inertia. Some may argue that the three corridors are merely pedagogical tools, while others conceive of them as objective realities. This book sides with the latter, arguing forcefully and comprehensively that topodynamic corridors are as real as other structural trends such as economic cycles or historical political currents linked to democratization or socialism. The idea that no structural trend could prevail in geo-economic space while similar trends could well be recognized in a non-spatial socio-economic context seems absurd. This notwithstanding, if topodynamic corridors and trends are real, does it imply that a space-economic determinism exists, from which human societies cannot escape? The answer to that question is complex. First, it must be stressed that, in the past, topodynamic trends have been stopped, and even reversed (though this is very rare). The fall of the Western Roman Empire is a good example. Secondly, new corridors can ascend. The Mongolo-American corridor just (relatively) briefly triumphed with the two Mongol Empires. Despite that, today it dominates the world. Thirdly, certain decisions have a strong topodynamic impact. Building the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial canal of China, or the Erie Canal in North America has had very important effects on topodynamic evolution. The decision made by the king and queen of Spain to send Christopher Columbus to the West in search for a route to India has had enormous topodynamic consequences. Human societies do have an influence on topodynamic trends. However, those trends themselves have been, and will continue to be, much more structural than transitory. They are slow, strong and stable, and they influence the long run and even the remote future. Most generations perceive them as unavoidable inevitabilities, as something given, which cannot be easily changed, at least not during a human lifetime. Even in the case of the “new” North American continent, the southwestward trend in the movement

19

Introduction

of the population gravity center that prevails has been and still is perceived as something so powerful that neither world war, nor civil war is likely to radically change it. Topodynamic trends are more predictable than any other economic phenomenon, infinitely more than any economic cycle. They constitute the most fundamental economic reality. One of the great errors of economic thought has been to ignore the impact that spatial concerns have had on economic outcomes. Topodynamic corridors have nothing to do with magic or mystery. They comprise interconnected communication routes, river and waterways networks, integrated and competing railways, canals, natural corridors, maritime routes, and highway networks. They correspond to the main commercial routes that came to organize the economic flow of the world over a large expanse of time. The very concrete nature of topodynamic corridors is linked to geography, but they have played their biggest role in history.

THE TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS INFERRED FROM THE PRESENT GRAVITY FIELDS The layout of the three corridors can be mathematically inferred from an analysis of the present world gravity fields (see Luc-Normand Tellier, “Étude prospective topodynamique du positionnement de la grande région de Montréal dans le monde aux horizons 2012, 2027 et 2060,” research paper 18 of Études, matériaux et documents, Montreal, Department of urban studies and tourism, University of Quebec at Montreal, 2002, 108–116). The Mongolo-American Corridor can be traced by means of an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 1, and by computing the gravity attraction vectors corresponding to the present world spatial distribution of values-added (productions). The gravity attraction vector computed at a given point in space corresponds to the resultant of all the attractive forces exerted by the economic “masses” of all the urban regions of the world on an individual located at that point who considers migrating. The layout of the Mongolo-American Corridor is obtained by considering Central and North America as a single region, and Eurasia as another region. The gravity attraction vectors of South America are computed while taking into account the attractive force of North America, and those of Africa, while taking into account the attractive force of Eurasia. Then, all the vectors of the world are oriented towards the Mongolo-American Corridor. By changing the exponent of distance for 2, and by treating the whole world as a single region, the Asian Corridor is obtained. In the northern part of corridor, vectors tend to follow the corridor. To the northwest of the corridor, the farther the vectors get from the corridor, the more they point towards the Mongolo-American Corridor, whereas, to the east of the northwestern part of the corridor, vectors are attracted by the Shanghai region. As for the Great Corridor, to a great extent, it corresponds to the most important population densities of the planet, namely the highest densities of Europe, the Ganges valley, the lower Yangtze River valley, and Japan. Its layout can be derived from the spatial distribution of attraction gravity potentials based on population, and an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 2.

CHAPTER

1

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

P

olarization, that phenomenon through which activities and people gather first in villages and then in small towns, cities and metropolises, is indisputably the most important and the most striking phenomenon of world’s history since the appearance of writing, five or six thousand years ago. Polarization is so omnipresent in the present world that the very first remark that must be made about it, the one that resonates with so many contemporaries, is that it did not always exist. Effectively, for about one hundred thousand years, our species, the Homo sapiens sapiens, has lived on this earth in a context where polarization of sedentary habitats virtually did not exist at all. From the beginning of urbanization until the appearance of motorized transportation, polarization had been a rather marginal phenomenon, and the world rate of urbanization calculated on the basis of cities having at least two thousand inhabitants probably never exceeded 5% (Figure 1). Today, about half the world population live in cities, and, in some countries, the urbanization rate exceeds 90%. The urban reality is so pervasive that even the inhabitants of the countryside are, in fact, urbanized, since the rural zones so deeply depend on cities. Despite that, even during the twentieth century, there have been some societies where polarization almost did not exist. For instance, in Rwanda and in Burundi, at the beginning of the twentieth century, no city, or significant village existed in a permanent manner. In those two countries profoundly agricultural with a very refined political system that could be compared with the European feudalism, the only concentrations of population that existed before the European colonization corresponded, in both countries, to the courts of the king and the queen mother, and these courts moved every time a king succeeded another. So there was no fixed village or town in the whole region. Thus, in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, polarization is quite recent. The evolution of its most common form, urbanization, is marked by two historical phases: that of the first urban revolution, thanks to which the world rate of urbanization went from almost 0% to 5% in a little more than

24

Urban World History

World rate of urbanization %

Appearance of preurban cities

First First urban urbexplosion revolution

Second urban revolution

50%

50%

5%

1825 2000

1% ⫺1800

0.1% ⫺3200

0% ⫺6000

1%

5%

Time (years)

Figure 1 Evolution of the World Rate of Urbanization (cities having at least two thousand inhabitants)

five thousand years, and that of the second urban revolution, which, since about 1825, has propelled the world urbanization rate to the present overall rate of approximately 50%. Before describing this long evolution that began with agriculture and the settling process, in order to reconstitute the genesis of the spatial dynamics of the world history, let us start by evoking the first steps of human history.

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

25

The Origins and Beginning of Humankind Life appeared on Earth under the form of mere unicellular organisms during the Precambrian period some four billion years ago, about five hundred million years after the forming of our planet. It took life three and a half billion years to pass from the stage of unicellular organisms to that of multicellular ones. Progressively, various phyla and classes developed on Earth till one of them, the reptiles, especially the dinosaurs, came to dominate all other species. Their domination ended about sixty-three million years ago. Fifty-seven million years passed by between the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the appearance of the first pre-human beings, probably in Africa, some six million years ago. The first Homo was born with the Homo habilis some two and a half million years ago. His descendant, Homo sapiens, appeared in East Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, and gave birth to our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, some one hundred thousand years ago. It is between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago that Homo sapiens sapiens experienced profound genetic changes, which favored his brain development and allowed for his mastering speech. Some seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens populated Asia, and Europe where he met Homo neandertalensis, which had inhabited that continent for one hundred and thirty thousand years. Homo neandertalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens coexisted in Europe for a long time till Homo neandertalensis disappeared thirty-five thousand years ago. It is just twenty thousand years ago that the first human beings started to innovate by inventing bread and using honey. This occurred in the Near East where agriculture and urbanization were also born much later. When human beings started to populate America fourteen thousand years ago, around 12,000 BC, they still had no house, nor settled villages anywhere on earth. The settling process of the human species started at various places throughout the world from around 11,000 BC, that is, some seven thousand five hundred years before the beginning of urbanization. The first dwelling places were made with clay mud mixed with minced straw. It is considered that the first significant villages were built in Mesopotamia around 9000 BC, in China around 7500 BC, and in Amazonia around 6000 BC.1 These first villages lived on gathering, hunting, and fishing, and not on agriculture. The first baskets appear at the same epoch as the settling process. The first weaved clothes are posterior, and they appear around 7000 BC.

1.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 362.

26

Urban World History

THE FERTILE CRESCENT AND THE DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS Originates from the Fertile Crescent the growing of wheat, barley, bean, pea, lentil, olive, vine, fig, date palm, pomegranate, apple, cherry, plum, and pear. Wheat , barley, pea, and lentil were domesticated around 8500 BC, whereas olive, vine, fig, date palm, and pomegranate were around 4000 BC. The domestication of apple, cherry, plum, and pear came later since it required mastering the grafting technique. Numerous animals were also domesticated for the first time in the Fertile Crescent, like dog, goat, sheep, pig, and cow. Among the six most important domesticated animals, only horse and chicken have been domesticated for the first time out of the Fertile Crescent. Horse was in Ukraine, and chicken in China and Southeast Asia.

Despite the fact that agriculture has been often done by semi-nomadic populations, like the North-American Iroquois, it is generally considered that the settling process preceded agriculture and the domestication of animals. The first animal to be domesticated was dog, and it was just about 10,000 BC. Goat, sheep, and pig were domesticated around 8000 BC, cow around 6000 BC, and horse around 4000 BC.2 Donkey has been the first domesticated animal to be used for transporting people and merchandises. Before the appearance of agriculture, the total world population probably never exceeded fifteen million inhabitants (that is, the present population of the Netherlands). It has been estimated that, in that period, earth could optimally nourish a population of 8,6 million inhabitants living on hunting, fishing and gathering.3 It must be noticed that, as will be seen, the first “pre-urban cities” were basically inhabited by gatherers and hunters.

s THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE Agriculture appeared, independently, in numerous parts of the world.4 It appeared first in Southwest Asia: in the Near East and the Fertile Crescent, in present Iran and Iraq at the foot of the Zagros mountains, in Palestine around the Dead Sea, and in present Turkey on the Anatolian plateau. In those regions, domestication of plants began about 8500 BC, and the domestication of animals (excluding than dog) around 8000 BC. Agriculture also developed in Southern Asia, on the plains liable to flooding of the Ganges (in present India), Brahmaputra (Bangladesh), and Irawaddy (Burma-Myanmar) rivers.

2. 3. 4.

Ibid., 167. Fekri A. Hassan, Demographic Archaeology (London: Academic Press, 1981). Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy, second edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 144, and Jared Diamond, op. cit., 98 and 362–363.

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

27

Finally, it appeared in China, in the valleys of the Huang He (Yellow) and Yangtze rivers. In those regions, domestication of plants and animals began around 7000 BC. In the Americas, agriculture developed independently, first, in Mesoamerica, in the region of Tamaulipas to the northeast of present Mexico, and in the Tehuacán Valley to the south of present Mexico City. In these regions, domestication of plants dates back to 3000 BC, and animals to 500 BC. In the Andes, agriculture appeared in the coastal region of present Peru where plants were domesticated from about roughly 3000 BC, and animals from 3500 BC. Finally, agriculture developed from 2500 BC in the Ohio basin (in present United States). To these regions, four more zones of the world should be added where agriculture probably was developed independently: the African zone of Sahel and Sahara, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea. It may seem odd that, among those regions where agriculture appeared spontaneously, many regions, like Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Andes, Sahel, and Sahara, are not considered today as particularly favorable to agriculture. It must be said that some of these have experienced important climate changes. For instance, many Sahel and Sahara zones, which are desert or semi-desert today, received normal rainfall and were covered with vegetation between 7000 and 4000 BC.5 However, it remains true that many regions where agriculture began were not easy to cultivate, and that some form of ecologic and geographical chance played a role.6 There exist about two hundred thousand vegetal species on Earth, of which just a few thousand are edible, the rest being indigestible, poor in nutritional value, difficult to prepare or uneasy to gather. Among the edible species, there are just a few hundred that have been domesticated, and most of them have been relatively early. Almost all the vegetal species cultivated today already were cultivated at the beginning of this era, at the time of the Roman Empire. At the end of the Pleistocene, climate changes favored the extension of the ecological zones favorable to growing wild cereals in the Fertile Crescent. By chance, a very high proportion of the edible vegetal species were also present in the Fertile Crescent, which contributed to the fact that this region became the first cradle of agriculture on Earth. According to Diamond, the spatial distribution of the species that can be domesticated explains, to a large extent, the geographical allocation of the cradles of agriculture. The same thing is true in the case of the domestication of animal species. Started from various independent centers, the domestication of plants and animals 5. 6.

It must be remembered that the last ice age ended just around 7000 BC. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 29.

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extended relatively rapidly to the whole planet. Ten thousand years ago, all human beings lived on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Eight thousand years later, at the beginning of this era, the vast majority of the human species lived on agriculture and breeding, whether in Eurasia, Africa, America, or Oceania. In order to understand this evolution, it is useful to know that agriculture and breeding are such that, instead of representing 0.1% of the biomass of a hectare of land as they do in an untouched “natural” environment, domesticated species get to constitute 90% of it. This allows for augmenting the production of edible calories to the point where one hectare can feed ten and even one hundred times more farmers and stockbreeders than gatherers and hunters. This is why the introduction of agriculture produced a radical increase in population densities, which is, most of the time, a prerequisite (but not a sufficient condition) for the emergence of a real urbanization.

Agriculture and Topodynamic Corridors Since domesticated vegetal and animal species differ from an autonomous source of agriculture to another, it is generally possible to reconstitute the trajectories of the migration of the various cultivated species in the same way that the geographical trajectories of the migration of ideas, religions or inventions can be traced back. For instance, the spread of the cultivation of barley and two kinds of wheat (Triticum dicoccides and Triticum dicossum) used to make bread and pasta has been pieced together.7 Those crops started in the Euphrates region about 8500 BC. They reached Anatolia and the Aegean Sea, and were grown in Cyprus and Greece from around 6500 BC. Over the Ionian and Adriatic Seas, they came to Italy around 6000 BC, then to France and Germany around 5400 BC, to Spain around 5200 BC, to England around 3500 BC, and, finally, to Norway around 2500 BC.8 The trajectory of the fastest westward diffusion of the cultivation of wheat and barley, as well as agriculture, originates from Mesopotamia and, strictly, follows the central axis of the Great Corridor. To the east, the migration of agriculture also followed the Great Corridor. It reached the Indus Valley and the Indian subcontinent about 6500 BC. The eastward movement did not stop at the Indus River. It went on inside the Great Corridor towards the Ganges Valley and the northeast of present India. However, this last stage was slower because it implied passing from regions where rains predominated during winter to regions where they 7. 8.

Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Jared Diamond, op. cit., 181.

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29

predominated during summer. Passing from one region to the other required using new techniques and growing vegetal species that were different from those coming from Mesopotamia. By contrast, the spread of the wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia occurred more easily through the Asian Corridor from the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau (in the present Shaanxi province dominated by the city of Xi’an). This fact is very important, since it testifies to a several thousand years old relation between the Indus Valley and the Loess Plateau. Out of the corridors, the agriculture migration process from Mesopotamia was slower. For instance, it is considered that the cultivation of wheat and barley reached Egypt only around 6000 BC, that is, five hundred years after it had attained the Indus River, Cyprus, and Greece. The migration to the rest of North Africa, Ethiopia, or Central Asia came even later than that. The arrival of the Mesopotamian crops in Egypt prompted the spectacular takeoff of the Egyptian civilization. Out of the eight principal crops which were the basis of the Mesopotamian agriculture and became the foundation of the Egyptian agriculture, only one, barley, existed in Egypt at a natural state before the coming of agriculture. Despite that, those imported crops found in Egypt favorable conditions that allowed that country to develop its agriculture on a very large scale. The spread of agriculture from Mesopotamia through the Great Corridor constitutes a first evidence of the existence of this corridor. A second illustration of the historical role played by the Great Corridor comes from the diffusion of the prehistoric Ubaid culture, whose name comes from an archaeological site located in the Sumer region of Mesopotamia, six kilometers west of the city of Ur. This pre-urban culture is considered to be the one that gave birth to the very first urbanization, that of the first urban revolution. The Ubaid culture developed between 5900 and 4300 BC from the site of Ubaid. From there, it expanded to the west along the Tigris, but even more along the Euphrates towards the Syrian Corridor and the Orontes River. The trajectory of the diffusion of the Ubaid culture precisely corresponds to the central axis of the Great Corridor, which also played a major role in the spread of urbanization.

Agriculture, Mobility, and Urbanization Urbanization appeared in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC, in China around 2000 BC, and in Mesoamerica around 300 BC. About five thousand years separate the appearance of agriculture and that of urbanization both in Mesopotamia and in China. In America, the lag is closer to three thousand years. Such a huge gap between the coming of agriculture and urbanization is stunning, and it shows the complexity of the conditions that are required for urbanization to emerge.

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Cities are, above all, meeting places where people exchange goods, but also information, and where they get protection in exchange for submission to a political power, spiritual grace through the intermediary of priests and worship places, as well as services and cultural experiences. In order for these exchanges to take place, a supply and a solvent demand for goods and services to exchange must exist, as well as the possibility to exchange at a reasonable cost. This is why the appearance of urbanization has been historically linked to the increase of the productivity in agriculture and breeding, as well as in the production of non-agricultural goods that could be exchanged for agricultural goods, but it has also been linked, even more importantly, to the improvement of transport and communications (among other things, by means of the use of wheel, roads, boat, and, also, writing). Many historians of urbanization (not to say the vast majority of them) have traditionally placed agriculture at the origin of urbanization on the pretence that city dwellers were offered the possibility to survive just when agricultural surpluses were realized, which made it possible for them to feed themselves. This reasoning has been repeated ad nauseam. It bears, however, a major flaw: why should farmers produce agricultural surpluses as long as it was impossible for them to exchange them for goods they did not produce? Wouldn’t it be more logical to inverse the reasoning, and to say that agricultural surpluses and market-oriented agriculture (as opposed to subsistence agriculture) were made possible by the supply on the markets of non-agricultural goods?9 To redraw our understanding of the relationship between agriculture and urbanization, it is useful to remember certain facts. First, trade, and even long-distance trade, existed in many cases prior to urbanization. In the case of Near East, it is a well-established fact. It is most likely that trade caused urbanization, at least as much as, and probably more than, agriculture did. Second, if three to five thousand years separated the beginnings of agriculture and urbanization, as far as we know, the appearance of the first “urban” cities coincided with three innovations, which deeply transformed long-distance trade. The first of these was the invention of wheel and wagon in Western Asia. It is close to the Black Sea that the oldest evidence of the existence of transportation on wheels has been found, and the relic that has been discovered there goes back to about 3400 BC. The diffusion of that invention followed the Great Corridor, as did agriculture and so many other innovations from Western Asia like plow, sail, windmill, potter’s wheel, all invented around 4500 BC, as well as lock, pulley, and rotating mill driven by

9.

Jane Jacob, in The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969), went as far as suggesting that cities made agriculture possible, and not the opposite. This is a defendable position as long as we refer to market-oriented agriculture.

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men or animals.10 It must be stressed that among the advantages of the Middle East is the presence of ancient sources of copper, mainly along the present border of Iraq and Iran in the region of the Zagros Mountains up to the Black Sea. The development of metal technology played an important role in many of those innovations. The second invention that revolutionized transportation was boat, which appeared also around 4300 to 4000 BC. It seems to have been invented first in the Black Sea region, and then in Sumer and Egypt. Boat rapidly replaced raft and pirogue that were previously used. The third invention that profoundly transformed the world of communications is that of writing, which originated, around 3400 BC, from the Fertile Crescent, in the Sumer region or Egypt. Until recently, Sumerians were considered as the inventors of writing. Now, some archaeologists uphold that Egyptians preceded them in that field. In any case, writing had a major effect by allowing for bookkeeping, complex accounting, and sending long and elaborated messages to remote destinations. The dates of the appearance of cities, wagon, boat, and writing, so to say, coincide, and all those innovations came from the Fertile Crescent or the Black Sea regions. This fact is worth noting since if, around 3200 BC, agriculture was already rather widespread in Asia, Europe and Africa, urbanization developed at that time in only one region, the Near East where those innovations took place. Thus, if the link between agriculture and urbanization can be questioned, the historical link between the increase in mobility and urbanization remains incontestable. Indeed, the prerequisite to both urbanization and a surplus-producing agriculture is the possibility to exchange, and the possibility to exchange directly depends on the means of transportation, transport costs, and the existence of efficient markets. Once the possibility to exchange is guaranteed, the natural complementarity between cities and countryside spontaneously generates the development of both cities and market-oriented agriculture, at least in regions where agriculture is possible. When trying to clarify the links between agriculture and the urban phenomenon, one must never forget that, at the beginning, the very first cities, those defined as “pre-urban” like Çatalhöyük, Jericho or Jarmo, were inhabited by hunters and gatherers in the absence of agriculture. Moreover, in different periods, numerous military, religious, or trading cities were created in arid or very little cultivated areas, sometimes surrounded with desert. Finally, if generally throughout history urbanization went together with an increase in the productivity of agriculture, many cases existed also in which urbanization rose in regions where agriculture was declining. This happened in developed as well as underdeveloped countries, and in a distant past as well as in more recent times.

10.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 255.

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THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING There exist basically two types of writing, the phonetic and non-phonetic writings. The nonphonetic writing was invented the first, and it takes on two forms: pictograms and ideograms (or logograms). Pictograms constitute a transition from mere drawing to writing, whereas ideograms correspond to a further stage in the evolution of writing, since they move from representing things to evocating ideas. The Egyptian writing gives a perfect example of the transition from pictograms to ideograms. The Sumerian cuneiform writing, which, till recently, was considered more ancient than Egyptian writing, belongs to the group of non-phonetic writings using logograms, as do Chinese writing, appeared around 2000 BC, and pre-Columbian Mexican and Maya writings, appeared before 600 BC (it seems that Mexican writing developed first and inspired Maya writing, not the opposite). Phonetic writing is more recent, and it takes on two forms, syllabic and alphabetic writings. Syllabic writing is the oldest phonetic writing. It goes back to about 1550 BC, and it probably appeared in the middle of the Great Corridor, in Cyprus or Crete. It uses a different symbol, called grapheme, for each syllable. Among the syllabic writings, we find the Linear A of Cyprus, the Linear B of the Mycenae region in Greece, the Japanese Kana syllabary, the Indian Sanskrit syllabary, and the Ethiopian syllabary. Alphabetic writing uses a different grapheme for each phoneme (sound), whether consonants or vowels. It developed in two steps. First, Egyptians got the idea to use twenty-four different hieroglyphs to represent each of the twenty-four Egyptian consonants. About 1500 BC, the people of Ugarit, who were Semites living in the middle of the Great Corridor, were inspired by the Egyptians, and elaborated the first essentially alphabetic writing, which was limited to consonants. The Phoenician alphabet, which developed a little later right to the south of Ugarit, spread to the various Phoenician colonies, including Carthage, and, along the Great Corridor, both to the west towards Greece and to the east towards the Indian sub-continent. From the Phoenician consonantic alphabet directly derives the Aramaic consonantic alphabet (Aramaic, like Phoenician, is a Semitic language) from which originate the Semitic Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac alphabets as well as the Indian Sanskrit syllabary appeared during the seventh century BC. Second, the alphabetic writing came to represent also vowels. Greeks were the first ones to do this during the eighth century BC. The Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician one, and it gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet, from which comes the Latin alphabet we use, as well as to the Cyrillic, Armenian, and Georgian alphabets. The diffusion of alphabetic writing first followed the Great Corridor to the west and Greece, and to the east up to India. From there, it followed the Asian Corridor to the north (with Alexander the Great and, later, Islam) up to the western part of China, and to the south (with Islam and, later, the Spanish Empire) up to Indonesia and Philippines. Today, the alphabetic system has triumphed all over the world, except for the Far East where the writings derived from the Chinese system subsist. As far as writing is concerned, the contemporary world is divided in two parts: the alphabetic part whose single origin is Egypto-Phoenician, and the non-phonetic part whose only origin is Chinese.

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From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

s EMERGENCE OF URBANIZATION IN THE GREAT CORRIDOR Let us now relate the history of urbanization over a period of more than three thousand years ending with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC.11 The region where urbanization was born, the Levant, represents only 0.3% of the Earth’s surface. It goes from the Tropic of Cancer (twenty-third parallel north) to the forty-third parallel north, and from the thirtieth to the fiftieth meridian east (see Map 2). Today, this area includes a dozen countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait.

Firat

Hattusa

Murat

Tigris

Çatalhöyük

Nineveh Ugarit

Eup

hra

Nimrud Jarmo Ashur

tes

Byblos Tyre Jerusalem

Damascus

Babylon

Jericho

Uruk

Petra

Ur

Susa

Eridu

Memphis

Persepolis

Nile Thebes

150 km

Map 2 The Beginnings of Urbanization

11.

About the early stages of urbanization, see: Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education and Prentice Hall, 1994); Vere Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964); Charles L. Redman, The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978), and A. Bernard Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt (New York: The Dorsey Press, 1988).

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In order to understand how this territory came to play such an important role in the history of humanity, it is necessary to study its geography. Without being an island or a continent, the Levant is surrounded with water due to the presence of the Red, Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas as well as the Persian Gulf, which is an extension of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Moreover, that area contains three major rivers, the Euphrates, Tigris and Nile, without forgetting the small Orontes River, which occupies a strategic position. In fact, this region constitutes one of the most important crossroads of the world, crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe, crossroads between the Orient and Occident, and crossroads between the maritime routes of the Mediterranean and Indian Seas. In the past, the Levant has been crossed by famous trade routes like the Silk Road linking the Mediterranean Sea to China, and the Spice Road connecting India and the Mediterranean Sea through Arabia. It is also crossed by the axis of the Great Corridor that goes along the Euphrates, the Syrian Corridor and the Orontes River. Finally, it must be noted that the Euphrates and Tigris constitute an ancient river system in constant interaction.

THE PLACE OF ORIGIN OF INDO-EUROPEANS According to Orrin C. Shane III and Mine Küçük (“The World’s First City,” Archaeology, March-April 1998, 44), Colin Renfrew from Cambridge University dares to evoke the possibility that Çatalhöyük could be one of the most important cultural cradles of humankind. He suggests that the pre-urban city and its region could be the place of origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages. It must be said that the source of Indo-Europeans is not know with precision. They come from around the Black Sea; however, it is not proven that they came from Anatolia, the Caucasus Mountains, the region north of Caucasus, or Ukraine in Eastern Europe. The generally accepted thesis consists in considering that they came from the site of the kurgans (collective burial places that take the form of tumuli) in the Stalingrad-Volgograd-Tsaritsyn region north of Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. It seems that Indo-European languages originated from the Mongolo-American Corridor, and invaded the Great Corridor both to the southeast towards Persia and India, and to the west where they progressively replaced all the previous European languages with the only exception of Basque. The family of Indo-European languages includes Greek, Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavic languages, Persian languages such as Farsi, Tajik and Dari, and Indian languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi. In total, about 144 languages are Indo-European. Semitic languages are not: they originate from Africa. The invasion of the Great Corridor by Indo-Europeans coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor occurred again and again throughout history.

Before the discovery of America and Oceania, long-distance trade was, in practice, limited to Africa, Asia and Europe. The node of those exchanges between the three continents was the Levant. Since urbanization emerges from exchanges and communications, it was logically likely to appear in that region, and, particularly, in its fertile zone. The Fertile Crescent went from

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

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the Nile Valley to the common mouth of Euphrates and Tigris on the Persian Gulf, and it skirted round the Arabic desert. It included Mesopotamia, as well as the Syrian and Canaanite Corridors (historical Canaan corresponded to the Mediterranean coast of present Israel, Lebanon, and Syria).

Appearance of Pre-urban Cities The development of gathering, fishing and hunting followed by that of agriculture and breeding favored the increase of population densities and the appearance of the first villages, and, later, of big villages that are considered as “pre-urban” cities. The term “pre-urban” underlines the fact that those cities were, to a large extent, autarkical, and, as such, they did not belong to urban systems based on intensive exchange networks. Çatalhöyük, Jericho, and Jarmo are classic examples of pre-urban cities.12 Çatalhöyük is located in Anatolia in present Turkey. In Turkish, Çatalhöyük means “pitchfork-shaped mound.” That pre-urban city is considered as the oldest known city in history despite that it was not urban, and was mainly inhabited by gatherers and hunters. In 7000 BC, it had at least six thousand inhabitants, which makes it the biggest of all the known pre-urban cities. Its site is made of two mounds separated by the Çarsamba River in the Konya Valley. It is surrounded with, to the north, the Toros Mountains, to the east, the Sultan Mountains, and, to the west, the Ala Mountains (which are all part of the “chain of mountains ranges” that give birth to the Great Corridor). Nine thousand years ago, that region was very favorable to gathering and hunting, thanks to its alluvial soil, its natural pastures full of cattle and horses, and its surrounding forests abundant in deer and wild pigs.13 The Çarsamba River did not constitute a commercial axis, and the Mediterranean Sea was away, about one hundred and fifty kilometers south, beyond the mountains. The region’s trade potential was then limited. Thus, Çatalhöyük never was more than a very big village of hunters, gatherers, and some of the first craftsmen, farmers, and stockbreeders. What strikes the most about Çatalhöyük is its form. This big fortified village occupied about twelve hectares on top of a mound, and it had no street, no alley, nor major public space. It had just a few small squares. Inhabitants had to move from one building to the other by means of ladders. Houses were made of dried bricks, and they had no entrance door. It is thought that people entered

12.

13.

See Glyn Edmund Daniel, The First Civilisations: The Archaeology of their Origins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), and James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967). James Conolly, “Technical Strategies and Technical Change at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey,” Antiquity, 73, 282 (1999): 791.

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Urban World History

through an opening made in the roof. Hearths and ovens, storage bins, plastered floors and benches, and painted plaster walls were found in the interior. Çatalhöyük’s murals are recognized by art historians as unique in world history. The use Çatalhöyük’s inhabitants made of obsidian, that natural glass of volcanic origin, is famous. They produced obsidian polished mirrors, blades, flakes, daggers, projectiles, shatter, chips, etc. Considering its size and complexity, pre-urban Çatalhöyük was unique in the world of that epoch.14 It is clear that, in Western Asia, the city of Çatalhöyük has played a major role in the passage from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period to the Pottery Neolithic one. The earliest known vessels that may be considered as ancestral to pottery, outside of the Far East, have been found in Çatalhöyük at an excavation level dating from about 6750 BC. They seem to correspond to the beginning of the use of utilitarian pottery in Western Asia. Let us note that the oldest fired clay figurines, which are the earliest attested precursors of ceramics, come from former Czechoslovakia, and they date back to about 25,000 BC. The oldest fired clay vessels ever found come from Japan; they date back to about 12,000 BC. Pottery appeared in the Fertile Crescent and China by around 8000 BC, and in the northern part of South America, Africa’s Sahel zone, the U.S. Southeast, and Mexico thereafter. It is in the Sahara that the oldest known utilitarian pottery was discovered. Moreover, it is in Çatalhöyük that the very first example of metal working is found. It involved copper melting. From a sociological point of view, it seems that, at the origin, Çatalhöyük’s socio-economy and productive activities were organized around the individual household, and that progressively agriculture intensified and kin-based corporate groups developed.15 Finally, Çatalhöyük marked an important stage in the settling process in Western Asia. Larger than Jericho and more advanced than Jarmo, Çatalhöyük must be considered an important birthplace of civilization. Due to the Bible, Jericho, that other pre-urban city, is much better known than Çatalhöyük. Even if it remains difficult to determine which of the two cities is the oldest, one thing is certain: Jericho never attained the size and the historical importance of Çatalhöyük. Appearing between 7800 BC and 6800 BC, Jericho was much smaller than Çatalhöyük. During the sixth millennium BC, it had a third or 50 percent of Çatalhöyük’s population; that is about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Despite the fact that both cities were walled, many things differentiate them. The luxuriance of the vegetation that surrounds Çatalhöyük contrasts with the aridity of the Jericho region. Çatalhöyük is a fluvial city, whereas Jericho is an oasis. Located in a desert zone, not far from 14. 15.

Orrin C. Shane III and Mine Küçük, “The World’s First City,” Archaeology, 51, 2 (1998), 43. James Conolly, op. cit., 798–799.

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the Jordan River or the Dead Sea, Jericho is an oasis thanks to the spring “Ayn as-Sultan.” Phosphate mines are also found in the region. The spring and the phosphate mines constitute the only real assets of Jericho, which benefits from as little commercial advantages as Çatalhöyük.

FROM ÇATALHÖYÜK TO NEW YORK AND TOKYO It is in Çatalhöyük and the other oldest pre-urban cities that the most outstanding scheme of history takes form (see Figure 2). It is characterized by the forming of a central core surrounded with a first periphery and, further, a second periphery. In Çatalhöyük’s case, the central nucleus is constituted of the city itself where developed the first functions of making (workmanship) and managing. As for the first periphery (or semi-periphery, as Braudel called it), it is marked by the development of resources (through agriculture and breeding). Finally, the second periphery is sprawling and made of tentacles. It is characterized by a pure and simple exploitation of resources (through fishing, hunting, gathering, or mineral extraction). This same scheme is observed throughout urban history both at the level of each city taken in isolation and at the level of whole urban systems. Even today, it characterizes the world urban system as a whole, which comprises three main central cores respectively dominated by New York, London-Paris, and Tokyo.

Despite that, it is estimated that human beings visited the site of Jericho as early as c. 9000 BC. Archaeological remains point to the presence of a temple and houses built of stone as early as about 8000–7600 BC. There are indications that Jericho may have started as a sanctuary, as a religious settlement. It seems that Mesolithic hunters established their sanctuary beside the perennial spring in evidence of its life-giving importance. From that point of view, Jericho could be the oldest religious city of the world. Like Çatalhöyük, Jericho surely had a defensive function. It provided shelter for the first peasants that practiced agriculture, as well as for hunters. From about 7000–6700 BC, Jericho was surrounded by a fortified enclosure with walls two meters thick and a shaft or tower nine meters high. Both agriculture and hunting (specifically fox hunting) constituted the economic basis of Jericho, which is one of the oldest agricultural sites in the world (probably older and more important than Çatalhöyük from an agricultural point of view). It must be noted that, due to the aridity of the region, agriculture probably required irrigation. It seems that an advanced agriculture existed in Jericho complete with irrigation and the domestication of animals from around 7000 BC onwards. In Jericho, houses were built of brick and the city walls of stone. Jarmo is another Levant’s pre-urban city. It is located in the region of Mesopotamia, in the upper Tigris basin, closer to the Caspian Sea than to the Persian Gulf. Although located in the mountains of the Kurdistan where the affluent of the Tigris called Little Zab originates, Jarmo is not a “river city.”

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Urban World History

RESOURCE LEVY

RESOURCE DOMESTICATION

EXCHANGE MAKING MANAGEMENT

Figure 2 Braudel’s Scheme

From the Beginnings of Agriculture and Urbanization to the First Urbexplosions

39

It is considered to be one of the world’s earliest “village-farming communities.” Its site was discovered in 1948. According to radioactive-carbon dating, the beginning of the site could be around 6750 BC, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The site of Jarmo includes fifteen archaeological levels. In one of the more recent layers, clay vessels with rough painted decorations provide the first certain evidence for the manufacture of pottery vessels. Excavations have also yielded evidence of domesticated emmer and einkorn wheats, of two-row barley, and of dogs, pigs (probably hunted instead of domesticated), sheep, and goats, suggesting the achievement of a settled agricultural way of life involving breeding. Relics have been found that indicate the existence of a form of religion with mother-goddesses. Contrary to Jericho and Çatalhöyük, Jarmo was probably not walled, and it does not appear to have achieved the same level of civilization as those cities. None of the three pre-urban cities depicted were coastal or even situated on an important river. None had a port, or was at a crossroads (roads suitable for vehicles did not even exist at that distant time). Pre-urban cities were, above all, protective devices, shelters, or agricultural communities. In the beginning, pre-urban cities were not surrounded with agricultural fields, but populated by hunters, fishermen, and gatherers. Later, farmers, breeders, and craftsmen progressively arrived. Pre-urban cities were not real cities. One could even argue that those of them that were not agriculture-oriented were not even villages, in the traditional sense of that word, since, normally, villages carry out agriculture-related functions.

Appearance of Urban Cities in the Sumer Region Real “urban” cities were to appear some millennia after the first pre-urban cities, in hot and fertile areas related to rivers that allowed for easy transportation. It happened in the Sumer region, around 3200 BC, in the context of the first urban revolution.16 These new cities were bigger than their predecessors; they had a population of 7,000–20,000, with, contrary to the pre-urban cities, a well-developed class of craftsmen and highly developed forms of social organization and government. They were inhabited by farmers (even today, in the Third World, it is estimated that roughly 25 percent of the working population in cities with populations of 5,000–20,000 work in agriculture) and craftsmen, as well as traders, soldiers, priests, priestesses, civil servants, political leaders, slaves, servants, prostitutes, water carriers, women, and children. The area covered by the pre-urban cities was on the order of 3–5 hectares whereas, from the year 3000 BC on, the first Sumerian urban cities had an area of some

16.

Vere Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review, 21, 1 (1950): 3–17.

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40 hectares, reaching 100 hectares by 2000 BC. Their social, political, and religious organization was complex and profoundly differed from the pre-urban one, which was yet rudimentary. The case of Jarmo illustrates the fact that, in Mesopotamia, agriculture and pre-urban cities were born in the remote upstream part of the Tigris basin, north of the Akkad region, in the region that would become the cradle of Assyria. By contrast, urban cities developed totally downstream in the southeastern part of Mesopotamia where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet.17 The appearance of irrigation explains that. Southeastern Mesopotamia took the form of an alluvial plain constituted of very dry zones, swamps, and reed ponds. A long dry season and weak annual rainfalls of only two hundred millimeters on average characterized its harsh climate. Without irrigation, that region could not be cultivated at least eight months a year. However, its alluvial soil was extremely fertile. Irrigation completely transformed the Sumer region, which covers the area that lies, south of Akkad, between the Euphrates and Tigris close to the junction of the two rivers, as well as Chaldea, which is the land bordering the head of the Persian Gulf between the Arabian Desert and the EuphratesTigris junction. Canals were built everywhere, and water was brought to the driest zones. Agriculture extended over an increasingly vast territory, and a large population was attracted coming from the north, from Akkad and the upstream Tigris region. The canal network also favored navigation while providing an exceptional mobility to the local economy. From 4000 BC, Sumer overran Akkad both culturally and economically. It is in that context that urbanization and the first urban system of the world emerged. Two waves of early urbanization must be distinguished in Mesopotamia. The first one started around 3200 BC and was associated with the emergence of the first true urban network, which was inhabited by the original Sumerian population. The second one is much more recent. It happened one millennium and a half later, during the second millennium BC. This latter Mesopotamian urbanization wave gave birth to the first urbexplosion, which was dominated by Babylon and a Semitic Akkado-Babylonian population. Hereby, that urbexplosion will be referred to as the “small bang” both to stress its importance as being the trigger of the whole urbexplosive process inside the Great Corridor, and to differentiate it from the “big bang” of the Industrial Revolution that took place almost 3.5 millennia later. The striking fact about what happened in the Sumer region during the “small bang” is that it is not one or several cities that suddenly appear, but truly a whole urban system made of a large number of independent, but 17.

A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, revised edition completed by Erica Reiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).

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intimately intertwined “city-states,” as Toynbee named them to stress the fact that they formed societies that, while exhibiting certain of the essential attributes of the states, nevertheless retained the character and dimensions of cities. The most important and some of the oldest of these “city-states” were Eridu, Ur, and Uruk. Eridu and Ur, located to the south of the Euphrates, were both Chaldean and Sumerian, whereas Uruk, which lay between the Euphrates and Tigris, was just Sumerian. As noted earlier, the invention of wheel transportation, boat, and writing little preceded the emergence of urbanization. At the same period, wooden plowshare and copper melting were invented in Mesopotamia. It also seems that urbanization was little preceded by the appearance of the concept of state (that is, a social entity ruled by a government) since states arose for the first time in world history in Mesopotamia around 3700 BC, and just a little later in Egypt.18 Out of the Fertile Crescent, states were formed much later: around 300 BC in Mesoamerica, around 50 BC in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and around AD 1000 in West Africa. Many have established a link between the development of irrigation systems and the forming of the first bureaucracies and states. According to Diamond, the true causal links would be the following: the increase in the population density favors using more and more complex technologies and organizations, which requires centralized bureaucracies that make possible the development of elaborated irrigation systems.19 This is the scenario observed in the Sumer region, and later in China.

ZIUSUDRA, NOAH, AND THE FLOOD In the Mesopotamian polytheist religious tradition, cities, water, agriculture, kingship, and the creation of the world were interrelated. The Eridu Genesis said that the universe was created out of the primeval sea. Gods were given birth, and the deities in turn fashioned man from clay to cultivate ground, care for flocks, and perpetuate the worship of the gods. Men built cities and instituted kingship. However, for unknown reasons, the gods decided to destroy humankind with a flood. Eridu’s patron god Enki did not agree with the decree. He revealed it to a man named Ziusudra who did as Enki commanded him. He built a huge boat, in which he succeeded to ride out the flood. Afterwards, he prostrated himself before the gods and was rewarded for living a godly life by being given immortality. This story is at the origin of the Bible’s narration of the Flood and Noah’s action. It must be said that archaeologists have found, in Ur and elsewhere, evidence that the Flood did occur in the Sumer region. Non-Semitic beliefs of the first Mesopotamians constitute one of the major historical bases of the Bible, which is, otherwise, so deeply associated with the Semitic culture.

18. 19.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 278. Ibid., 22–23 and 62.

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Eridu is generally considered as the first urban city in history. In fact, the ancient list of the kings of the Sumer region designated Eridu as the oldest Sumerian city. Archaeological research confirms this. The date of foundation of Eridu is uncertain. According to some archaeologists, it could go back as far as 4500 BC. A little to the north of Eridu, by 6000 BC a large village of four to five hectares existed that preceded the foundation of Eridu. That village had both craft activities and long-distance trade in luxury goods such as copper and turquoise. That being said, it is likely that Eridu became a true urban city just around 3200 BC. It was built on sand dunes close to an affluent of the Euphrates, at the southeastern tip of the Fertile Crescent, close to Ur and not far from the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Cultivated fields surrounded it. On its site, one of the first evidences for water transport was excavated. The model boat found in the prehistoric cemetery of Eridu attests the importance of fluvial transportation at the time. The boat dates back to about 4000 BC. A still older boat remain has been found in 2001 close to Sozopol (Bulgaria) in the Black Sea. It seems to date back to about 4000–5000 BC. It should be recalled that the oldest relic of a wheel vehicle was also found in the Black Sea region. The “Black Sea–Tigris-Sumer” axis seems to have played a major role in the development of urbanization. The function of Eridu that is best documented is neither agriculture, trade, nor transportation, but religion. The city was a sanctuary for its patron god Enki, “lord of the sweet waters that flow under the earth.” Around 2040 BC, the inhabitants of Eridu built a ziggurat in his honor. The ziggurats of Eridu, Ur, Uruk, and other Sumerian sites were pyramidal, stepped temple towers made of brick. They had no internal chambers. Their sloping sides and terraces were often landscaped with trees and shrubs. On the upper platform of ziggurats was built a chapel. In the Ancient Near East, two main communication routes linked Egypt and the Persian Gulf following the Canaanite (or Palestinian) Corridor and the Euphrates: the Road of the Sea and the Road of the Kings.20 The Road of the Sea went from the Nile Delta to Damascus while passing through Sile at the Egyptian border, as well as Gaza, Aruna, and Megiddo in the Canaanite Corridor. The Kings’ Road followed the central axis of the Great Corridor, to which it probably gave birth. It started from the Persian Gulf, went through Ur, followed the Euphrates, crossed Babylon, and went on to Mari where it divided in two main branch roads. The northern one ran along the Euphrates, took the Syrian Corridor up to Aleppo and the Orontes River, and then went south down to Damascus where it met the Road of the Sea. The second branch of the Kings’ Road lay south of the first one. It linked Mari to Damascus through 20.

André Lemaire (ed.), Les routes du Proche-Orient : des séjours d’Abraham aux caravanes de l’encens (Paris : Desclée de Brouwer, 2000).

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Palmyra (called Tadmar by the Assyrians) where another branch road went directly to the north towards ancient Harran (now written Haran). It is more or less the Road of the Sea and the Road of the Kings that Semites followed to migrate from Arabia to the hearth of Mesopotamia, and that Abraham and the patriarchs took from the opposite direction to reach the promised land of Canaan coming from Ur and Mesopotamia while passing by Harran. Semites originate from the Arabian Desert they quit around 2500 BC through the Canaanite and Syrian corridors. They then entered the region of Akkad in Upper Mesopotamia, and, from the site of Mari (in present Syria, close to the Iraqi border), they followed the Euphrates to progressively penetrate the Sumer region in Lower Mesopotamia. They entered Mesopotamia as two different groups, on the one hand, the Amorite population, and, on the other hand, the Aramaean one. Amorites settled in Syria around 2000 BC, and in Mesopotamia around 1900 BC. Later, one of their dynasties came to conquer Babylon, and, under Hammurabi, to make it the predominant city of the region. Amorites disappeared during the twelfth century BC with the triumph of the Aramaeans. The latter were nomads or semi-nomads, and they had arrived in Mesopotamia at about the same time as the Amorites. Terah, Abraham’s father, was the chief of one of the Aramaean clans settled in Ur. Arabs and Jews, both of whom consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham, have a common Aramaean origin. The Arabs are said to descend from Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his wife’s maidservant Hagar, while the Jews are said to descend from Isaac, the son Abraham had by his wife Sarah, at 100 years of age. The penetration of the Semite stockbreeders in Mesopotamia took generally a peaceful form thanks to the transhumance system. When cereals were growing, the droves were kept away from the fields and, after the harvest, cultivators were glad to welcome the stockbreeders and their herds in order for them to graze on what was left in the fields and to manure the ground. This way migrants coming from distant regions could peacefully swarm into new areas. The progressive intrusion of Semitic populations in Mesopotamia, and their accession to power in the Akkad and, later, the Sumer regions led to the fusion of Mesopotamia’s pre-Semitic and Semitic cultures. Thus, many of the main kings of Assyria and Babylonia were Semites when the original Mesopotamian population was not Semitic. Similarly, Sumerian, Assyrian and Aramaean languages systematically interpenetrated. The story of Abraham eloquently illustrates that merger. Abraham is thought to have lived at Ur around the 18th century BC under King Hammurabi of Babylon (the author of the famous “Hammurabi’s code”). Abraham is an Aramaean Semite from Ur, presented as a descendant from Shem, the oldest son of Noah. According to the Bible, around 1850–1800 BC, Abraham left Chaldea with his father Terah and his nephew Lot to return on

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THE MONGOLO-AMERICAN CORRIDOR AND THE THREE PIVOTS OF EURASIAN HISTORY Except for the Semitic and later Arab invasions of the Near and Middle East parts of the Great Corridor and the Tibetan invasions of the Asian Corridor, almost all the invasions of the central zones of the Great and Asian Corridors, both to the west and to the east, originated from three main zones of the Mongolo-American Corridor: the cradle of the Indo-Europeans located north of the Caucasus, the cradle of the Uralic-speakers in the Ural Mountains, and the cradle of the Altaics in the Altai range that extends over parts of Russia, Mongolia, and China. Indo-Europeans, Uralicspeakers, and Altaics all originate from the Mongolo-American Corridor, which, mainly made of steppes, entailed the best conditions for horses and horsemen. Historically, in Eurasia, the Great and Asian Corridors have provided the highest mobility for goods and the best conditions for wealth accumulation, while the Mongolo-American Corridor guaranteed the highest mobility for invading riders attracted by the wealth of the Great and Asian Corridors. Indo-Europeans lost their unity during the 4th millennium BC (Igor M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl, Early Antiquity, London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 367–368). From their place of origin, they rode and invaded Asia Minor under the names of Hyksos , Luwians, Mitanni, Hittites , Hurrians, and Kassites. They migrated to the south of the Balkans under the names of Phrygians and Hellenes, the latter comprising the Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians , and Achaeans. They swept Persia and India under the names of Iranians, Aryans , Indo-Iranians, Indo-Aryans, Medians, Persians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Parthians, Kushans, and Yue-Che (also written Yüeh-chih). Finally, they occupied Western Europe under the names Proto-Celts , Celts, Italics , and Germans (which comprise the Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Alans , Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians , Jutes, Angles , Saxons, Suevi, Vandals, and Lombards), as well as Eastern and Northern Europe under the names of Slavs , Vikings, and Normans. In the group of the horsemen that came from the Ural mountains, we find the Finns, Estonians, Magyars (Hungarians), and Mordvin. Finally, three linguistic groups of horsemen came from the Altai region: the Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchus-Tungus-Juchens. Among the Turks, we find the Huns, Azeris, Turkmen, Bulgars , Khazars , Pechenegs , Kipchaks (called Polovtsy by the Russians, and Kumans by the Byzantines), Mamlüks, Seljuq Turks, Ottoman Turks, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks. As for the Mongolian group, it includes, among others, the Avars, Tatars (or Tartars), Liao -Khitans, and Mughals.

their ancestors’ footsteps along the Euphrates, the Balikh and the Jullab Rivers down to Harran where Terah, Abraham, and Lot settled. After his father’s death, Abraham, aged seventy-five, quit Harran with his nephew Lot. He went west along the Syrian Corridor, then south along the Canaanite (later “Palestinian”) Corridor where “a land was promised to him,” that of Canaan, already inhabited by the Semitic Canaanites. Abraham and his family traveled down to Egypt before returning to Canaan and settling in Hebron where died the patriarch, father of Isaac and grandfather of Jacob, also named Israel.

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In sum, in Eurasia, the major part of the massive migrations were oriented towards the Great and Asian Corridors, and they originated from three main regions that constituted the three “pivots” of Eurasian history (referring to the expression of Sir Halford John Mackinder who, in The Scope and Methods of Geography and the Geographical Pivot of History, London: Papers of the Royal Geographical Society, 1951 edition, wrote about Central Asia as being the “pivot of History”). It must be remembered that, among the tribes coming from the Altai, we find the Huns who invaded the Roman Empire, the Turks who, despite the fact that they had been vassals of the Avars, conquered the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, the Mongols and Mughals who took control of the Indus Valley and northern India, as well as the Mongols who conquered China. Originating also from the Altai, the Khazars , Kumans , and Pechenegs penetrated into Eastern Europe (consult, among others, Gérard Chaliand, Guerres et civilisations, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005). Among the German tribes, the Visigoths , Ostrogoths , Burgundians , Jutes , Angles , Saxons , Franks , Alemanni, Suevi, Vandals , and Lombards penetrated into the Roman Empire, while their Viking cousins took control of Scandinavia. The Slavs, who are not German, probably came from the swamps of the Pripyat River, an affluent of the Dnieper River that passes from Ukraine to Belarus. They entered the Byzantine world and Central Europe. Finally, coming from the Ural Mountains, the Finns and the Magyars-Hungarians invaded Central and Northern Europe. It must be noted that, except for the black Nubians, whose penetration was ephemeral, and the white Egyptians , who somewhat belong to the Great Corridor, the Semites (Amorites , Aramaeans , Jews , and Arabs) are practically the only group in history to have penetrated in a lasting way from the south into the Great Corridor. This deserves all the more mentioning since Semites originate from Africa. Actually, Semitic languages constitute one of the three branches of the North-Eritrean language family, the two other ones being those of ancient Egyptian, and Berber. North-Eritrean languages belong, with South-Eritrean languages (including Cushitic and Chad -Hamitic languages) and Omotic languages, to the Hamito-Semitic, Afrasian, or Afro-Asian language family. The sub-group of Semitic languages remains mainly concentrated in Africa, twelve of its nineteen existing languages being spoken in Ethiopia. All this suggests that the Afro-Asian language family originates from Africa, and only one of its branches expanded to the Near East (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997, 383).

The figure of Abraham initiates the passage from the polytheism of his Semitic ancestors and Sumerian neighbors to monotheism by keeping a part of the Sumerian religious tradition while adopting the Semitic Canaanite cult of El that became El ’Olam or Elohim (“God the Everlasting One”; Elohim is the plural form of the Hebrew word “eloha” which means “god”). In Ur, Abraham worshipped many gods, but in Canaan he committed himself to worship exclusively Elohim without however rejecting the existence of other gods. So, he professed monolatry (the worship of one among many gods), and not monotheism. True monotheism came later with pharaoh Akhenaton and prophet Moses.

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THE SEMITIC BIBLE AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN VEDAS The evolution towards monotheism came after Abraham’s epoch, maybe, among other things, under the influence of Egyptians who are likely to have been the very first to institute around 1350 BC, under Pharaoh Akhenaton (also named Amenophis or Amenhotep IV, who reigned from 1372 to 1354 BC), an official monotheist cult. Many striking similarities between hymns to Aton and Psalm 104 of the Bible suggest a link between the monotheist cult of Aton and Judaism. It must be reminded that Moses was born in Egypt around 1300–1280 BC and that the Exodus from Egypt took place around 1250 BC. That being said, ancient Mosaic religion gave birth to true monotheism just during the sixth century BC in the context of the Exile of Jews in Babylonia, when Israel ’s prophets started contesting the reality of other gods than Yahweh, something their predecessors had never done. Modern monotheism originates from the unique source of Judaism whose roots are Semitic, but also Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Christian and Moslem monotheism emerge from the Hebraic source. From a religious point of view, the modern world essentially stems from two main sources, the Bible, written from 1250 BC, and the Aryan Vedas , which are older than the Bible and were written in Sanskrit, which is an Indo-European language, between 1800 and 1200 BC. Vedas directly gave birth to Hinduism-Brahmanism and, indirectly, to Mazdakism-Zoroastrianism-Parsiism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The diffusion of those religious currents was canalized by the Great and Asian Corridors. Strangely enough, today, the majority of the populations of Indo-European origin and language are the heirs of religious traditions of Semitic origin (as in the case of European Christians, Christians and Moslems from Eastern, Northern, and Central Asia, as well as Moslems from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). Similarly, the majority of the heirs of religious traditions of IndoEuropean origins are not of Indo-European origin or language (as in the case of Hindus from Southern India, and Buddhists from China, Korea, Japan, or Southeast Asia). As for the numerous inhabitants of the Americas who are not of Indo-European origin, they speak Indo-European languages and practice religions of Semitic origin. In the same way, educated Africans who are not of Indo-European or Semitic origin (it is the vast majority) speak Indo-European languages and practice religions of Semitic origin. Only the Indians from Northern India have altogether an Indo-European origin, language, and religious tradition, and Israelis and Arabs have altogether a Semitic origin, language, and religious tradition. This illustrates the extent to which links between race, language, and religion are tenuous, complex, and geographically confused. Generally, religions follow the spatial logic of economic development and diffuse from the topodynamic corridors, whereas populations are attracted from the periphery to the economic poles within the topodynamic corridors. Many examples will be given of this. The contrast between the two spatial logics explains, to a great extent, the discrepancies between linguistic and religious spatial patterns.

Ur, Abraham’s homeland, lies about 17 kilometers northeast of Eridu and 16 kilometers west of the present bed of the Euphrates River. Before becoming a true urban city around 3100 BC, a little after Eridu, Ur was a village that had been founded during the 5th millennium BC. The archaeologist Leonard

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Woolley has found proof that Ur was flooded by the sea during the 5th–4th millennium, confirming the traditional story of the Flood.21 The settlement of Ur was probably revived around 4300 BC thanks to settlers thought to have been from northern Mesopotamia, from the vast region of Akkad. Before the 2nd century BC, when its course radically changed, the Euphrates ran much closer to Ur and the city was linked to the Euphrates by a canal that allowed Ur to develop as an important foreign trade market place. Ur was then rather close to the Persian Gulf, which, due to the accumulation of the Euphrates and Tigris alluvial deposits, now lies at 260 kilometers east of Ur. There are proofs that Ur was in touch with India and the Indus Valley as early as in 2350 BC, during the reign of Sargon I, the Semitic king of Akkad, founder of the first grand empire, the first permanent army, and the first conquest war. The “sea kings” of Ur were exporting goods to Dilmun (Bahrain) on the Persian Gulf and there they picked up copper and ivory coming from the east. Despite its being closer to the Euphrates than Eridu and despite its canal, Ur was not really a “river city.” It was a “city of the plain” surrounded with a rich, populated and irrigated agricultural hinterland. It was located on marginally higher ground, secure from flooding yet near enough to the Euphrates to benefit from riverside trade as it developed.22 About 2800 BC, the city covered an area of about forty hectares, with a population on the order of 24,000, while its hinterland had a population that may have reached about 500,000, which is considerable. From around 2450 BC to 2000 BC, Ur was the capital of an important empire that extended to northern Mesopotamia. It was invaded and partially destroyed by the Elamites. But most of Ur’s masters, whether Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian or Persian have taken care of the city and of its temples. Ur remained an important commercial center until about 150 BC, when the Euphrates changed its course. That natural event was a disaster for Ur since it destroyed Ur’s canal and connection with the Persian Gulf, as well as the sophisticated irrigation system that surrounded the city. The rich agricultural fields that made Ur a rich city soon transformed into deserts. The incredible wealth of the treasures excavated in Ur from 1922 to 1934 provides eloquent evidence that the city had achieved a level of civilization previously unknown. Treasures of gold, silver, bronze, and semiprecious stones, as well as the architecture of Ur’s monuments, reveal exceptional art. Like Eridu, Ur was also a “religious city.” Its great ziggurat was dedicated to the moon god Nanna (Sin), the patron deity and divine king of Ur. The ziggurat had three stories at its

21.

22.

P.R.S. Moorey, Ur of the Chaldees: A Revised and Updated Edition of Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Ur (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 22.

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origin, and was built of burnt bricks. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, who ruled from 556 to 539 BC, raised the ziggurat to seven stages. Ur’s is the best preserved of any ziggurat. Like other Sumerian cities, Ur was made of burnt bricks, the Sumer region having no stone. It must be stressed that, at Ur as in the other ancient Mesopotamian cities, the houses are grouped together in layouts that have “grown out of the conditions of the primitive village and are not laid out on any system of town planning.”23 As will be seen, city planning does not appear before the Harappan civilization (some say the Egyptian civilization, but this is quite debatable). The Mesopotamian unplanned approach greatly influenced the later Islamic city builders.24 Ur’s architects were acquainted with the column, the arch, the vault, and the dome. As in the famous Parthenon of Athens, the builders of Ur’s ziggurat used the principle of entasis, by which the impression of straight lines is created while in fact not a single straight line is used. Each wall, from the base to top and horizontally from corner to corner, is a convex curve so slightly bent that it gives the impression of being straight and strong, whereas true straight lines would seem to sag under the weight of the superstructure. This detail reveals a real sense of observation and innovation, which, in other fields, contributed to make Mesopotamians the founders of astronomy, mathematics, and modern sciences. We owe to the Sumerian numerical system based on number six the division of the day in 24 hours, that of the hour in 60 minutes, that of the minute in 60 seconds and that of the circle in 360 degrees. The link we observe here for the first time between the development of science, urbanization, and the space-economic forces that underlie it will never be denied throughout history. One city symbolizes more than any other the scientific contribution of Sumer, and it is the city-state of Uruk. While close to Ur and Eridu that are located to the south of the Euphrates, Uruk does not belong to Chaldea since it lies to the north, in the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, close to the Euphrates. The first settlement in Uruk goes back to about 3750 BC. Like Ur, around 3100 BC, Uruk became an “urban” city. In 3000 BC, temples were built over terraces. In 2700 BC, Gilgamesh fortified the city, and, in 2110 BC, the first ziggurat was built. It is in Uruk that the oldest known written document was found. It constitutes one of the world’s first evidence of semi-pictographic writing (as mentioned earlier, some recently discovered older objects, cylindrical seals, found in Egypt that bear some hieroglyphs suggest that writing appeared in Egypt even before it did in Mesopotamia).

23. 24.

P.R.S. Moorey, op. cit. See also Shamil A.A. Kubba, Mesopotamian Architecture and Town Planning 10,000–3,500 BC (Oxford: B.A.R. International Series, 1987). Hakim, Besim Selim, Arab-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles (New York: KPI and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

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Uruk’s document is an inventory written on a clay tablet about 3300 BC. Uruk’s semi-pictographic writing has not yet been deciphered. It is at the origin of the cuneiform script. Uruk is worth remembering for being the city where were found the oldest relics of wheel (out of the Black Sea region), swing-plough, veil, and concrete. Stone is completely lacking in southern Mesopotamia, however archaeologists have discovered that, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, an artificial stone was in use in Uruk. It clearly constituted a forerunner of concrete but the secret of its manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years. It is interesting to note that primitive forms of concrete appear this early in the history of urbanization. The Romans became masters of the art of using concrete for construction. Their concrete was made of “natural cement,” and its use became widespread. Modern “artificial” concrete is quite recent. It derives from the so-called “Portland concrete” that was invented just in the early 19th century.

Appearance of Urbanization in Egypt The forming of city-states accompanied the beginnings of urbanization almost everywhere: in Mesopotamia, but also in Phoenicia, in the country of the Philistines, in Greece, in Italy, and even in the Hausa and Yoruba regions of West Africa, as well as in the Maya region of Mesoamerica. The emergence of the “nation-state” in Egypt from the very beginning of urbanization constitutes a curiosity. Here again, geography provides excellent explanations. Historical Egypt corresponds to the Nile Valley nurtured on the rich alluvial deposits brought by its famous floods, but squeezed on both sides by the desert. The Nile provides wealth to its delta, and its valley on a width of three or four kilometers, not more, whereas the desert gives Egypt its security. Nile’s providential floods were for a long time a mystery. They are now explained by the fact that at some season the vast humidity of the Congo Basin reaches the Ethiopian mountains, which generates major rainfalls that cause the Blue Nile to swell, and the Nile to flood. The river benefits from still one more advantage: while it runs northwards, the prevailing winds blow southwards. That greatly favors navigation. In order to go north, boats only have to follow the stream, whereas, to go south, navigators just have to haul up sails. As soon as Mesopotamian domesticated vegetal species reached Egypt through trade, agriculture boomed, two kingdoms took form, one to the north, the other to the south, and the process that led to the merging of the two kingdoms developed. The Egyptian nation-state has generally been united, powerful, and independent for an almost continuous period of almost 3000 years, from 2850 BC to 30 BC. Of course, Egypt has been conquered by the Assyrians, Persians, and

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Greeks, after having been by the Hyksos, those Semitic Afrasians dominated by an Indo-European aristocracy who conquered then horseless Egypt, from 1730 to 1580 BC, thanks to their horse-drawn chariots, and established themselves, for about one century, as pharaohs over a part of Egypt inhabited by non-Semitic Afrasians. However, till the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC and her integration into the Roman Empire, Egypt never really disappeared as a state, altogether under the Old Kingdom or Empire (2649–2134 BC), the Middle Kingdom or Empire (2040–1640 BC), the New Kingdom or Empire (1532–1071 BC), the Late Period (712–332 BC), the Greco-Macedonian Period (332–30 BC), as well as the intermediary periods. “Urban” cities appeared in Egypt at practically the same time as in Mesopotamia. However, some people long contested that the first Egyptian cities were really cities. Egyptologist John Wilson, in a communication delivered to a symposium held in 1958 under the provocative title, “Egypt through the New Kingdom: Civilization without Cities,” argued that Egypt had no cities until the year 1090 BC. The debate is based on the fact that the first Egyptian cities were profoundly agricultural and, contrary to their Mesopotamian counterparts, were not fortified. It is true that Egyptian cities do not respond to all the criteria some have proposed to define a city of the epoch. According to those criteria, a concentration of population can be defined as a city only if it is surrounded with walls, it includes full-time craftsmen, its density is sufficient, its houses are made of lasting materials, it has streets, and it has a long-lasting character. In truth, the first Egyptian cities meet most of those conditions. Pre-urban cities appeared in Egypt long after they had emerged in Mesopotamia. If Jarmo was founded around 6750 BC, in Egypt, Fayun is thought to have been founded in 4400 BC and Meride, in 4300 BC. However, urban cities appear in Egypt and in Mesopotamia almost at the same time. In Mesopotamia, the first “urban” city, Eridu, was born between 3500 BC and 3200 BC, while, in Egypt, Memphis is considered to have been a real “urban” city by 3100 BC. The faster evolution observed in Egypt can be explained by the fact that agriculture started later in Egypt (it is well accepted that it started in Egypt in the sixth millennium BC, while it had started around 8500 BC in Mesopotamia). But agriculture developed much faster in Egypt thanks to the arrival of the Mesopotamian domesticated vegetal species, which provoked an acceleration of the development of agriculture that, in its turn, favored a rapid polarization of populations. In the same way the first Egyptian cities differed from the first Mesopotamian cities because of their more agricultural character, and their absence of fortifications, the first Egyptian urban system also profoundly

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dif fered from the first Mesopotamian urban system. Very early, the Mesopotamian city-states were involved in trade, and the development of their urban system was determined by commercial imperatives, while, in Egypt, the existence of a strong central authority, the relative withdrawal of the economy into itself, and the predominance of agriculture over trade favored the development of a centralized and very hierarchical urban system. In theoretical terms, as will be explained at the end of this chapter, it can be said that the Mesopotamian urban system conformed to the theory of “network systems” whereas the Egyptian one corresponded to a “central place” scheme. Thus, from the very beginning, Braudel’s scheme developed with the emergence of a center specialized in trade and located in Mesopotamia, and of a semiperiphery more agriculture-oriented including Egypt, which was the very first “territorial state” (according to Braudel’s terminology) the world had known. While in Mesopotamia city-states predominated, and were commercially and militarily competing with each other, Egyptian cities played the role of relays of the central power, and were specialized in agriculture and administration in conformity with the “central place” scheme. Many factors explain the fact that the center of the new urban network developed in Mesopotamia instead of Egypt. First, agriculture appeared in Mesopotamia before it did in Egypt. Second, the interaction that existed between the Euphrates and the Tigris had no equivalent in Egypt, since the Nile is the only important African river north of the Sahara desert. Third, because of the complexity of the Nile delta, the link between the river and Mediterranean Sea was, then, much weaker than the link between Sumer and the Persian Gulf, which represented a major commercial handicap for Egypt. As will be observed in other cases, rivers that end with a delta bear more navigation problems than those, like the Euphrates and Tigris, which run into estuaries. It is the location rationale characteristic of deltas which, to a great extent, explains that, at the head of the Nile’s delta, was founded around 3100 BC one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Memphis. That city was located on the west bank of the Nile, south of the Nile Delta and 35 kilometers south of present Cairo. Capital of Egypt from about 2686 to 2160 BC, Memphis can be considered as the very first capital of united Egypt. Curiously enough, today, Memphis is better known as a necropolis than a metropolis. It is the city of the famous pyramids of Giza (Cheops-Khufu, Chephren, and Mycerinus, built around 2600 BC) and of the Great Sphinx. This is another illustration that the old Egyptian cities originally differed from the Mesopotamian cities. They were royal cities very preoccupied with death and the beyond, while the Mesopotamian cities were trade-oriented city-states more inclined to allow the living to pray gods than to bury the dead.

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Memphis was founded as a royal, administrative and military residence. It was not located directly on the Nile, but a canal eventually connected it with the river, and allowed it to become an important commercial center. Memphis’ location close to the Nile River, upstream from the delta, was central. It allowed easy access to the two main parts of Egypt, the delta and the Upper Nile region where Thebes (not to be confused with the Greek Thebes, the main city of the Boeotia, which was also a very important city) was located. According to the tradition, Memphis was founded by Menes, the first pharaoh of the first of the 32 dynasties of Ancient Egypt, the one who united the two prehistoric kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. The city was located at the junction of the two formerly separated kingdoms. When the capital moved to Thebes, thanks to its location Memphis remained a major city. It progressively developed into a craft center, almost an industrial site with a shipyard, and a major trade center. It even became a cosmopolitan city with “ethnic” quarters inhabited by Hittites, Carians (both of Indo-European origin and from Anatolia, in present Turkey) or Phoenicians (of Semitic origin). Thebes became the capital of Egypt in 2040 BC, when the governors of Thebes united Egypt under their rule, and founded the eleventh dynasty. It is not clear how long Thebes existed before it became the capital of Egypt. Its earliest surviving monuments date from about 2100 BC. It is not impossible that Thebes was one millennium younger than Memphis. Thebes is a “river city.” It lies in the Upper Nile region on either side of the river, about 700 kilometers south of Memphis, which is a long distance. Thanks to its status as capital, Thebes emerged as a great political, administrative, and religious city. Its priests played a major role, and its diplomatic activity was considerable. The city had also a commercial and international vocation. It is at Thebes that the Phoenicians created the first deposit banks. Ships were sailing to Thebes from Lower Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean Sea, as well as from Sudan. Unfortunately for Thebes and for Egypt as a whole, because of the numerous falls (cataracts) and because of the difficulty to navigate further upstream, developing economic links with the Nile’s upper basin was quite uneasy. Thebes will forever be remembered as the city of a great queen and three famous pharaohs: Queen Hatshepsut, who reigned from 1503 to 1482 BC, Pharaoh Akhenaton (also named Amenophis or Amenhotep IV), who reigned from 1372 to 1354 BC, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who reigned from 1361 to 1352 BC, and Pharaoh Ramses II, who reigned from 1304 to 1237 BC. Hatshepsut was most probably the most powerful woman the world had ever known. Three and a half millennia later, the only other woman who has reached a similar level of power may have been Catherine II the Great

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of Russia, who reigned from 1762 to 1796. Akhenaton can be considered as the historical father of monotheism. He officially imposed the cult of Aton, the only sun god, on the whole kingdom of Egypt. Monotheism did not survive Akhenaton in Egypt, but, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it progressively conquered half of humankind. Finding it difficult to institute monotheism in the existing capital of Thebes, Akhenaton founded a new capital, el-’Amarna, about halfway between Memphis and Thebes. Two years after his death, his successor Tutankhamen returned to Thebes and the old faith, and el-’Amarna was abandoned.25 Akhenaton’s wife, Nefertiti, is famous for being one of the most illustrious beauties of all times. Akhenaton was succeeded by his son-in-law Tutankhamen, whose tomb was discovered in 1922, and made him instantly famous. As for Ramses II the Great, he is the best known of all pharaohs. He reigned for 67 years, from 1304 to 1237 BC. That is the second longest reign in Egyptian history (the longest being that of Pharaoh Pepi II, who reigned for 94 years, from 2246 to 2152 BC) as well as second in world history (Louis XIV reigned for 72 years, and comes the third). The upstream movement from Memphis to Thebes culminated with the accession to the throne of two Nubian (also called Kushite) dynasties. The 25th and 26th dynasties included six pharaohs who reigned from 770 to 657 BC, and were Sudano-Ethiopians. The kingdom of Kush was located in modern Sudan. Its capital has been Napata, and later Meroe. A similar upstream movement was often observed through history, for instance, in the cases of the Euphrates, Tigris, Rhône, and St. Lawrence rivers. For millennia, the Nile acted as a topodynamic axis where the dominant trend was southward and upstream. The moving of the capital from Memphis to Thebes was a good illustration of that. The fact that, eventually, the movement was reversed in favor of the Nile delta reflects the fact that moving further upstream led nowhere because of the numerous falls (cataracts) and because of the difficulty to navigate further upstream. One must never forget that the farthest sources of the Nile were just discovered around AD 1862 when John Speke and James Grant reached the Kagera River, which flows into Lake Victoria, discovered by Speke in 1858. In fact, the farthest source of the Kagera was discovered in Burundi, just in 1900, by the German Richard Kandt. That source is the Rukarara River, an affluent of the Nyabarongo, which flows into the Kagera. The beginnings of the history of urbanization were marked by the space-economic competition between three main axes: the “Black Sea-TigrisPersian Gulf” axis, the “Persian Gulf-Euphrates-Mediterranean Sea” axis, and

25.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 27–28.

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the “Mediterranean Sea-Nile” axis. Along the Nile axis, two trends alternated. The southward trend favored the development of economic links with the hearth of Africa, Sudan, and Ethiopia, while the northward trend favored the Nile Delta and the contacts with the Mediterranean world, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Greece. It is quite clear that, contrary to the Euphrates axis, the Nile one proved to be in no position to give rise to a topodynamic corridor. Ultimately the northward trend won, and the Nile axis got integrated into the Great Corridor. That welding became obvious when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and when a Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies, ascended the Pharaonic throne. When, in 30 BC, the two last pharaohs, the Greek Cleopatra VII and the Greco-Roman Ptolemy XV Caesar (son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar), died, Egypt had become more Mediterranean than African. Actually, Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and halfsister of Ptolemy XV Caesar, by her marriage to King Juba II of Mauretania, became queen of Mauretania, that Mediterranean kingdom which corresponds to modern Northern Morocco and Northwestern Algeria. In the struggle for economic power, despite its size, wealth, and considerable assets, the Nile was handicapped by the fact that, upstream, it led to no important commercial network. It was the case four thousand years ago, and it is still the case today. In spite of its majesty, just because of geography, the great Nile could not win the commercial battle against the medium-size rivers that the Euphrates and Tigris are. This did not prevent Memphis and its heir, Cairo, as well as Alexandria from standing, in their own time, among the greatest cities of the world. It must be said that none of those cities lies at more than 635 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor, and that all three succeeded to connect themselves to the Spice Road we shall describe later.

The Strategic Role of the Phoenician Cities In the dynamics of the exchanges between the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile axes, two commercial poles played a strategic role: the Persian Gulf pole at the end of the Tigris and Euphrates axes, and the Phoenician pole at the junction of the Euphrates and Nile axes. Let us start with the latter, which is the most documented and better known. It is the Phoenician cities that linked the Euphrates, Orontes, and Mediterranean Sea, but also Mesopotamia and Egypt, and developed for the first time the immense economic potential of the Mediterranean Sea (Map 3). With their relatively small population, Phoenicians never considered forming a territorial state, like Egypt or, later, Persia, in the semi-periphery of the Mesopotamian center. They were ever more ambitious.

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epr

Dn

Rhône Po Danube

Marseille

Black Sea Byzantium

Taranto

Troy Thebes Athens

Catania

Mycenes Syracuse

Carthage

Ephesus

Sparta Ugarit Byblos

Mediterranean Sea

Tyre

Alexandria

Nil e

175 km

Map 3 The World of Phoenicians and Greeks

Around 600 BC, Phoenicians are thought to have skirted round the southern extremity of Africa, starting from the Red Sea, two thousand years before Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama. Moreover, according to some, they even reached America. Around the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic coast, they created a series of colonies and a commercial network, which, with Carthage, a city they had founded, came close to emerge as the center of a new urbexplosion capable of succeeding the Babylonian one. Among the cities of the extended Phoenician network, let us mention, in the Near East, Ugarit, Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Berot-Beirut, Acre, Joppa-Jaffa, and Aradus-Ruwad, as well as Carthage and Bizerte in North Africa, Cádiz and Malaga in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, Palermo in Sicily, and Lisbon on the European Atlantic Coast. To the Phoenician colonies, we must add the numerous colonies of Carthage in Sicily and Spain. In sum, Phoenicians were the first true economic rivals of Mesopotamia although they did their best to keep the closest commercial relations with it. Their rise to economic preeminence led to a rivalry with the Greeks, but, above all, the Romans.

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The origin of Phoenicians goes back to the arrival of their Semitic ancestors from Arabia in the Canaanite and Syrian corridors. Phoenicia and, more generally, Canaan (which constituted the coast of modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria) are the natural link between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are separated by three deserts: the Sinai, the Arabic and the Syrian. A look at the topography of the region reveals a lot. Deserts lie at an altitude of more than 500 meters above the sea. The land that is under that threshold constitutes the Fertile Crescent, that fertile and relatively water-abundant area. The Canaanite Corridor is rather narrow, and Phoenicians soon understood that their future lay off the Mediterranean coast in the open sea. Sumerian and Egyptian cities were plain or river cities. The Phoenician ones belonged to a new category: they were maritime cities, the oldest of the history of humankind. Villages appeared in Phoenicia very early, around 6500–6000 BC, on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The founding of the village of Ugarit goes back to 6000, and even 6500 BC, that of the village of Byblos to about 5500 BC. The “city” of Byblos was founded around 3300 or 3100 BC, about the same time that Eridu, Ur, Uruk, and Memphis became real “urban cities.” Ugarit developed into an “urban city” around 3000 BC. It could be said that all those cities are from the same “generation.” Sidon and Tyre belong to a much younger generation. The city of Sidon was founded around 1500 BC, and it founded, in its turn, the city of Tyre about 1400 BC. Byblos is probably the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world, the oldest commercial city and the oldest city specialized in overseas trade. Byblos is the first of a very long list of maritime ports that dominated the world. It is the direct ancestor of Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, New York, and Tokyo. It is interesting to note that “sea cities” that are so dominant today did not succeed in becoming the cores of economy worlds (in Braudel’s sense) during the first millennia of urbanization. The first true “sea city” that became the core of an economy world was Constantinople around AD 400, which is extremely recent. Venice was next. Contrary to all the cities mentioned this far, Byblos’ economy was not based on agriculture or trade with its immediate hinterland; it relied on its commercial ties with distant regions. It sent to Egypt mainly cedar and other valuable wood that were lacking in the very dry kingdom of the pharaohs, and it produced for exportation, among other things, glass (as Venice did much later; it is considered that Phoenicians invented glass). It was also used as a simple turntable for the commerce of its greater region. Thus, Byblos imported papyrus from Egypt to re-export to Greece where papyrus was referred to as byblos or byblinos. From there comes the name Bible, “the book made of papyrus.”

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Byblos was the main center of the Canaanite culture, which was completely original compared with the Egyptian or Sumerian cultures. It used Semitic languages and practiced a religion involving sacred prostitution and child sacrifices. The site of Byblos was excavated from 1921 onward and yielded up the oldest inscription that uses the Phoenician alphabet, the probable ancestor of the Greek alphabet. It must be said that the alphabet from Ugarit probably preceded the Phoenician one (both Ugaritic and Phoenician are Semitic languages). Ugaritic was written on clay tablets from left to right, like Latin and Greek, whereas Phoenician was written from right to left, like Hebrew or Arabic. Ugarit often appears to be more a Canaanite than a truly Phoenician city. It had its own language, Ugaritic, whose alphabet is the oldest of the world (the Egyptian alphabetical hieroglyphs put aside). Experts think that Ugaritic used a truly alphabetic, and not simply syllabic, writing system.

UGARIT, A CROSSROADS CITY Culturally, Ugarit was at the geographical center of three of the five sources of writing, that is the Sumerian-Akkadian, the Egyptian, and the Hittite-Aegean ones. It was far from only two sources, the Chinese and the Mesoamerican ones. The texts found in Ugarit also revealed how cosmopolitan the city was. Seven different scripts were used in Ugarit before 1200 BC: Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphic, as well as Cypro-Minoan, Sumeran, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic cuneiform. Even in religion, Ugarit was a source of inspiration. The analysis of the texts of the Ugarit temple revealed a lot about the Old Canaanite mythology. The three main deities of that mythology were El, Asherah of the Sea, and Baal. El became Elohim who is Yahweh, the Bible’s God. Asherah of the Sea was a goddess “mother of gods.” She was El’s consort and by him the mother of 70 gods. The cult of the Virgin Mary “Mother of God” could have indirectly originated from the cult of Asherah. In the Greco-Roman mythology, Asherah became Artemis and Aphrodite in Greece, as well as Diana or Juno in Rome. Finally, Baal, the god of fertility, ended up being the king of the gods. Baal became the Greek god Belos who in turn became Zeus in Greece and Jupiter in Rome. It seems that both the God of Israel and the main god Zeus-Jupiter of the Greek and Latin mythologies originated from Ugarit and the Canaanite mythology. Even the Canaanite habit of sacrificing children can be related to the stories of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (or the sacrifice of Ismael, the Arabs’ ancestor, by Abraham in the Moslem tradition) and of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The discoveries of Ugarit provided evidence that the patriarchal stories in the Bible were not merely transmitted orally, but were based on written documents of Canaanite origin. Thus, the Canaanite mythology appears to be at the origin of both the Greco-Latin mythology and the Biblical current.

The site of Ugarit was strategic. It was located about 45 kilometers to the south of the mouth of the Orontes River in a large artificial mound, about one kilometer from the Mediterranean shore, where Ugarit had its own natural port (now called Minat al-Bayda). The city had a bridge across

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the Nahr Chbayyeb giving access to a road leading to the north and the Orontes River. Another road led to the south across a bridge over the Nahr ed-Delbeh. It seems that this road was the principal commercial link of the city with other Phoenician cities. Ugarit lay at the very junction of the Canaanite and Euphrates-Orontes axes. It is also the place where the northsouth Egyptian and Phoenician axes met with the east-west axis of the Great Corridor. Moreover, the city established a strong link between, on the one hand, Mesopotamia and the Euphrates, and, on the other hand, the Aegean Sea and Greece. Quite younger than Byblos and Ugarit, Sidon and its daughter Tyre exerted a considerable influence. At its peak, Tyre was the most powerful of all the Phoenician cities. Around 814 BC, Tyre founded Carthage, which came to be even more influential. Tyre is a coastal city, but also a “sea island city.” As such, it is the ancestor of a long and glorious list of cities that includes Venice, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay-Mumbai, which are all located on islands close to the coast. Despite its influence, like the other Phoenician cities, Tyre’s population never surpassed fifty thousand, and its area, eighty hectares. Phoenicians’ power never came from their number. From a political point of view, Phoenician cities, which were originally city-states, often dominated by a trading oligarchy, have, like so many commercial cities through history, been submitted to foreign rules. They have been under the influence of the Empire of Ebla and, later, the Empire of Akkad. The Empire of Ebla existed from about 2350 to 2200 BC and is thought to be the very first Asian empire. Ebla lay right at the center of the Syrian Corridor, between the Orontes and Euphrates Rivers. The domination of the Empire of Akkad lasted from about 2250 to 2160 BC. The city of Agade, Akkad’s capital, was located close to the Tigris to the northeast of present day Baghdad, on a site that, surprisingly enough, has not yet been discovered. It was founded around 2300 BC by the great Semitic king Sargon, who overcame the Empire of Ebla. The region of Akkad was located between Sumer, to the south, and Assyria, to the north, in the area where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers come very close to each other. It included Babylon and modern Baghdad. Sargon not only defeated Ebla, but also the rulers of the Sumer region. This is important, since the triumph of Sargon and Akkad led to the diffusion of the Semitic Amorite culture and to the progressive marginalization of the Sumerian one. It must be remembered that Phoenicians were Semites. The Semitic Akkadian language became the language of trade and administration throughout Mesopotamia, which strengthened the links between Mesopotamia and the Phoenician cities. Around 2000 BC, Phoenicia was submitted to Egypt. In 1085 BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt collapsed, and Phoenician cities regained their independence, and Byblos became the foremost city-state of Phoenicia. The domination of Byblos lasted until around

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950 BC, when the rival city of Sidon and its daughter-city, Tyre (which eventually became the capital of the Sidonian kingdom) took over. In 743 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered Phoenicia, and then succeeded the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman Empires.

The Strategic Role of the Persian Gulf The emergence of the Great Corridor as the dominant commercial axis was favored by the activity of Phoenicians to the west of Mesopotamia, but it was also, to the east, by the dynamism of the Persian Gulf traders whose history is not as well known. Excavations made around the Persian Gulf, among others, in Bahrain, have revealed the existence of Paleolithic and Neolithic sites, as well as commercial cities, which, three thousand years BC, operated between Sumer and the Indus Valley. This fact is very important, and, as will be seen, it will throw a precious light on the beginning of urbanization in the Indus Valley and the emergence of the Asian Corridor. It is clear that the trading links between the Great and Asian Corridors go back very far in time, probably to the very epoch of the birth of the Asian Corridor. Then as today, the islands of Bahrain seem to have served as warehouse for the trade between Sumer and the Indus River, in the same way Byblos did for the commerce between Egypt and Greece or Mesopotamia. Among other things, potteries, whose relics have been excavated, were transiting there. The Arabian city of Gerrha, located to the south of Bahrain, also served as warehouse and point of contact between the maritime routes, and the Arabian caravan trade in which Gerrha’s traders were very active. The exchanged products included cinnamon from India, as well as herbs, myrrh, and incense from Southern Arabia, especially from Yemen and Hadramawt.26 Incense and myrrh are oleoresinous gums obtained from flowering trees that naturally grow in Southern Arabia, on the Hadramawt Plateau. In Antiquity, myrrh and incense were considered, like silk or gold, as luxury goods whose trade over very long distances could be profitable.

The Babylonian Urbexplosion One thousand and five hundred years after the beginning of urbanization, conditions existed for the very first urbexplosion in history to emerge. A center had taken form whose commercial ramifications extended to the west up to the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt, and Greece, and to the east up to the Persian Gulf and the Indus Valley. The Egyptian and Hittite (in Anatolia) 26.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, Les routes millénaires (Paris : Nathan, 1988), 98–100.

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semi-periphery was also ready to play its role. Among the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile axes, the most central and the most strategically located between the other two, as well as between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, was the Euphrates axis. There, a new city, Babylon, succeeded to stand out, among other things, thanks to its relatively central location at a place where the Euphrates and Tigris get very close to each other. The new Babylonian urbexplosion was born around 1800 BC, and dominated for more than a millennium (even if Babylon did not dominate politically all that time). Thanks to the Biblical symbol of the Babel Tower, which is nothing but Babylon’s ziggurat, the cosmopolitan character of the Babylonian metropolis of the new urbexplosion is famous. Babylon has been the first authentic “heterogenetic”27 and cosmopolitan metropolis (Ugarit was cosmopolitan, but not a metropolis), the first “London” or the first “New York” the world has known. Its triumph was preceded by one millennium and a half of Mesopotamian urbanization, by one thousand and five hundred years of research and innovation, as well as building roads, cities, fortresses, ports, irrigation channels, trade networks, and institutions. This urbexplosion would not have been possible if urbanization had not also progressed in the surrounding area, in Egypt, Anatolia, Phoenicia, but also in Greece and the Indus region. The birth of an urbexplosion cannot be an isolated phenomenon. It requires a long gestation and a favorable environment. The gestation of the Babylonian urbexplosion was the longest in history (that of New York’s urbexplosion lasted only two or two and a half centuries). The triumph of the Euphrates-Mediterranean axis over those of the Nile and Tigris was not easy. Its toughest competitor was the Tigris axis oriented towards the Black Sea. Egypt was rich and powerful, but its geographical handicap condemned it to remain, to some extent, a dead end, and disqualified it. In the case of the three axes, the prevailing movement was upstream. In the Nile’s case, that led to unknown lands. For the Euphrates, it led to the Mediterranean Sea, and, in the case of the Tigris, to the Black Sea. It is mainly the superior economic and commercial potential of the Mediterranean Sea, compared with Nubia and the Black Sea, that determined the winner. However, it must be stressed that, at the beginning, the Black Sea region was clearly ahead of the Mediterranean Sea. It has to be reminded that IndoEuropeans originated from the Black Sea region, and domestication of horses, wheel, and boat appeared there before they did anywhere else. It is thanks to horses and wheel vehicles that Indo-European Aryans conquered the Indus Valley and Northern India from 1750 BC, and Indo-European Hyksos princes took over Egypt, from 1730 BC, all that just a few years before the Babylonian urbexplosion prevailed. 27.

Made of heterogeneous groups.

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Babylon’s rise was incredibly fast. Its site is mentioned for the first time around 2500 BC. But Babylon was founded in 1894 BC when the Semitic Amorite king Sumuabum chose it to become the nucleus of his small kingdom. It took Babylon only one century to supplant the Sumerian city-states thanks to the sixth and best-known Amorite king of Babylon, Hammurabi (who reigned between 1792 and 1750 BC). Hammurabi, the author of the famous code, conquered the surrounding city-states and created the first Babylonian Empire that extended, over an area of 400,000 square kilometers, to all of southern Mesopotamia and part of future Assyria, in the Akkad region. Fifty years after Hammurabi’s death, around 1700 BC, Babylon’s population reached 300,000 inhabitants. Babylon was the very first city in the world to cross this threshold. In just two centuries, it had gone from almost nothing to the status of the largest city in the world. The rise of Babylon put an end to the rule of the city-states in Mesopotamia, and gave birth to a “city-empire,” the “first giant city of antiquity.”28 Babylon remained “the center of the world” for more than a millennium. Alexander the Great died in Babylon, in 323 BC, after having made the city the capital of his incredible empire. Babylon’s location partly explains its success. It lay on the Euphrates River (the river having now shifted its course, it no more passes there). Babylonians took advantage of the Euphrates to build numerous canals in and around the city in order to bring water to all sections of the city. Babylon was built on both sides of the river and a bridge was built over the Euphrates. Babylon was a “bridge city” like so many others (as London or Paris). Moreover, its location allowed linking easily the Euphrates and Tigris, since at its site the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers come rather close to one other. Hammurabi’s policy was focused on controlling the Euphrates waters that were so important in an area that depended exclusively on irrigation agriculture. This led him to build a long irrigation canal going from Borsippa, located a little to the south of Babylon, to the Persian Gulf. This canal followed the central circle of the Great Corridor. Hammurabi’s reign marks the launching of the westward trend in the Great Corridor. Thanks to Hammurabi, the core of the Mesopotamian economic development shifted from Sumer and southern Mesopotamia to the northwest. This movement eventually gave birth to the westward topodynamic trend that later led to the Mediterranean Sea. This trend started around 1775 BC. Like most great cities of history, Babylon attracted numerous invaders. But, during more than one thousand years, the grandeur and economic power of Babylon outlived all invasions and conquests. Successively, the Indo-European Hittites, the Kassites (who were neither Semites nor 28.

Paul Bairoch, De Jéricho à Mexico: Villes et économie dans l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, “Arcades,” 1985), 26–27.

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Indo-Europeans), the Elamites (non Semitic nor Indo-European neighbors of the Sumerians on the Persian side), the Chaldeans, who, like Abraham, were Semites from Aramaean origin, and the Semitic Assyrians took control of the city. In 689 BC, Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who reigned from 704 to 681 BC, ordered the destruction of Babylon. His successors revised that decision and decided to rebuild it. At the death of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, in 626 BC, a Chaldean leader, Nabopolassar, took control of Babylon and founded the Second Babylonian Empire. Nabopolassar’s son, Nebuchadrezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 562 BC, became the greatest king of Babylon and made the Second Babylonian Empire even more powerful than the first. The first Babylonian Empire had never reached the Mediterranean Sea. At its peak, that Second Empire covered Sumer, northern Mesopotamia, the Syrian Corridor, the Canaanite and Phoenician coast, as well as Palestine, and it exerted a certain suzerainty over Egypt. At that time, Babylon was crossed by two canals and had two boulevards, 24 large avenues, 53 temples and 600 chapels, covering 10,000 hectares (100 square kilometers). Its main ziggurat, that of Etemenanki, the famous Babel Tower, was 90 meters high, and it had a 100-meter-wide base and seven stages. Babylon dominated the urban world till 301 BC, when the Greek King Seleucos I decided to found a new capital named Seleucia not far from Babylon, but on the Tigris, at the end of the royal canal, which went from a site located just to the north of Babylon on the Euphrates up to the Tigris. That decision caused the decline of Babylon. Later, the Parthians, and then the Sasanian Persians established their capital at Ctesiphon, just aside of Seleucia. As for Arabians, they later chose as capital Baghdad, located on the Tigris a little upstream of Ctesiphon and Seleucia. Baghdad lies just 88 kilometers to the northeast of Babylon. As can be seen, in Mesopotamia, the victory of the Euphrates over the Tigris never was total, despite the fact that the triumph of the EuphratesMediterranean Sea axis leaves no doubt. In order to better grasp how tight has been the struggle between the two rivers, it is suitable to look at the period of the Assyrian Empire, which dominated between the first and second Babylonian Empires.

The Assyrians and the Tigris Axis The upriver movement along the Tigris is well illustrated by the succession of the capitals of the Assyrian Empire, which, till the emergence of the Persian Empire, was the greatest the world had seen, even greater than the second Babylonian Empire that succeeded it. At its peak, between about 850 and 626 BC, the Assyrian Empire covered the whole of Mesopotamia, including Sumer, a part of Persia, the entire Syrian Corridor, Canaan, including Phoenicia and Palestine, and the Nile Valley, including the delta and the Nile up to the

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first cataract located about 200 kilometers to the south of Thebes (see Map 4). The Assyrians were the first to control the entire section of the Great Corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. Their empire had four successive capitals: Ashur, from 1365 to 880 BC, Nimrud (also called Kalakh or Kalkhu), from 880 to 725 BC, Nineveh, from 725 to 614 BC, and Harran after the Assyrian Empire was destroyed by the Babylonians and their allies, the Medes and the Scythians, two Iranian peoples of Indo-European origin. Nineveh lies upstream from Nimrud, which is upriver from Ashur.

Nineveh

Ashur Nimrud

Babylon

The Assyrian Empire in 671 BC

Royal Per sia nR

The New Babylonian Empire from 625 BC to 539 BC

o ad

Babylon Persepolis

1200 km

The Persian Empire around 500 BC

The Empire of Alexander the Great in 323 BC

Map 4 The Assyrian Empire, the New Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Empire of Alexander the Great

The uphill movement is interesting since it succeeded to a very long downstream movement along the Black Sea-Tigris axis, which predominated during the period from the emergence of pre-urban cities to the rise of urban cities.

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The Black Sea region has shown dynamism long before the beginning of urbanization. As we have seen, the pre-urban city of Jarmo, located in the upper Tigris basin, was built long before the first urban cities of Southern Mesopotamia, and agriculture developed in the area of Jarmo long before it did in the Sumer region. Thus it is clear that before the emergence of Sumerian urbanization the predominant movement along the Tigris was from north to south, and not the opposite. It is likely that the appearance of the Babylonian urbexplosion greatly contributed to reverse that trend, as illustrated by the fact that the Assyrian kings decided to progressively move their capital to the north, closer to the Black Sea. That evolution bears many characteristics of a typical urbexplosive process. The first relates to the fact that, despite numerous invasions, the Assyrian conquest, and the other conquests that followed, the Babylonian pole continued to dominate economically, and to exert an influence over territories it did not dominate politically. By nature, an urbexplosion transcends political borders. A second characteristic refers to the centrifugal movements caused by the natural expansion of an urbexplosion. The economic dynamism stemming from the center spreads through space, and this brings about the development and annexation by the urbexplosion of territories increasingly remote. Many times through history, such movements have induced transfers of capitals. The transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople is a good example of this, as is the displacement of the capital of the United States from Philadelphia to Washington during the urbexplosion dominated by New York, or the transfer of the capital of Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia during the urbexplosion dominated by São Paulo. It is not impossible that, by moving their capital, the Assyrian kings attempted to flee the economic ascendancy of Babylon. It must be reminded that, though Ashur was the capital of the Assyrian State during 515 years, and Nimrud for 155 years, their population never exceeded 30,000 inhabitants, while Babylon had more than 300,000 inhabitants. Ashur did not lack assets. It was located on the west bank of the Tigris River where it meets one of its affluents. Thanks to the rivers and to high escarpments, Ashur was also a “shelter city.” It was encircled by 4-kilometer-long walls and defended by a strong fortification system. Its port on the Tigris allowed Ashur to exert important commercial functions. Metals were imported from Asia Minor or Armenia, tin from northwestern Iran, and lumber from the west. Thanks to its fertile hinterland, Ashur was also an agricultural city. It was less dependent on irrigation than was the region of Sumer. Despite that, Ashur was no match for the city of Babylon. Nimrud was even better located than Ashur. Strategically situated at the juncture of the Tigris and Great Zab rivers, that city was far enough from Babylon to aspire to free itself from the economic influence of Babylon, all the

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more so since the Tigris and the Great Zab were ideally oriented. The Tigris source points into the direction of the Black Sea, and the Great Zab’s towards the Caspian Sea. Once again, the Assyrian kings were deceived: like Ashur, Nimrud did not succeed to rival with Babylon. It was decided to move the capital even more upstream, this time, to Nineveh. Nineveh is one of the oldest cities in the world. It is estimated that its first settlement goes back to the seventh millennium BC; it was almost as old as Jarmo, which is in the same region. That settlement probably became a preurban city by 3500 BC and an urban city by 3000 BC (Nimrud was founded around 1274 BC, and Ashur, about 2550 BC). Nineveh was made famous by the Bible, which presents Nineveh as the great polytheist city that Yahweh decided to convert by sending it Jonah (“Jonah of the Whale”) who succeeded in this endeavor to his own great surprise. Once the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh became a much more important city than Ashur or Nimrud. It reached a population of more than 120,000 inhabitants, according to both the Bible and archaeologists. Its location was very favorable. Farther from Babylon than the previous Assyrian capital, Nineveh corresponded to the southernmost ford of the Tigris, situated at the juncture of the Khawsal River and the Tigris. Nineveh was a bridge-city, and an important crossroads between the Tigris and the roads coming from the foothills of Kurdistan and the Orient en route to the Syrian Corridor and the Mediterranean Sea. It is difficult to determine when precisely the famous Silk Road29 between China and the Mediterranean Sea (see Map 5) began to be followed in a systematic way; many historians think that it goes back to Alexander the Great. It is likely that the silk trade on that road actually began at that period. It is estimated that China started to export silk on a regular basis from the third century BC, and that the Silk Road reached its peak between AD 100 and 1500. However, exchanges between the Orient and the Mediterranean Sea started long before that. Anyway, it is sure that, very early, Nineveh has been a strategic point in the east-west trade that followed the linear axis passing through Hecatompylos, Nineveh, and Antioch (Hecatompylos lay to the south of the Caspian Sea, and to the east of the city of Rhagea or Reayy, which gave birth to Tehran; as for Antioch, it was situated close to ancient Ugarit at the mouth of the Orontes River). Despite its major natural advantages, the exceptional power of the Assyrian Empire, and the fact that, in 689 BC, the Assyrian kings razed Babylon to the ground, just to rebuild it nine years later, Nineveh never 29.

The expression “Silk Road” comes from the great German geographer and geologist Ferdinand Paul Wilhelm Freiherr von Richthofen’s book: China, Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien, (“China, the Results of My Travels and the Studies Based Thereon”) (Berlin: Reimer, 1877–1885), 5 volumes.

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succeeded to take away the first place to Babylon. In 626 BC, Babylon rose up, and gave birth to the Second Babylonian Empire (see Map 4). Fourteen years later, in 612 BC, that empire overthrew the Assyrian Empire, and its capital, Nineveh, was sacked and burnt down by the Babylonians and their allies, the Medes and the Scythians. It must be said that the overthrow of the Assyrian Empire was made easier by the reputation of an exceptional brutality Assyrians had won through centuries. That reputation gave their defeat all the characteristics of a liberation for the peoples they had so long crushed. Under the Assyrian Empire, defeated enemies were impaled, flayed, or beheaded in great number. Whole populations of conquered cities were flayed alive, and their skins exposed on the walls of the cities. Defeated kings had their lips cut and their eyes gouged out before being put in cages like animals. Mass deportations were the rule in order to denationalize conquered regions. The penal laws were more severe in Assyria than in other countries of the East. Death penalty was common. In Assyria, the social position of women was lower than anywhere in the Near East. The fall of Nineveh marked the end of the Assyrian attempt to counter the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Urbexplosions constitute macro-structures characterized by a great inertia. Wars, revolutions, invasions, migrations, the intermixing of races, and empires rarely change their evolution. Urbexplosions transcend races, religions, languages, cultures, and political borders. The Assyrian assault against the Babylonian urbexplosion showed it for the first time in history. The victory of the Second Babylonian Empire consecrated the definitive triumph of the Euphrates axis over those of the Tigris and Nile. From that epoch till today, the ascendancy of the Great Corridor west of the Persian Gulf will only be truly challenged three times: first, around 370 BC, with the invasion of the Huns coming from the MongoloAmerican Corridor; second, from 1241, with the Mongol invasion arriving from the same corridor, and, third, from about AD 1825, when the modern Mongolo-American Corridor progressively rose to power thanks to the building of railways.

The Expansion of the Babylonian Urbexplosion One of the characteristics of urbexplosive processes consists in their ability to reorganize the surrounding economic reality. An urban system that metamorphoses in urbexplosion expands in all directions by creating new cities and, above all, extending its domination over the cities and urban networks it annexes and integrates in the same way a growing metropolis annexes and integrates progressively the neighboring smaller cities. This is what happened with the Babylonian urbexplosion to the north, the south, the east as well as the west. If the preparation of the emergence of a first urbexplosion

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in Mesopotamia took a millennium and a half, the rise of Babylon to the status of dominating metropolis was very rapid, and the expansion process followed. About 1600 BC, two centuries after the ascension of Babylon, the phase of expansion started. To the north, the integration of the Hittite Empire to the economic world dominated by Babylon began in a strange way, namely by a raid of the Indo-European Hittites on Babylon. Very often through history, a similar scenario occurred. The most classical example may be that of the Viking Varangians who, after raiding Constantinople without success, converted to Byzantine Orthodoxy and laid the foundations of Russia. The Hittite raid on Babylon took place in 1595 BC. Still rather barbarian, after their incursion in Mesopotamia, Hittites chose to return to their territory in central Anatolia where they created a powerful empire very influenced by the Mesopotamian culture. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, had been founded around 2350 BC, and the Hittites took control of it later, about 2100 BC, when they arrived in Anatolia from the north, probably from the present territory of Ukraine. They chose Hattusa as their capital around 1640 BC. Hattusa (called later Bogazköy and now Bogazkale) was located between the Black and Mediterranean seas, but closer to the Black Sea, in Anatolia, about 325 kilometers northeast of Çatalhöyuk and about 150 kilometers east of modern Ankara, Turkey’s capital. It was a “bridge city” located at the point of confluence of the Kizlarkaya and Buyukkaya rivers. Hattusa lay on the southwest side of the gorge of the Buyukkaya River, which is an affluent of the Kizil (or Halys) River that flows into the Black Sea. The hearth of the Hittite territory was then in the basin of the Black Sea. However, the Hittite Empire expanded towards the central axis of the Great Corridor, and not towards the Black Sea. At its apogee, during the Old Hittite Kingdom (in the 16th and 15th centuries BC) and the Hittite Empire (in the 14th and 13th centuries BC), the Hittite State even took control of the Syrian Corridor, the Orontes River, the city of Ugarit, and a part of Mesopotamia, all that without ever reaching the Black Sea. Over that vast territory, the Hittite sovereigns established a territorial state similar to the Egyptian one with whom they actually fostered close relations after a series of confrontations. The main clash between the Hittite and Egyptian empires came in 1288 BC at Kadesh on the Orontes River in Syria, in one of the greatest battles of the ancient world. Pharaoh Ramses II faced the Hittite king Muwatalli, who reigned from about 1305 to 1282 BC. Ramses II claimed victory, but the result of the battle was probably indecisive. After the death of Muwatalli, under King Hattushili III, who reigned from about 1275 to 1250 BC, a peace treaty was concluded between the Hittites and the Egyptians that resulted in dynastic marriages between the two royal families.

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Militarily powerful, the Hittites were, however, in the economic sphere of influence of the Babylonian urbexplosion. The tablets found in Hattusa have revealed that the Hittite Empire had intensive relations with Mesopotamia and that it became quite integrated with the economic system dominated by Babylon to which it provided Anatolian metals, especially copper, and bronze, its main staple commercial metal. The Hittite Empire survived the occupation of Hattusa around 1191 BC by the Indo-European Peoples of the Sea, specifically the Phrygians. The Syrian and Cilician parts of the empire became the Neo-Hittite Empire (that succeeded the Old Hittite Kingdom and the Hittite Empire) while Hattusa was becoming a Phrygian city. The NeoHittite Empire lasted for five centuries, until the Semitic Assyrian conquest of 710 BC. Thereafter, the Lydians, the Persians, and the Greeks of Alexander the Great (who were all Indo-Europeans) successively occupied the territory of the Hittites. Despite all those changes of allegiance, Anatolia continued to belong to the economic world dominated by Babylon. To the south of the Hittite country, the region of Damascus, which gave birth to Syria, experienced a similar evolution. That region occupied by the Semitic Aramaeans actually constitutes the hinterland of Phoenicia. The city of Damascus is only 80 kilometers from the Phoenician coast. It appeared in history as late as 1480 BC. It was listed under the name of “Dimashqa” in some hieroglyphic tablets of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt as one of the cities reconquered by Pharaoh Thutmose III. Damascus is separated from the Mediterranean Sea by the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges, which cut off the moisture-laden winds, and make Damascus’ region a rather desert area. The city is located on the Barada River at the point where it emerges from its canyon before losing itself in the desert. The river waters a fertile alluvial plain that extends about 20 kilometers eastward. In fact, Damascus is an oasis close to the sea. The oasis made Damascus possible, but its development was linked to desert caravan routes. Damascus was a very important crossroads of the Near East caravan routes.30 To a large extent, that was due to the fact that Damascus lay on the most direct path from Babylon to the Mediterranean Sea and the great Phoenician cities of Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Berot-Beirut. At the origin, the road coming from the Far East passed through Hecatompylos (close to present Tehran) and Nineveh before reaching the Mediterranean Sea at the mouth of the Orontes River. With the rise of Babylon followed by the progressive transformation of that route into the Silk Road, the route branched off to Babylon and, later, to Seleucia, Ctesiphon and Baghdad, and reached the Mediterranean Sea through Damascus (see Map 5).

30.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 190.

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The Aramaean Kingdom of Damascus formed at about the same time as the Hebrew Kingdom. The first mention of the Semitic Aramaeans occurs in Assyrian inscriptions around 1100 BC. When King David started extending his kingdom, the Aramaeans were also expanding. They had formed a state in the Upper Euphrates basin along the Euphrates and its affluent the Khabur River. That state, called Bit-Adini, extended to areas of Anatolia and Syria, including Damascus. About 1030 BC a coalition of the southern Aramaeans, led by Hadadezer, king of Zobah, in league with the Ammonites, Edomites, and the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, attacked the Hebrew Kingdom. But it was defeated by King David, who annexed Damascus. About fifty years later, the Aramaean Kingdom expanded once again and recaptured Damascus. An Aramaean, Adad-apal-iddin, came to ascend the Babylonian throne. By about 850 BC, the whole area from Babylon to the Mediterranean Sea was in the hands of the Aramaean tribes known collectively as Kaldu (i.e. the Chaldeans of the Bible, who were Aramaeans inhabiting Chaldea), and the Aramaic language diffused throughout the First Babylonian Empire. During the Second Babylonian Empire, whose territory was much larger than that of the first empire, Chaldeans were still in power, and the Aramaic language diffused through an even larger area. The Semitic Aramaic language is closest to Hebrew and Phoenician, uses the Phoenician alphabet, but bears some similarity to Arabic.

THE CONSECRATION OF ARAMAIC The supreme consecration of the Aramaic language came when, from 539 BC, Persians conquered Damascus , Mesopotamia, Egypt , Syria , Anatolia , and even a part of India. Persians then took a stunning decision that can however be understood in the context of the urbexplosion dominated by Babylon: they adopted Aramaic, and made it the official language of their empire in place of their own Indo-European language. This is how Aramaic came to extend over the whole territory of the Babylonian urbexplosion, from India to the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt. This also explains why Jesus spoke Aramaic, and not Hebrew. The triumph of one dominating language throughout the territory of an urbexplosion or an economy-world is the rule rather than the exception all through history. Under Alexander the Great and his successors, Greek supplanted Aramaic without eliminating it. The agony of Aramaic occurred the day the urbexplosion of Rome overcame the Babylonian one. It is estimated that the dispersal of the Jews by the Romans in AD 135 tolled the knell of Aramaic, which almost totally disappeared with the arrival of Arabic.

The Hebrew Kingdom of Saul, David and Solomon, and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel that succeeded to it in 931 BC more or less endured the same fate as the kingdom of Damascus. Conquered or made vassals successively by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, they belonged to a relatively minor sub-region of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Jerusalem,

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the Canaanite city captured by David who made it the capital in replacement of Hebron, never was one of the most important cities of the Fertile Crescent.31 Its population has been generally smaller than those of Hattusa or Damascus. Later, during Jesus’ lifetime, Jerusalem was not even the largest city of Judaea. With its 250,000 inhabitants, Caesarea was then two and a half times more populated than Jerusalem. The economic importance of Jerusalem was also relatively minor. Its region was little fertile, and its location was not very strategic even if it allowed to control the north-south route through the central highland of Palestine (that route was much less strategic than the north-south “Road of the Sea” along the Mediterranean Sea). Like Damascus and Jericho, its first settlement was located above a spring in a rather arid area. However, contrary to Damascus, Jerusalem was not a crossroads of caravan routes. The city is rather far from the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Dead Sea that separates it from Mesopotamia. The closest true river is the Jordan, that has never been a significant commercial axis. Jerusalem’s main advantages came from the fact that it was sufficiently remote and easy to defend, that it belonged to the Canaanite Corridor, which constituted the natural link between Egypt, the Syrian Corridor, and Mesopotamia, and that it had been selected by David as the capital of the Hebrew Kingdom. When David conquered it around 1000 BC, Jerusalem was already about 800 years old. It had been founded by the Canaanites about 550 years before the Hebrews entered the land of Canaan (they did around 1250 BC). Despite its relative marginality, Jerusalem remains the best-known city of the ancient Babylonian urbexplosion. This is due to religion, Jerusalem being the religious center of monotheist Judaism from which originated both Christianity and Islam. However, monotheist Judaism could not be understood setting aside David’s political dream. The first fixed point in the chronology of Judaism comes from the mention of “Israel” on the famous “Israel stela” of Pharaoh Merneptah around 1207 BC. The text of the stela testifies that Israel was then a wandering tribe, not a settled population. Saul founded the Hebrew Kingdom about 1020 BC in the southern part of the land of Canaan. David succeeded him, and reigned approximately from 1004 to 965 BC. First recognized king only by his own tribe, that of Judah, David managed to have himself recognized as king of Israel (Israel being located to the north of Judaea), and to extend his power over a vast territory. Bible specialists estimate today that the first writing of the traditions concerning Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel goes back to the very beginning of David’s

31.

Kamil Jamil el Asali (ed.), Jerusalem in History (Essex: Scorpion, 1989).

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reign, when he was only king of Judah, and still had Hebron as capital. 32 It must be said that it is just during Solomon’s reign, in the tenth century BC, that the text of the Bible took on the written form we know. It is in the context of the negotiations aimed at extending the power of David over Israel that the first writer (or writers) of the Bible presented Jacob-Israel as the descendent of Abraham, and the father of the twelve tribes of Israel over which David aspired to reign. By making all the inhabitants of Judah and Israel, and all the members of the twelve tribes of Israel the common heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David based his power on solid ideological foundations. The Genesis story and the transfer of the Hebrew capital from Hebron to Jerusalem were the most concrete expressions of that founding stand. However, the unity of the Hebrew Kingdom did not outlive Solomon. The geographical vulnerability of Judaea-Palestine, stuck between Egypt and Mesopotamia, surely greatly contributed to the emergence in that region of a religious current marked by the political weakness of the Jews. In the whole history of the Hebrew people, Judaea-Palestine experienced unity under a total Jewish sovereignty just under David and Solomon, that is, for about seventy years, from 1000 to 931 BC approximately. The rest of the time, the Hebrew people has been divided, most of the time dominated, and, three times, under the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian rules, enslaved or deported. A part of the Jewish people stayed in Egypt for about 500 years, from 1725 to 1230 BC, and, during much of that period, Jews were reduced to slavery. In 721 BC, the Assyrians deported three quarters of the Jewish population to the east where they were dispersed to such a point that they ended up being assimilated by the neighboring inhabitants. Finally, the captivity of the Judaeans in Babylon began in 586, and it ended in 539 BC. This history made of contrasts and suffering nurtured the religious fervor and gave Judaism an intensity and an interiority that polytheism never attained. The long gestation of monotheism within the Canaanite Corridor gave it a remarkable strength, and, eventually, the proximity of the Great Corridor favored its diffusion throughout the world, to a great extent thanks to Christianity, which expanded mainly to the northwest, later thanks to Islam, which mainly spread to the east, and, finally, thanks to the Jewish Diaspora. It must be noted that the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world, which 32.

See George E. Mendenhall, “The Nature and Purpose of the Abraham Narratives,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essay in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, Patrick D. Miller (ed.) (Philadelphia : Fortress, 1987), 337–356, and Moshe Weinfeld, “The Promise to the Patriarchs and its Realization: An Analysis of Fundation Stories,” in Society and Economy in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1500–1000 BC), ed. Michael Heltzer and Edward Lipinski (Leuven: Peeters, 1988), 353–369.

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goes back to the Exile at Babylon and even before, took an unprecedented dimension after the siege by Titus and destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which marked the end of the Jewish State for almost two thousand years. The dispersion was accentuated by the Roman conquest of the Massada fortress in AD 73 and, above all, the order denying all Jews access to Jerusalem given by Emperor Hadrian in AD 135. To the south of the Hebrew country, the expansion process of the Babylonian urbexplosion has also absorbed Arabia and its vast desert zones. Arabia, the Semites’ homeland, was, at the origin, a rather wild region, inhabited by nomads, clearly backward compared with Egypt or Mesopotamia. Progressively, the influence of Mesopotamia fostered economic development in the region. Two main caravan routes were created to link the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea and Nile through the Arabic Peninsula. The first one went from the common mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris (that is, the Shatt-al-’Arab) to the port of Gaza, south of Judaea, while passing through Petra. The second one, somewhat parallel to the first and a little to the south, linked the port of Gerrha, located to the south of Bahrain on the Persian Gulf, to the Egyptian city of Memphis, while passing through Riyadh, Medina, and also, occasionally, Petra. As we see, Petra was a meeting point between the two routes. That city developed lately. It was founded just in 500 BC, at a time when the Babylonian urbexplosion was at its peak. Petra was built in the middle of the desert on a well-protected terrace, pierced from east to west by the Valley of Moses (Wadi Musa). Its site was approached by a narrow east-west gorge (called Es-Sik) that was easy to defend. Rather rapidly, Petra became an important staging post and entrepôt on the two routes linking the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea and Nile, but also on the Spice Road going from India to Egypt through Arabia, passing through Mecca and Medina. Thanks to its proximity to the port of Gaza, it ended up being a key center for the trade between the Orient and Egypt, but also the Mediterranean Sea. With Damascus, Petra must be counted among the first great commercial cities that are strictly non-maritime. The Arabic Peninsula became a turntable of the trade issued from the Babylonian urbexplosion. Caravans conveyed cinnamon coming from India, myrrh and incense from Yemen, Hadramawt, Southeastern Egypt, and Lybia, gold and fragrant herbs from the Horn of Africa, and spices from Southern India. It must be said that the caravan route coming from the south of Arabia and going to Petra supplanted the maritime route of the Red Sea, which had become, from the second millennium BC, a pirates’ den. The rich kingdom of the Arab Nabataean tribe was created in 312 BC, and its capital was Petra. That kingdom succeeded to benefit altogether from the route of Orient, which had become the Silk Road, the Incense Road

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dominated to the south by the Sabaeans, and the Spice Road originating from India and crossing the Arabic Peninsula. The latter road became so essential for the Mediterranean economy that it eventually led to the discovery of America when conflicts between Islam and Christianity came to interrupt the trading flows. The Nabataean kingdom remained autonomous till 106 AD, when Emperor Trajan annexed it to the Roman Empire under the name of Provincia Arabia. To the northeast of the Arabic Peninsula, the maturation and expansion of the Babylonian urbexplosion favored the rise to power of Persia, that territorial state, which, to the northeast, was the counterpart of the Egyptian territorial state located to the southwest. In the case of Persia as in the case of the Assyrian capitals, a centrifugal movement of the capitals is observed, the successive Persian capitals being increasingly far from Eridu, the Sumerian point of origin of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Through its history, Persia-Iran had eight capitals (if we ignore Babylon itself, which was a “winter” capital of the Persian Empire). The oldest was Susa, founded in 3200 BC, capital of the kingdom of Elam, which had a common border with the region of Sumer and was closely tied culturally to Mesopotamia. For a long time, Susa was almost a Mesopotamian city. In fact, it successively belonged to the Akkadian, Gutian, Ur, Assyrian, and Babylonian empires. In 521 BC, Susa became the very first capital of Persia. Succeeded to Susa as capital successively the cities of Pasargadae, Persepolis, Istakhr, which are close to the Persian Gulf, Isfahan, which lies halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, Tabriz, Qazvin, and Tehran, which are altogether close to the Caspian Sea. Susa is located at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, which belong to the “chain of mountain ranges” that gave birth to the Great Corridor. It is built on four mounds between the Karkheh River, which flows towards the south and ends up in the plain without ever reaching the Persian Gulf, and the Dez River, which is an affluent of the Karun River that joins the Shatt-al-’Arab River resulting from the merge of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. In sum, like all the Mesopotamian cities, Susa is situated in the great river basin of the Shatt-al-’Arab. Susa’s hinterland, called Susiana, was rich, well irrigated, hot and fertile. It was originally populated by the Elamites who, contrary to the Medes and the Persians, were not Indo-Europeans, and, contrary to the Aramaeans and the Amorites, were not Semites either. Their origin was closer to that of the ancient Sumerians. The arrival of the IndoEuropean Iranians, that is, the Medes and the Persians, politically disrupted Susa and its region. Under the Achaemenid sovereigns Cyrus II and, later, Darius I, the Persians defeated, in 550 BC, their cousins the Medes who had dominated up to then and, in 539 BC, they conquered the Second Babylonian Empire and

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Babylon itself. In the period that followed, they adopted Aramaic as their official language, and they built an incredible empire that included altogether the ancient empire of the Medes, the ancient Babylonian Empire, the kingdom of Egypt, Lybia, Cilicia (in southeastern Anatolia), the kingdom of Lydia (in western Anatolia), a part of Macedonia and Thrace, as well as various territories going up to the Indus, the Aral Sea, and Caucasus. This huge territory corresponds to the following modern states: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Libya. The Persian Empire was the first great empire of Antiquity to be perfectly organized from one border to another. From the Danube to the Indus, the Persians imposed a single currency, a single administrative language, and a rigorous organization, while respecting the particularities of each people. The evolution of the territory of the Persian Empire veered with Darius I, who reigned from 522 to 486 BC, after succeeding to Cambyses II and Cyrus II who had reigned respectively from 529 to 522 BC and from 559 to 529 BC. His predecessors had opted for expanding the empire towards the north of Africa. Darius chose to reorient that expansion in the direction of Europe, following the logic of the Great Corridor. This led to attacking the Greeks, who were the closest Europeans. The attack started in Anatolia, where the Greeks were quite present. Darius crossed the Hellespont between Asia and Europe about 516 BC and was the first Persian king to declare war in Europe. The Persian invasion was stopped by the land victory of Marathon and the naval victory of Salamis, won by the Greeks respectively in 49033 and 480 BC. However, despite those victories, a part of Europe and Greece remained under Persian rule. The European option taken by Darius was probably dictated by economic considerations since Greece was already, at that date, a major Mediterranean economic power. In order to keep control of his huge empire, Darius I built, around 500 BC, one of the greatest and most famous roads of Antiquity, the Persian Royal Road, which was also called, later, the Road of the Lydian Kings (see Map 4). That 2,575-kilometer-long road went from Susa, the Persian administrative capital, to Sardis (near modern Izmir), the capital of ancient Lydia in Anatolia (Turkey). It included 111 staging posts where it was possible to sleep and change horses. It normally took 90 days to go from Susa to Sardis, but in a hurry the trip was possible in one week thanks to a very elaborated system of couriers. The Persian Royal Road precisely followed the Great Corridor: Sardis is practically right on the central axis of the Great Corridor while Susa 33.

The victory of Marathon took place on October 11, 490 BC precisely.

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is at a distance of 320 kilometers from it. The masters of the largest empire of that epoch had understood the strategic importance of this axis, and they decided to make it the spinal column of their empire. It is convenient to note that historians think that the Persian Royal Road may have had two secondary branches: one going from Susa to Memphis (Egypt) and the other one, from Susa to Bactra (in modern Afghanistan), the capital of Bactria.34 The Susa-Memphis route was clearly inside the Great Corridor (whose central axis it crossed), while the Susa-Bactra road was somewhat linking the Great and Asian Corridors. Historically, the Persian Royal Road was the first major land infrastructure conceived to thoroughly exploit horse transportation and relay. It was normal for such road to be built by Indo-Europeans since they are the ones who have domesticated horses. That road materialized and reinforced the natural axis of the Great Corridor. It linked Elam and Anatolia, but also indirectly Sumer and Greece. It paved the way for Alexander the Great whose empire almost exactly coincided with the Persian Empire at its climax (see Map 4). It is no exaggeration to say that the empire of Alexander the Great, to a large extent, was built by the Persians.

The Greek Challenge Under the Achaemenids, the Persian Empire had four capitals. Persepolis was the royal capital, Susa, the administrative capital, Hamadan-AgbatanaEcbatana, the capital in Media (the region of the Medes), and Babylon, the winter capital. Of the four, only Babylon was a true economic metropolis. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 334 BC, he chose Babylon as his new capital. He had understood that the First Babylonian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Second Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and his own covered a single urban reality, the one of the urbexplosion dominated by Babylon. The Ancients were convinced that cities were destined to die. As de Vries reminds us, “Herodotus was convinced that discontinuity was endemic to the urban world of antiquity.”35 If cities are not eternal, urbexplosions are not either. They age and, eventually, they are doomed to be replaced by younger urbexplosions that are distant enough from the core of the old urbexplosion to progressively free themselves from its domination, and challenge it. The Babylonian urbexplosion was no exception. After a domination of more than one millennium, the main challenge came from its periphery, from Greece. 34. 35.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 113. Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 122.

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As already mentioned, agriculture spread from Mesopotamia to the northwest following primarily the Great Corridor. The cultivation of emmer “triticum” wheat (used to make bread) and barley reached Cyprus and Greece around 6500 BC. Five millennia later, in 1700 BC, while the Babylonian urbexplosion developed, except for the island of Crete, Greece remained an underdeveloped and underurbanized region. The Hellenic populations of Indo-European origin named the Aeolians, the Achaeans, the Ionians, and the Dorians, who formed three distinct linguistic groups (i.e. Aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian), had arrived in Greece just about two centuries before. Greece started to become an economic power only from about 700 BC, that is, one thousand years after the emergence of the Babylonian urbexplosion.36 In itself, this single fact illustrates the gap that existed originally between the economic development of Mesopotamia and that of Greece. At that time, Greeks already knew writing, and they had just invented, during the eighth century BC, the modern alphabet (including both consonants and vowels), but, above all, around 700 BC, they invented coined money, which represented a major improvement over barter. That invention caused a true revolution. The use of coins greatly favored trade and, indirectly, urbanization, since trade is a most important foundation of city growth. In fact, cities themselves started issuing their own coins, and banking activities developed that involved money changing, payment operations for trade and manufacturing, and also consumer credit and public-sector lending. Greeks were also very inventive in the field of urban development, construction, and, especially, port installations, not to mention culture, science, and civic democracy.37 All those signs of dynamism accompanied an exceptional economic effervescence. Greek urbanization relied very little on agriculture, which is not always a prerequisite of urbanization. On the contrary, it seems that it is Greece’s weaknesses in agriculture that favored, altogether, a high level of urbanization (by the standards of the time), the development of small-size cities, the creation of colonies, and commercial aggressiveness. Bairoch wrote: “The Greek cities did in fact remain limited in size. If at its height (around 500–450 BC) Athens may have reached or surpassed a population of 100,000, the other cities rarely had as many people as 40,000. Moreover, as a general rule, as soon as a city approached a population of 20,000–30,000, it decided to found a new city rather than to continue the original city’s development.

36. 37.

Chester G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece : 800–500 BC (New York: Oxford, 1979). Wycherley, Richard E.. How the Greeks Built Cities (London: Macmillan and New York: Norton, 1962, second edition). This reference is a classic.

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This practice not only reflected the political and ideological underpinnings of Greek civilization, but was also apparently motivated by economic constraints. The quality of the Greek soil permitted only a modest agricultural yield and productivity, while transport costs were relatively high. This meant, in turn, that the cost of urban growth was high, in most instances probably prohibitively high … There is inevitably the problem of transport, a fact already clearly perceived by Aristotle [who] draws up two rules governing the location of the principal city. One concerns the bringing of military aid to all parts of the territory. The other seeks to ensure ‘that the city provides means of transport with a view to importing the fruits of the soil, and also wood for building, and should the need arise, the materials required for whatever kind of manufacture the city may happen to have.’ The problem of acquiring supplies of grain was important to the Greeks because the level of urbanization in Greece was high. Indeed, despite the ecological constraints on urban growth, ancient Greece appears to have been heavily urbanized. Confining myself to the classical Greek period, and basing my estimates on population data available for most of the Greek cities, I find that urban population represented some 15–25% of the total, even when the lower limit defining a city is set at five thousand people. If I reduce the threshold of urbanization it is possible to reach levels as high as 20–30%.”38 Greeks were, so to say, forced into trading. The deficiencies in agriculture incited the Greeks to trade in order to rip profits by exchanging their manufactured goods and some agricultural products like olive oil for grain and other agricultural goods they were unable to produce. By doing so, they competed with Phoenicians and became important traders for the whole of the Mediterranean basin. It is with the rise of urbanization in Greece that the Great Corridor became an important urban axis, after it had prevailed as an agricultural axis, and, later, with the spreading of the Ubaid culture, as a major cultural axis. The appearance and diffusion of urbanization in Greece followed a very clear spatial logic. The first cities were built in Crete, in that part of Greece that is the closest to Egypt, and one of the closest (with Cyprus and Rhodes) to the Syrian Corridor and Mesopotamia. Then, urbanization followed the orientation of the Great Corridor and reached the Corinthian Peninsula, called Peloponnesus or Morea, and the region of Mycenae before extending to the more continental part of Greece. The harbinger signs of urbanization in Crete go back to 4000 BC with the appearance of the settlement of Phaistos, which was both a palace and

38.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 107–108. Some historians estimate that the population of Athens reached 150,000 or 160,000 inhabitants, which is much more than Bairoch’s estimate.

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a pre-urban city. However, the urban phenomenon in Crete, the cradle of urbanization in Greece, becomes indisputable just around 1450 BC. Between 2000 BC and that date, Crete was civilized and had important palaces, but the urban dimension of that region could be contested. In the region of Mycenae in the Peloponnesus, the harbinger signs of urbanization appeared around 3000 BC, that is, about one thousand years later than in Crete. At that epoch, Greece was still inhabited by pre-Hellenic populations. The Indo-European Hellenic Achaeans came to Mycenae around 1900 BC. Around 1600 BC, the Achaeans created the rich kingdom of Mycenae and a brilliant civilization, which integrated Pre-Hellenic elements while being influenced by the Minoan civilization of Crete. The Indo-European language of the Achaeans of Mycenae is the most ancient form of the Greek language that has been discovered. Originally, it was written with its own symbols and not with the classical Greek alphabet. For a long time it was thought to be a different language from Greek, but the Mycenean script was finally deciphered in AD 1953 and it became apparent that the Mycenaean language was indeed Greek. It belongs to the Ionian linguistic group. Between 1400 and 1150 BC, Mycenae was the most important city of Greece, and it extended its influence over Crete and the Aegean Sea. The Mycenean trade network extended up to the city of Tanis on the Nile delta in Egypt, to Ugarit and Byblos in Phoenicia and Syria, to Troy and Miletus in Anatolia, and to Cyprus. From Mycenae, the development of Greek urbanization went, inside the Great Corridor, towards the hearth of continental Greece and Anatolia, then towards present Italy and France. The maritime and commercial character of the Greek civilization explains the magnitude of the range of that urbanization. As a general rule, as soon as a Greek city approached a certain threshold of population (about 20,000–30,000 inhabitants), its citizens used to decide to send some of themselves away to found one or several colonies. Most of the time, those colonies were maritime, and they could be very far. The first wave of Greek colonization out of continental Greece began around 750 BC, and it precisely followed the central circle of the Great Corridor in the direction of Cyprus, Anatolia (Homer’s Iliad tells, in epic terms, the conquest by the Myceneans of the city of Troy, in Anatolia), and the Syrian Corridor. So the first colonies were founded along the coast of Anatolia and at Posideion (modern Al Mina), at the mouth of the Orontes River, which is the very entrance of the Syrian Corridor leading to the Euphrates and Mesopotamia. Posideion was the very first Greek colony out of Cyprus and Ionia, which was the Greek part of Anatolia. Before expanding towards present Italy, France and Spain, the Greeks had already built a strong connection between Greece and the Mesopotamian core within the Great Corridor. All that evolution followed a “network system” logic similar to the one that had previously guided Phoenicians.

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What strikes the most about the Greek expansion is the fact that it preceded by about three centuries the apogee of the Greek civilization, which corresponds to the Age of Pericles (483–429 BC). There were already important Greek cities in Anatolia, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, France, Spain, and North Africa when Athens reached the top. Moreover, in many fields, the cities of the Greek periphery won fame before their sisters from continental Greece did. In Anatolia, Ephesus was founded around 734 BC by Greeks coming, not from the neighboring Greece, but from the islands of the Ionian Sea that lie between Sicily and the Isthmus of Corinth. Ionians are the ones who invented coined money. By forming an alliance with Sardis, the capital of the kingdom of Lydia and the western terrestrial terminal of the Persian Royal Road, Ephesus established itself as the main maritime terminal of that road. The neighboring Greek city of Miletus, located on the Meander River, was another terminal of the same route; it exerted a certain hegemony over the Black Sea trade and created about fifty commercial entrepôts in the Aegean Sea and Black Sea regions, and between the two. In the beginning, Miletus was ahead of Ephesus and became the most important city of Anatolia. But, in 494 BC, Miletus was captured, sacked and destroyed by the Persians. Then Ephesus supplanted Miletus and became the most important city of Ionia while Miletus remained a strong competitor after having been rebuilt from 479 BC onward according to the plans of Hippodamus of Miletus, the “father of town planning.”39 Ephesus and Miletus became the most important financial centers of Asia Minor, their economic function being basically related to trade and finance. They inherited the tradition of the Babylonian financiers while adding the enhanced power ensuing from the invention of coined money. Their emergence accelerated the westward movement within the Great Corridor of the financial power that the Phoenicians had initiated by competing with the financiers of the heart of the Babylonian urbexplosion. That movement went on for millennia. To the great financial centers of Antiquity, Babylon, Byblos, Ugarit, Miletus, and Ephesus, succeeded later Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, and London, all those cities being situated close to the central axis of the Great Corridor. West of continental Greece, Syracuse, founded in Sicily by colonists from Corinth the same year as Ephesus, became rapidly an important Mediterranean commercial center. The acme of Syracuse is incarnated by the genius Archimedes (287–212 BC), who defended his city and died on the very 39.

Miletus was not the first planned city, since the Harappan cities were planned. But Hippodamus is the first city planner whose name is known. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 43.

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day the Romans conquered it. Also in Sicily, Catania, founded just five years after Syracuse by Greeks coming from Chalcis (on the island of Euboea in the Aegean Sea), had a fate as brilliant as Syracuse’s. To the south of the Italian boot, Taranto was founded in 706 BC by the “Parthenian Spartans” expelled by the other Spartans in the context of a civil war, and it became the most important Greek city of Magna Graecia, that is, the territory controlled by the Greek colonies of southern Italy. It became one of the main centers of the Pythagorean philosophy. The Greeks had genius in planning their colonial expansion. They established colonies at three of the four most strategic points of the Mediterranean coast. These four points are the Strait of Gibraltar (called the Pillars of Hercules during the Antiquity), the Strait of Bosporus, and the mouths of the two main rivers of the Mediterranean basin, the Nile and the Rhône. Of those four points, the farthest from the Great Corridor and the least important before the discovery of America and Vasco de Gama’s sea route to India was the Strait of Gibraltar. The Greeks founded a colony at each of the three other points: Byzantium on the Bosporus Strait leading to the Black Sea, Marseille at the mouth of the Rhône leading to the interior of Western Europe, and Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile leading to the interior of Africa. Byzantium was founded the first in 660 BC as a colony of Megara, a coastal city situated on the Isthmus of Corinth about 35 kilometers west of Athens. The founding of Byzantium took on particular importance since it allowed Greece to take control of the Grain Route, which went from the Black Sea to the heart of Greece and the other regions of the Mediterranean Sea. The Black Sea region was at that time more developed than the territories of what later became Spain, France, England, and Germany. It produced, among other things, a lot of cereals while Greece lacked them terribly. The region of the Scythians, located to the north of the Black Sea in the Mongolo-American Corridor, possessed particularly rich corn-growing lands. According to Bairoch, Greece probably had to import a quantity of grain sufficient to feed at least 20% to 40% of its urban population.40 The European hinterland of Byzantium, called Thrace, was rich in wood, gold, silver, and arable land producing cereals. Its non-Greek inhabitants had an exceptional reputation as soldiers. Thrace also produced renowned Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Anaxarcus, and Protagoras. Close to the mouth of Rhône, Marseille (Massalia) was founded around 550 BC by Greek mariners from the Ionian city of Phocaea, in Anatolia. This event may be as important as the founding of Byzantium because it marked the opening of the interior of Western Europe (then quite wild) to 40.

Ibid.

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the influence of the Babylon urbexplosion. It heralded the conquest of Gaul by Caesar, 550 years later, and the victory of the Rome urbexplosion over the Babylon one. In order for Rome to overcome Babylon, the interior of Western Europe had to be economically conquered, and the founding of Marseille by the Greeks greatly contributed to this. If Byzantium allowed to take control of the Grain Route, Marseille offered a strategic position with respect to the Pewter and Amber roads. Pewter melted with copper gives bronze, one of the foundations of civilization, which was produced for the first time in Mesopotamia around 2500 BC. Providing the Babylonian urbexplosion with the pewter it required was uneasy. Pewter had to be imported from Asia Minor, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, northwestern Iberian Peninsula, Armorica (present Brittany), or Cornwall (England). This last region was the richest in pewter, and most of its production of pewter ingots was directed towards Gaul. From there, ingots were transported on horseback during thirty days down to the mouth of the Rhône, and then to Marseille.41 Amber, that fossilized resin used in jewelling, began to be traded as early as the fourth millennium BC. Its main source was the Baltic Sea and the Jutland Peninsula. From there, it reached the Mediterranean Sea either through Bohemia, Bavaria, the Alps, and the Po Valley down to Adria (from which the name of the Adriatic Sea originates), located to the north of Po’s mouth, or through the Meuse-Mass, Saône and Rhône rivers down to Marseille.42 It seems that, before the founding of Marseille, pewter and amber reached the Mediterranean Sea mainly through the Alps and the Po Valley while, after the founding of Marseille, the Rhône route was preferred. As for Alexandria, it was founded on the site of the ancient Egyptian town of Rakotis43 by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, a century after the end of the Age of Pericles. Its founding was preceded, about three hundred years before, by the founding, in the Nile Delta, of another Greek city called Naucratis. Like Byzantium, which, under the name of Constantinople, was for many centuries the greatest city in the world, Alexandria is listed among the major cities of the history of humankind. Alexandria, which was planned for Alexander the Great by Dinocrates of Rhodes, instantly became the crossroads of the Mediterranean maritime routes, the Nile traffic, the Herbs Road coming from the Horn of Africa, and the Spice Road, which originated from India, and reached the Mediterranean Sea through Yemen, Mecca, Medina, and Petra or Aila. The remarkable commercial success of the port of Alexandria 41. 42. 43.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, op. cit., 55–57 and 62. Ibid., 46. Some people pretend that Rakotis was a Phoenician colony. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 30.

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is somewhat surprising. The port was located at the western extremity of the Nile Delta, while the Herbs and Spice roads lay to the east of the Nile. Despite this, Alexandria became the terminal of these roads. The reason for this is related to the characteristics of the Nile Delta, which are such that establishing a port anywhere is uneasy. Alexandria was the best location to build a port in the whole delta region, which allowed it to become the main destination of the Herbs and Spice roads. It is also through Alexandria that Egypt supplied the whole Mediterranean (both western and eastern) basin with papyrus, which remained till the fifth century of our era the most economical and used material for writing texts.44 Alexandria became Athens’ heir thanks to its famous library, his scientists (among them, Eratosthenes who claimed that the Earth was a sphere, and who was the first man to measure the Earth’s circumference and the degree of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, both of his estimates being astonishingly accurate; he measured the Earth’s circumference to within about 300 kilometers), his mathematicians (including Euclid), and his philosophers. The last head of the Alexandria Neoplatonician school was a woman, Hypatia, a great philosopher and the first notable woman in mathematics, whose opposition to Christianity led to her barbarous murder by the Nitrian monks and a fanatical mob of Cyril’s Christian followers in AD 415. Let us leave the periphery of the Greek world to come back to its core successively dominated by three famous cities, Athens, Sparta, and Thebes (the Greek one). Founded in 1581 BC45 in a region inhabited as early as 2800 BC, Athens became a city worthy of interest just about 700 BC. At its acme, between 483 to 429 BC, its population reached only 150,000 inhabitants, that is, only half the peak population of Babylon. Athens is located on and around the Acropolis, that rises 500 feet above sea level. It lies eight kilometers from the Bay of Phaleron, an inlet of the Aegean Sea where Athens’ port, Pireus, is situated. The Acropolis lay in the middle of an arid basin having a very limited agricultural potential, but there were springs around. The strength of Athens came from the security the Acropolis provided and from the very close link with the port of Pireus. A six-kilometer-long walled corridor even linked Athens to its port. At the end of the first Greco-Persian War in 479 BC, thanks to the great politician and naval strategist Themistocles, Athens, a continental city, succeeded to become a first-class maritime force in the region. The very central location of Athens in Greece contributed to its success, but the most important

44. 45.

Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris : Libraire Félix Alcan and Brussels : Nouvelle société d’édition, 1937), 71–74. When the worship of Athena was established on the Acropolis.

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factor probably was the presence at about 40 kilometers southeast of Athens of the very rich silver and lead mines of the Lavrion (or Laurium) region. In 483 BC, Themistocles convinced the Athenians to exploit the newly discovered Maronaea silver veins of Lavrion to finance the construction of the large fleet of 200 triremes that then defeated the Persians at Salamis. The Laureot Owls, Athenian silver coinage attributed to the mines, were circulated throughout the classical world and provided Athens with almost a monetary monopoly over the Greek world. The ascendancy acquired by Athens over the whole Greek world allowed it to benefit from the incredible network the Greeks had built all around the Mediterranean Sea. This was done in the commercial field, but also to a great extent in the intellectual sphere. Athens’ most famous philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus were the spiritual heirs of numerous philosophers from the Greek Diaspora, and some of them, like Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, were stemming from the Diaspora. This debt of gratitude to the Diaspora existed also for the authors who brought fame to Athens’ culture like Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, Aristophanes, Isocrates, Thucydides, and Xenophon, as well as sculptors such as Phidias and Praxiteles or architects like Ictinus and Callicrates.46 Sparta, the great rival of Athens, was founded by the Dorians long after Athens, around 820 BC. In 404 BC, at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars started in 431 BC, Sparta succeeded in replacing Athens as the most powerful city of Greece. Sparta probably never exceeded 60,000 inhabitants, which is much less than the population of 150,000 of ancient Athens at its climax. Economically, Sparta never was a Mediterranean power. Located on the right bank of the Eurotas River, in the southern part of the Peloponnesus, the city lay about 25 kilometers from the closest port, in the middle of an agricultural plain surrounded with mountains. Everything opposed Athens and Sparta. While Athens gave birth to democracy, Sparta was so fond of monarchy that it had two kings and two dynasties, the Eurypontids and the Agiads. The Spartan ruling class devoted itself to war and diplomacy, deliberately neglecting the arts, philosophy, and literature Athens so adored. Athens was a walled city, which extended its walls as far as Pireus, while Sparta took pride in the fact that it was not encircled with walls, and claimed that “its men were its walls.” Athens has left marvelous ruins, whereas none of Sparta’s buildings or monuments survived in the memory of humankind.

46.

In 86 BC, the Roman general Sulla razed Athens. Athens was rebuilt, and regained her cultural leadership in the Mediterranean world. In 267 AD, the Goths and Heruli devastated the city, which was rebuilt. In 1461, it fell to the Turks. In the 1830s Athens was re-established as the Greek capital after the War of Independence against the Turks.

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The strength of Sparta came essentially from the courage and endurance of its soldiers. Spartans made a cult of virility and war spirit. Tyrtaeus, the only renowned Spartan poet, who died around 650 BC, devoted his life to celebrating the glory of dying for Sparta. During forty-five years, from 404 to 371 BC, and from 362 to 350 BC Sparta dominated Greece. Between those two periods, Thebes, a city so old that it is almost impossible to determine the period of its founding, had its hour of glory during nine years thanks to the naval victory of Leuctra won in 371 BC by the Theban Epaminondas against the Spartan fleet, four years after Thebes had defeated Sparta at the battle of Tegyra, where Sparta had lost a battle for the first time in its history. Three distinct Indo-European linguistic groups had invaded Ancient Greece: the Dorians, the Ionians, and the Aeolians (including the Achaeans). Athens was the main Ionian city. Argos, Sparta, and Corinth were the main Dorian cities, and Thebes was the principal Aeolian city. Thebes was located in Boeotia at the strategic crossroads between the “Aeolian” road coming from the northwest, from Delphi, Phocis, and the most continental part of Greece, the “Ionian” road going to the southeast, to Athens, and the “Dorian” road going to the southwest, to the Peloponnesus, to Corinth, Argos, and Sparta. Moreover, it was situated on a low ridge dividing the surrounding fertile plain. Its location made it a natural commercial and agricultural city, as well as a natural intermediary to make peace between the various protagonists of Greek struggles. Unfortunately, the death of Epaminondas in 362 BC allowed Sparta to recover the leadership, though not for long. Around 350 BC, King Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great, started imposing his rule over an increasingly large part of Greece. However, Sparta remained strong enough to resist the Macedonian expansion. It is the only Greek city the Macedonians never conquered nor dominated. The dissensions between the Greek cities played into their enemies’ hands throughout the Diaspora. Persia gave its support alternatively to Athens and to Sparta. The Greek Diaspora became a battlefield. After Athens’ attack on Syracuse and the destruction by the Syracusans of the Athenian fleet in 413 BC, Carthage invaded the Greek part of Sicily. Syracuse resisted and counterattacked, but, ultimately, Rome benefited from the struggle. At the end of the 3rd century BC, Rome had the complete control over southern Italy and Sicily, including Syracuse. Similarly, the conflicts between Sparta and Athens allowed Persia to extend its domination over the Greek cities of Ionia. Between 338 and 323 BC, Philip and his son Alexander the Great held in their hands the destiny of the Greek world. After having established their domination over the major part of Greece, they had the choice between turning their back on the past by pursuing the expansion towards Western Europe, or taking the control of the aging Babylonian urbexplosion. Alexander

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the Great chose that second option, and conquered the Persian Empire, added to it the major part of Greece that the Persians has never succeeded to conquer, went beyond the limits of the Persian Empire towards India, but renounced to extend his empire up to the Caucasus and the Aral Sea, as the Persians had done. By concentrating on conquering the Persian Empire and reaching the Indus River instead of pursuing the northwestward movement, Alexander the Great compromised the chances the Greeks had of giving birth to a Mediterranean empire like the future Roman Empire of which, to a very great extent, they have laid the foundations. At the end, Rome conquered the three strategic points of the Mediterranean Sea the Greeks had controlled. Romans captured Byzantium in 194 BC, Marseille in 49 BC, and Alexandria in 30 BC. And then a new urbexplosion dominated by Rome came to supplant that of Babylon. The Roman Empire was maritime and Mediterranean, while the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, as well as that of Alexander the Great (surprisingly, the heir of the maritime and Mediterranean power of Greece) were, above all, continental empires from the Levant. The passage from the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion to the Roman one took about two millennia. As for the topodynamic evolution from Sumer to Rome over a distance of three thousand kilometers within the Great Corridor, it required three and a half millennia. What has been observed along that evolution occurred repeatedly at a pace increasingly accelerated throughout the recent history of humankind. What took two thousand years in Eurasia at the beginning of urbanization was observed during the 19th and 20th centuries over a period of one hundred years or even less. However, the topodynamic processes remained fundamentally the same. In the emergence of new urbexplosions as in the case of the first one, at first, the core is rather fuzzy, and the city that will end up dominating is not determined at the starting point. Many cities are candidates. It is just when the urbexplosion approaches maturity that one of them triumphs. While competitors fight each other, the urbexplosive process develops, and its influence spreads over increasingly vast territories that lie farther and farther from the center. At the climax, the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery are clearly defined, and the role of each actor seems fixed for eternity, but this is just an illusion. Sooner or later, the embryo of a rival urbexplosion forms at a good distance from the center of the old urbexplosion, at a distance sufficient to allow the new urbexplosion to progressively free itself from the domination of the center, but, at the same time, sufficiently close to that center for the embryo to benefit from the energy that emanates from the old core. The gestation process of the new urbexplosion involves the forming of a fuzzy center and the competition between the candidates to the position of leader. The old urbexplosion notices the emergence of a potential rival and counterattacks.

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However, the very growth of the new urbexplosion weakens the old one until the new one overthrows it. The Babylonian urbexplosion had many children: in Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, Greece, and Italy. Many potential rivals threatened the domination of the Babylonian urbexplosion. Neither Egypt, despite its rich and powerful state, nor Phoenicia, despite its immense commercial network, nor Persia, despite its numerous military victories, nor Greece, despite its brilliant colonial strategy, its science, and culture, could triumph. Rome did, little after Alexander the Great had had the impression that he had conquered the whole world by taking control of the entire Babylonian urbexplosion. Many factors favored Rome: the westward topodynamic movement within the Great Corridor, the good distance from Babylon, the aging of the Babylonian urbexplosion marked by too high population densities, exhaustion of soils, lost of dynamism, and lack of economic opportunities.

s URBANIZATION IN THE ASIAN CORRIDOR Urbanization had a second original birthplace, east of Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley, which belongs to the Asian Corridor. If the first Sumerian cities became “urban” around 3200 BC, the first urban cities of the Indus Valley appeared close to one thousand years later, that is, around 2300 BC (about two hundred years after the appearance of the first pre-urban cities in this region). A third probably original birthplace of urbanization lies in China, in the Shaanxi province. It is also situated within the Asian Corridor. It is estimated that urbanization started in China about one thousand years after that of the Indus Valley, that is, around 1250 BC (pre-urban cities probably appeared in China between 2000 and 1500 BC). It has been mentioned that the Sumer region and the Indus Valley have established contacts with each other very early. For instance, the agriculture of Mesopotamian origin reached the Indus Valley around 6500 BC. And it is known that Ur had commercial exchanges with India and the Indus Valley as early as 2350 BC, that is, at the very moment urbanization was taking roots in the Indus Valley. Moreover, it is proven that, after having been introduced into the Indus Valley, the cultivation of Mesopotamian wheat and barley reached the Chinese Loess Plateau to which the Shaanxi province belongs during the second millennium BC. Various indications suggest that Chinese pottery of the Shang dynasty (that reigned from about 1770 to 1050 BC, that is, in the period when urbanization emerged in China) imported various motifs from the Indus Valley and even Mesopotamia.47 One should avoid believing 47.

Igor M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl, Early Antiquity (Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 408–409.

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that the first three original birthplaces of urbanization were totally isolated from each other and that the first birthplace (the Mesopotamian one) had strictly no influence on the second one, nor the second one on the third one. The relations between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley naturally go through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. As for the relations between the Indus Valley and China, they follow the Asian Corridor and the route that was to become the Silk Road (when silk started to take that route, probably under Alexander the Great; see Map 5). That millennia-old road, which gave form to the northern part of the Asian Corridor, linked the Mediterranean Sea and the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau through three main routes: the summer route from Samarkand to KhamiHami passing north of the Tien Shan Mountains through Tokmak and Barkol; the all-season route from Samarkand to Khami-Hami passing between the Tien Shan Mountains and the Tarim Basin through Kokand, Kashgar-Kashi and Turfan; the winter route from Merv-Mary to Kiuchuan-Jiuquan passing to the south of the Tarim Basin through Bactra-Balkh, Tashkurgan, KhotanHotan, and Dunhuang. The three routes converged to the east on the Hexi Corridor of the Gansu region before reaching the Huang He (Yellow River) Basin. From west to east, the main axis of the Silk Road linked the following cities: Antioch (on the Mediterranean Sea), Dura-Europos, Ctesiphon (close to Baghdad), Ecbatana-Hamadan, Rhagae (Tehran), Hecatompylos, Merv-Mary, Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar-Kashi, Turfan, Khami-Hami, Anhsi-Anxi, KiuchuanJiuquan, Langzhou, Fengxiang, Xi’an, and Luoyang. All the cities from Antioch to Samarkand belonged to the empire of Alexander the Great, and all the cities from Kashgar-Kashi to Luoyang have belonged to China since the Han dynasty (that is, since about 100 BC). On the 8,000-kilometer-long Silk Road, the Orient exchanged its silk,48 fur, porcelain, ceramics, jade, lapis lazuli, spices, cinnamon, fruit, rhubarb, precious woods, flowers such as ginger, pomegranate, and rose, tea, medicinal plants, as well as bronze and iron objects against Western products like gold, silver, platinum, ivory, precious stones, woolen or cotton cloth, crimson, and glassworks (it must be stressed that China did not produce glass before the fifth century AD). It is also from this road that paper and printing reached the Western world from China. On the Silk Road were also traded the incense and argan oil from Arabia as well as the spices, ivory, pearls, precious stones, and gold from India. Slaves and pretty courtesans were also exchanged. The goods traded on the Silk Road were mainly conveyed by camels, but also by horses and oxen. 48.

China kept the secret of silk production till the 5th century AD, that is, over a period of close to 1,000 years.

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Samarkand

Beijing

Antioch Ai Khanum

Khotan

Tehran Damascus

Baghdad

Changan Lahore

Luoyang

Nanking

Chengdu

330 km

Straight Road Silk Road

Map 5 The Silk Road, the Straight Road, and the Asian Corridor 49

The evolution from Sumer to Rome that has just been described is both similar and different from the one that goes from the Indus Valley to the Chinese Loess Plateau. In both cases, the covered distance approximates three thousand kilometers, and the trajectories go from the Tropic of Cancer (23rd parallel North) to the 43rd parallel North. That being said, major differences exist. In the Mesopotamian case, the Babylonian urbexplosion developed directly from the first urbanization, that of Sumer, while, because of the invasion of the Indo-European Aryans starting around 1750 BC, the urbanization of the Indus Valley aborted and did not transform into any urbexplosion. At the most, it could have contributed to the emergence of the Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion in the Loess Plateau.

The Indus Valley The Harappa civilization culminated between 2100 and 1750 BC. Its hearth was located in the Punjab region of Pakistan, close to the present border with Afghanistan, but its territory extended towards the south and the mouth of 49.

Actually, the so-called “Silk Road” is a complex network linking a very large number of cities and crossroads. Appendix 3 presents a figure which synthesizes the main elements of the Silk Road network. That figure results from a systematic comparison of the many (often quite different) existing maps of the Silk Road.

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the Indus River, and towards the east in present India’s Rajasthan. That civilization was highly urbanized, with several very large cities and an economic system based on agriculture, the raising of livestock, and trade relations with other regions located in Mesopotamia and Arabia. It used its own form of writing, which has yet to be deciphered. So the link between the Harappa urbanization and Mesopotamia, including Sumer, which is well documented, has been established thanks to archaeological as well as literary evidence from Mesopotamian sources only.50 The city that gave its name to the civilization of Harappa was founded around 2300 BC in Punjab. Like the other cities of its civilization and like the Sumerian cities, Harappa was built of burnt and unburnt bricks, and, like the future Chinese cities, it was well planned, Harappan cities being built on a rectangular grid plan. The rectilinear gridiron pattern of land subdivision was introduced in a systematic way for the first time by the Harappan civilization, which can be presented as the mother of town planning.51 Harappa had covered drains, and there were bathrooms in most of its houses, which indicates a strong desire for cleanliness that was probably connected with the concepts of ritual purity and taboo, as well as with ideas of hygiene. Despite this, no building has been discovered at any Harappan site that can with certainty be interpreted as a temple. However, Harappa artifacts have produced much evidence of the cult of the goddess and the bull. Harappa contained a citadel in the middle of the west side, with storehouses and workmen’s quarters to the north. Like the Mesopotamian cities, Harappa and its sister cities were “river cities” and relied on river transportation. Harappa was located on an extensive series of mounds on the left bank of the now dry course of Ravi River, which was an affluent of the Indus River. As in Mesopotamia, Harappan cities were based on transportation innovations. Some of their boats and bullock carts with a framed canopy have been excavated. The Harappan civilization did not know of or at least use horses, but it knew of the wheel and used oxen for transportation purposes. Its ignorance of horses caused its death. The Harappan sedentary civilization with its bullock carts was easy prey for the Aryan mobile invaders on their horse-drawn chariots. The second largest city of the Harappa civilization was Mohenjo-daro, which, in about 2000 BC, had a population of around 30,000–40,000. 50.

51.

Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Elisabeth E.C.L. During Caspers, “Sumer, Coastal Arabia and the Indus Valley in Protoliterate and Early Dynastic Eras: Supporting Evidence for a Cultural Linkage,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 22, 2 (1979): 121–135. Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 15. The case of the ancient Egyptian templetown of Kahun where the gridiron is found must not be seen as representative of any systematic city planning practice in Ancient Egypt (see ibid., 29).

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The Harappan urbanization and civilization developed along a natural corridor that followed the Indus and Ravi rivers. Harappa was the northern pole of the corridor, while Mohenjo-daro was its southern pole. This corridor is at the origin of the Asian Corridor. Mohenjo-daro was situated on the right bank of the Indus River, about 650 kilometers southwest of Harappa, which it resembled with its fortifications, citadel regular rectangular grid plan, and functioning network of covered sewers. Like Harappa, it was probably founded around 2300 BC, and lasted 550 years until around 1750 BC. Contrary to Harappa, which was built in both raw and burnt bricks, Mohenjo-daro was essentially built in burnt bricks. The whole region of the southern Indus Valley is famous for its brick architecture. Kalibangan, the third most important city of the Indus civilization, is a little younger than the two first ones. The settlement of Kalibangan entered its “urban” phase as late as 2150 to 1900 BC. It was located in the present Indian state of Rajasthan. It occupied a special site between two river basins, that of the Indus and the Ghaggar River. The Ghaggar River originates from northern India in the Siwalik Range and, after 320 kilometers, it joins the now underground Saraswati River that continues southwest and practically disappears in the Great Indian Desert. It is possible that, originally, the Ghaggar River (or Sutlej River) was an affluent of the Indus River or even a separate river parallel to the Indus River, and flowing down to the Arabian Sea.52 In the past, Kalibangan stood on the left bank of the Ghaggar-Sutlej River, but the course of the river has since changed, and its bed is now dry in the Kalibangan region. The plan of Kalibangan follows the grid pattern observed at Harappa and at Mohenjo-daro. Kalibangan’s streets were of regularly controlled widths, the major streets running through, while the minor lanes were sometimes offset, creating different-sized blocks. The citadel of Kalibangan was protected by a massive defensive wall of brick. In Kalibangan, both mud and burnt bricks were used, but burnt bricks were reserved for bathrooms, wells, and drains. Most of the domestic architecture was in mud brick. The Harappa civilization suddenly disappeared when the Aryans invaded India (and present-day Pakistan) between 1750 and 1000 BC. The Aryans seemingly came from present-day Iran through Afghanistan and the important Khyber Pass, which links Kabul in Afghanistan to Peshawar in present-day Pakistan. The Khyber Pass is very close to the city of Harappa, which was one of the first victims of the Aryan invasions. From the region of Harappa, the Aryans went on to the north of present-day India. Among the populations repelled by the invaders were the Dravidians who fled to the south of India where they still constitute the majority. Despite its high level of development, the Indus civilization could not resist the Aryan conquerors 52.

Ibid., 31.

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essentially because, contrary to the Harappans, the Aryans were horsemen and benefited from horse-drawn war chariots. The Aryans were shepherds and stockbreeders, and they put an end to the urban economy of Harappa and its sister cities. Urbanization revived in India a long time later. Allchin and Allchin estimate that urbanization reappeared in India, along the Ganges, during the sixth century BC at the earliest (that is 1,200 years or more after the disappearance of the Harappan civilization),53 especially in the Mauryan (between 320 and 185 BC), Asoka (from 269 to 232 BC), and Gupta (from AD 320 to 550) empires, but the link between the new Indian urbanization and the Harappan one was not obvious at all. It may even be possible that the links between the Harappa civilization and the first Chinese cities were stronger than those between the same civilization and the Indian cities of the later period.

THE DIFFUSION OF DOMESTICATED SPECIES In the case of the Great Corridor, the diffusion of urbanization followed, to a large extent, the route followed, millennia before, by agriculture and, later, by the Ubaid culture. Within the Asian Corridor, some evolutions were also a harbinger of the topodynamic evolution. For instance, it is attested that wheat, barley, cows and bulls, horses, sheep, and goats came very early to China from the Indus Valley and the west, in particular from Mesopotamia, along the Asian Corridor. Those species rapidly became integrated into the agriculture and breeding, which had developed in an autonomous way in northern and, possibly, southern China. It is also admitted that, inside China, the diffusion processes generally followed a north-south axis, which is totally in accordance with the geometry of the Asian Corridor. Most of the time, the diffusion went from the north towards the south, as in the case of the breeding of pigs, dogs, chicken, buffalo, silkworm, duck, and goose, in the case of the cultivation of millet, soya, hemp, citrus fruit, tea, apricot, peach, and pear, but also in the case of writing, the making of bronze, and the setting-up of advanced states. By contrast, rice and the technology of iron melting diffused from the south to the north (Jared Diamond , Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997, 329–331).

One of the rare relics of the Harappa civilization in more recent India relates to the fact that it seems that the titles of “radja” (“king”) and “maharaja” (“great king”) originate from the Harappan civilization. By contrast, the imprint of the Aryans on modern India is omnipresent. The Aryans are the authors of the famous Veda texts, which are the oldest written sacred texts in the world. They were written in Sanskrit between 1800 and 1200 BC. Those texts are at the origin of Hinduism, which is at the root of Buddhism. With their religion,

53.

Bridget Allchin and Raymond Allchin, Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan before 500 BC (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

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the Aryans also brought a rigid social system based on the religious power of the Brahmans and the division of society into castes. That system still unofficially survives both in Moslem Pakistan and in Hindu India.

The Appearance of Urbanization on the Loess Plateau of China The history of China is long and complex. Moreover, China is the only country of the world crossed by the three topodynamic corridors. It turns out that three phases can be distinguished in the development of that country, and that they are clearly linked to the three topodynamic corridors. The first one, which corresponds to the beginning of urbanization, started around 1100 BC, and most of it took place inside the Asian Corridor. The second phase was related to the opening of China to foreign influences; it began around AD 970, and was marked by the Great Corridor. The third phase began in AD 1896, and it corresponded to the ascent of the Mongolo-American Corridor through the Russian and Japanese influences. It must be added that, before it came to dominate, the Mongolo-American Corridor had played a major role throughout Chinese history, as will be seen. The cradle of urbanization in China is situated on the Loess Plateau, where an important plain is covered with loess, a very fertile wind-deposited silt of periglacial origin transported by wind during the Quaternary Age. That Chinese region is located to the north, in the Huang He (Yellow River) Basin, about 1,200 kilometers from the Yellow Sea and 3,000 kilometers from Harappa. Thanks to the loess of that region, the Huang He carries three times as much silt as the Yangtze River, which itself carries as much silt as the Nile, Amazon and Mississippi altogether. The urbanization that developed in the loess region around 1100 BC probably was original. However, since there can be true urbanization only in a commercial context involving, among other things, long-distance exchanges (such exchanges usually develop “before” the birth of urbanization), it is relevant to ask what long-distance exchanges accompanied the first Chinese urbanization. Since east, north and south of the Loess Plateau, economic development was still primitive around 1250 BC, the hypothesis of the existence of long-distance commercial links with the west, particularly with the Indus Valley and, through it, with Mesopotamia comes to mind. There are good reasons to believe that, indeed, exchanges took place rather early, through the Asian Corridor, between the Loess Plateau and the Indus Valley, considering the diffusion to China of the wheat and barley from Mesopotamia, and the various artistic influences observed in the pottery of the Shang dynasty. On the other hand, the planning of the cities of the Harappan civilization and that of he first Chinese cities are stunningly similar: central axes oriented according to the cardinal points and intersecting at the center of the city,

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rectangular street grid, etc. This must be especially noted since those characteristics are not observed in the case of the Mesopotamian cities. Finally, as already mentioned, from 250 BC, Buddhism conquered China by following the Silk Road that went from the Harappa region to the Loess Plateau.54 This illustrates the very ancient importance of that route, which became even more important during the reign of Emperor Han Wu Ti (140–87 BC), who defeated the Huns, which considerably favored transcontinental trade along the Silk Road. Han Wu Ti was the most famous emperor of the western Han dynasty. Be that as it may, the Chinese urbanization was born on the very fertile Loess Plateau where predominated the cultivation of millet originating from China, and that of wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia. The first Chinese cities, appeared around 1250 BC, started as ceremonial sites.55 That was the case of Hao Ching, which was the capital of the western Zhou kingdom from 1121 BC, and Xianyang, which became the capital of the emperors of the Qin dynasty in 232 BC, a little before the unification of China in 221 BC. Only progressively did those ceremonial sites acquire an urban character around 1100 BC. Bairoch estimates that “by the fifth century BC, though no city had a population of as much as 200,000 China already had four to six cities with populations in excess of 100,000.”56 The urban system that took form on the Loess Plateau was rather soon dominated by the city of Changan, which would become Xi’an (we shall refer to Changan-Xi’an, where Changan is the ancient name of the city, and Xi’an is the modern version of the same name; the same will be done with all names of Chinese cities; see Map 5). Changan-Xi’an became the second capital of united China, after the neighboring Xianyang. Changan-Xi’an bore the title of capital of China for 527 years, that is, from 206 BC to AD 8 and from AD 589 to 906. Lintong, a little to the north of Changan-Xi’an, was the site of the discovery in AD 1974 of the mausoleum of Shi Huangdi, the first emperor and unifier of China, who died in 210 BC. The mausoleum contained an army of 7,000 warriors made of pottery and equipped with weapons and horses. Changan-Xi’an is located on the fertile loess plain in the basin of the Huang He River, between the Wei River and two of its affluents, the Feng and Chan rivers. It was linked to the three rivers by a canal network. 54.

55.

56.

Buddhism was not the only religion to have spread through the Silk Road. Nestorian Christianity, Christian Monophysite Christianity, Manichaeism , MazdaismMazdakism, Zoroastrianism, Parsiism, and even the Egyptian cult of Osiris entered China through that route. Peter Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press and Chicago: Aldine, 1971). Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 43–44.

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For centuries, Changan-Xi’an was, with Luoyang, the main terminal of the Silk Road. It was also one of the strategic cities of the north-south “Straight Road” that was the spine of the first united Chinese Empire, and led to the Red Basin, Sichuan, and Chengdu, the future capital of the Sichuan province (see Map 5). The Straight Road gave birth to the Indian Silk Road since it led to the Ganges after successively crossing the Yangtze River, the Mekong, which leads to Vietnam, the Salween, which leads to Burma-Myanmar and Thailand, and the Brahmaputra, which shares the same delta as the Ganges. The Red Basin constitutes the second major cradle of urbanization in China. It draws its importance from its great fertility and the fact that it is the site of one of China’s most ancient and successful irrigation systems. That system was created under the Qin dynasty between 221 and 206 BC, and it used half the water of the Min River, an affluent of the Yangtze. The link that was established very early, in the context of the first unification of China, in 221 BC, between the Loess Plateau and the Red Basin favored the emergence of the first Chinese urbexplosion, dominated by Changan-Xi’an and Luoyang up north, on the Loess Plateau of the Shaanxi province, and by Chengdu and Chongqing to the south, in the Red Basin of the Sichuan province. About 100 BC, Changan-Xi’an had a population of 250,000 inhabitants, more than 50 temples and five palaces within a twelve-meter-high and 11.9-kilometerlong wall that surrounded the city. In AD 100, it reached a population of more than 300,000 inhabitants. Luoyang, which was also called Henan-fu, was the second Chinese terminal of the Silk Road. Europeans used to call it Sera Metropolis, which means the metropolis of the Seres, being the people of that region from whose name comes the word “sericulture,” the cultivation of domesticated silk (“serica“ in Latin). Founded around 1125 BC, almost a millennium before Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang was the capital of the Zhou kingdom from 771 to 232 BC, and later the capital of unified China from AD 23 to 220. During that last period, Luoyang became the largest Chinese city. Situated to the east of Changan-Xi’an on a tributary of the Huang He, it was a commercial crossroads because of the river and Silk Road, and a dynamic city, which entered history thanks to Ts’ai Lun, an official attached to the Luoyang Imperial court of China who invented paper there in AD 105. The Chinese kept the secret of the making of paper for 600 years, till 751 when, in Samarkand, Arabs captured Chinese papermakers who revealed their secret, which reached Baghdad and Damascus in 793, and France just around AD 1270.

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THE DIFFUSION OF CHINESE AND BUDDHISM Inside the Asian Corridor, the movements of peoples and languages followed the same main trajectories. Chinese belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. The region of origin of Chinese is the middle Huang He Basin where lies the Loess Plateau . The diffusion of Chinese occurred from the north to the south, where Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Tai-Kadai were spoken. Little by little, Chinese drove back to the south those languages, and their populations of Chinese origin, down to Southeast Asia. That movement caused the immense Austronesian expansion, which was one of the biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years. Austronesian people, stemming ultimately from mainland China and Taiwan , colonized the Philippines, Java, and the rest of Indonesia, and then the Malay Peninsula as well as Polynesia and Madagascar. Austronesian languages are spoken today as native languages over more than half of the globe’s span, from Madagascar to Easter Island (Jared Diamond, op. cit., 336). More recently, the diffusion of Buddhism , which accompanied or followed the diffusion of urbanization, followed a very interesting course whose progression can be dated. Buddhism was born in Benares around 525 BC in a cultural context strongly marked by the Aryan Vedas . It became a true religious current around 400 BC. From that date, it spread throughout India and reached China through the northwest along the Great Indian Road (or Indian Silk Road) that went upstream the Ganges and Indus rivers. After having reached Bactra (Baktra Basileion in Greek) and the Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria, which became a Buddhist kingdom around 50 BC, it followed the Silk Road up to China. Let us note that in AD 1964, a Greek city of the kingdom of Bactria, called Ai Khanum and probably founded by Alexander the Great under the name of Alexandria Oxiana, was rediscovered by French archaeologists in Afghanistan, close to Tajikistan and China. That city with its Greek gymnasium, temples, and statues attests a Mediterranean presence in the very neighborhood of China. It is then normal to notice that the Buddhist statues from the beginning of this era that have been found in that region revealed a strong influence of the Greek sculpture. Buddhism entered the present territory of western China around 250 BC through the city of Khotan-Hotan, which was then an Aryan city and not a Chinese one. In 117–115 BC, the Han dynasty conquered an important part of Central Asia by taking control of the Hexi Corridor (in the Gansu Province), which is a little closer to Khotan-Hotan than to Changan-Xi’an and belongs to the Silk Road. This how Buddhism entered, a little reluctantly, in the Chinese Empire. Only two centuries later, around AD 100, did Buddhism become a significant phenomenon in the Chinese world. It had already reached Luoyang around AD 25, as well as Kaifeng and Zhengzhou around AD 50. Finally, it arrived in Nanking-Nanjing around 240. From Khotan-Hotan to Nanking-Nanjing, it had taken about 500 years for Buddhism to cover the distance from the present western border of China to the Yangtze River along the Asian Corridor. The Chinese urban development followed about the same route from the Loess Plateau to southeast China.

In the Red Basin, Chengdu was founded by the Qin dynasty around 300 BC, and it constituted an important communication node with waterways linked to the Yangtze River and its tributary, the T’o River, and overland routes coming from the region of Changan-Xi’an and leading to Tibet, the Yunnan Province (close to Burma-Myanmar), and Vietnam. To the southeast of Chengdu, the city of Chiangzhou, whose name became Chongqing in AD 1188, is older than Chengdu. Its origin is lost in the obscurity of Chinese

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legends. In 316 BC, when the kingdom of Ba was integrated into the Qin Empire, Chongqing became the capital of the region. Its location on a headland at the point of confluence of the Chialing and Yangtze rivers endowed it with both a military and commercial importance. Chongqing constituted and still constitutes the main link between the Red Basin and the Yangtze River. The city was fortified in 250 BC. By AD 200, urbanization was solidly established in China. It can even be said that an urbexplosion was born there since the urban nucleus of the Loess Plateau was spawing tentacles in all directions and conquering an ever vaster territory. Luoyang was then the largest city of China, with a population of about 350,000 inhabitants, slightly more than that of Babylon at its peak. The Chinese Empire was then transforming into a true economy-world. Indeed, the original urbexplosion progressively extended beyond the Loess Plateau and the Red Basin to cover China’s Great Plain, which stretches out to the east of Zhenzhou, from Hangzhou to Peking-Beijing. Gradually, the economy of the Chinese Empire was reaching the dimension and complexity of the only other economy-world that the world knew at that time, that is the Roman Empire.

s THE EMERGENCE OF URBANIZATION IN AMERICA If it is possible, yet unproven, that Mesopotamian urbanization exerted an influence on the rise of urbanization in the Indus Valley, and that the latter may have exerted an influence on the beginning of urbanization in China, there is no doubt that the beginnings of urbanization in America owed nothing to any external influence. This explains the many specificities of that urbanization. In the three Eurasian poles, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China, urbanization developed north of the Tropic of Cancer. Pre-Columbian urbanization took place south of that Tropic. Altogether the Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, and China urbanizations were based on civilizations that knew and used wheel transportation and writing. Pre-Columbian civilizations did not know wheel transportation as they did not use the potter’s wheel (the Amerindians from the Valley of Mexico, predecessors of the Aztec, invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport). As for writing, it was invented independently by the pre-Columbians from the Valley of Mexico before 600 BC. Their invention inspired the Maya who had a well-developed writing based on logograms called glyphs (comparable to the Egyptians’ hieroglyphic system or to Sumerian cuneiform writing). Mesoamerican civilizations from Mexico and Central America had a writing system, but, despite their significant level of urbanization, the Inca had none (if we except their “memorizers” made of knotted cords, called quipus). It must

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be noted that the absence of writing was also a feature of the development of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa. Bronze, iron and steel played a major role in the development of urban ization in the three Eurasian poles, whereas pre-Columbian civilizations did not know iron and steel, and they used little bronze.57 Their tools and weapons were made of stone, wood or, rarely, bronze. In fact, the mass production of bronze tools was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before AD 1500 and the arrival of Europeans, while it was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier. Pre-Columbian societies used neither animal traction nor plow. About their only source of energy was human muscular strength. Transportation depended almost exclusively on human beings (except for the llama/alpaca in the Andes). The llama/ alpaca was confined to a small area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian Coast. While it was used for meat, wool, hides, and goods transport, it never yielded milk for human consumption, never bore a rider, never pulled a cart or a plow, and never served as a power source or vehicle of warfare.58 Finally, pre-Columbian navigation was very primitive: trade between the New World’s most advanced societies, those of the Andes and Mesoamerica, was carried out by rafts that sailed with the wind.59 Among the other differences, it must be observed that most of the pre-Columbian urbanization was located in mountain ranges at high altitudes, as in the cases of the Inca and Aztec (however, the Maya, who occasionally built cities in the mountains of southern Guatemala, located more frequently in the wooded plains of Yucatan, Belize, and northern Guatemala). In Eurasia, waterways and valleys structured the first poles of urbanization, which were nurtured by trade (including trade over long distances). In the case of the pre-Columbian urbanization, long-distance trade seems not to have played as important a role, probably because of the deficiencies of the transport modes. Based on such observations, most people would be inclined to think that pre-Columbian cities were very primitive. Not only were they not, but they were also more sophisticated than the Mesopotamian cities and even the European cities their conquerors came from. In AD 1500, the great pre-Columbian cities were richer, more populated, and better organized than the Spanish cities. At the time of its conquest by the Spaniards, Tenochtitlan, the future Mexico City, had about 160,000 inhabitants, and it is estimated that around AD 650, the city of Teotihuacan had reached a population of about 57.

58. 59.

In pre-Columbian civilizations, metal technology was either extremely limited or yet to be discovered. See Arthur Street and William Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Jared Diamond, op. cit., 355. Ibid., 359.

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100,000 inhabitants. In 1500, the two largest cities of the Iberian Peninsula, Granada and Lisbon, had only about 70,000 inhabitants each.60

Agriculture and Pre-Columbian Pottery Before taking up the history of urbanization in pre-Columbian America, let us have a look at the beginnings of the domestication of animals and plants on that continent. It is thought that America was first inhabited by Mongoloid peoples coming from Asia, through northeastern Siberia, by way of the Bering Strait and Alaska, around 12,000 BC. One thousand years later, they had reached the present center of the United States; then, around 10,000 BC, they had completed their southward migration, and attained Patagonia and the extremity of South America. The migration towards the east and Greenland was slower. Amerindians reached that island just around 2000 BC.61 At the arrival of Europeans, a high proportion of Amerindians lived on hunting, fishing, and semi-nomadic agriculture. However, three important zones of sedentary agriculture existed: Mesoamerica (present Mexico and Guatemala), Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, and the Ohio Basin. Agriculture probably developed in those three regions in an independent way around 2500 BC. It is also possible that it did, independently, develop also in Amazonia at about the same period. In the region of the Mexico Valley, agriculture reached a very high level of sophistication. There, irrigation was very developed, and a large number of vegetal species were domesticated, as in the Andes, by the way. In Mesoamerica, three agricultural products clearly dominated: corn, beans, and squash, whereas in the Andes, the three main products were manioc, potatoes, and lima beans. Let us remind the fact that pre-Columbian agriculture gave the world maize (originating from the Maya region), many types of beans, tomato, tobacco (coming from North America), potatoes (originating from Peru; it must be noted that tomato, potatoes and tobacco all belong to the solanaceae family), sweet potatoes, squashes, chili peppers, manioc, cranberry, groundnuts (the word cacahuètes in French comes from the Aztec word for peanuts), avocado, pumpkin, pineapple, sunflower, agave, hevea (and, consequently, rubber), coca (originating from the Andes), vanilla, and cocoa (hence, chocolate; cocoa naturally grows in Central America, and it was first cultivated by the Maya), among other things. America also domesticated animals that did not exist in Eurasia, like turkey, llama, alpaca, and Guinea pig. Four of the twelve species that account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops come from America. They are corn, which originates from Mesoamerica, potato, manioc, and sweet potato, which all come from

60. 61.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 92–93. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 37.

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the Andes. The other blockbusters are wheat and barley (from Mesopotamia), rice (from India), sorghum (from West Africa and Sahel), soybean (from Eastern Asia), sugarcane (from New Guinea), sugar beet (from Europe), and fruit banana (from Southeast Asia and India).62

Teotihuacan Tenochtitlan

Uxmal Palenque Tikal

Chan Chan

Machu Picchu

230 km

Cuzco

Map 6 The Two Pre-Columbian Corridors

The diffusion of agriculture in America was hindered by the geography of the continent. Climate variations and various obstacles such as the undulating morphology of Central America slowed north-south relations down. So, agricultural products of the Andes were scarcely diffused to Mesoamerica, and

62.

Ibid., 132.

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vice versa. The diffusion of pottery allows the formulation of an interesting hypothesis about the existence of pre-Columbian topodynamic corridors (see Map 6). It is believed that the earliest pottery ever found in America came from the border region between Venezuela and Guyana, and dates back to about 4000 BC. The second earliest pottery came from Puerto Hormiga, on the Caribbean Sea in Colombia, close to Panama. It dates back to about 3500 BC. From Puerto Hormiga, it seems that the diffusion of the art of pottery took two different roads. It entered Central America and reached the present area of Mexico City around 2300 BC. But it also went towards the south along the Andes, reaching Valdivia, Ecuador, around 3000 BC (some archaeologists pretend that this site is the oldest in America…), and the region of Chan Chan in northern Peru about 2000 BC. All that seems to indicate that preColumbian civilization started in the northern part of South America and that a diffusion process took place following two main topodynamic corridors; the first towards the Valley of Mexico linking Puerto Hormiga, Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan, and the second along the Andes towards Peru and Chile from Puerto Hormiga to Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimú Empire, and Cuzco. It is interesting to note that, in the same way as, in the Northern Corridor, the two development poles of the Mayan region and the Valley of Mexico competed in Mesoamerica, the Chimú region located on the northern coast of Peru, in the Southern Corridor, competed with the Inca Cuzco region located in the interior in southern Peru. The pole that ultimately triumphed when the Europeans arrived to both Mesoamerica and the Andes was the one farthest from Puerto Hormiga and Colombia, that is, the Valley of Mexico and the Cuzco region.

Urbanization in the Northern Pre-Columbian Corridor Reconstructing the history of urbanization in pre-Columbian America is not always easy because of the scarcity of deciphered written documents and the destructions, which ensued from the Spanish conquest. In Mesoamerica, the order of civilizations seems to have been the following. The rise of the first pre-Columbian documented civilization, that of the Olmec who appeared around 2000 BC, culminated between 1200 and 600 BC. Their civilization was pre-urban, and their territory extended from the coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico situated to the east of present Mexico City up to the Acapulco region on the Pacific while passing by the Valley of Mexico. Their zone of origin seems to have been at the extreme south of the Gulf of Mexico in the present state of Tabasco, to the northwest of the future Maya country. The Olmec were perhaps the greatest sculptors of Ancient Mesoamerica, and they invented the calendar and the first Mesoamerican writing, which was hieroglyphic. Their territory, which can be described as the Olmec Corridor and is located where the Gulf of Mexico gets closest to the Pacific, came to canalize the

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relations between the Valley of Mexico to the northwest and the Maya country to the southeast. It is from the Tabasco center that civilization exploded in all directions: towards the northwest in the direction of Teotihuacan, the Valley of Mexico, and El Tajín, towards the southwest in the direction of Oaxaca where the Zapotec and, later, the Mixtec civilizations developed, and, finally, towards the east in the direction of the Maya country. The northward trajectory gave birth to the first pre-Columbian urban civilization, that of Teotihuacan, which generated an immense empire that came to cover the whole Mesoamerica. Teotihuacan lay a little to the northeast of present Mexico City, in the Valley of Teotihuacan, which is an extension of the Valley of Mexico. Teotihuacan’s first settlement goes back to around 450 BC. This settlement became a true city about 400 BC, and a planned metropolis about the beginning of the Christian era. Teotihuacan was planned and divided into quarters by two great avenues that crossed at the center, and the entire city was laid out on a grid plan oriented to these avenues. The Teotihuacan empire reached its acme between AD 450 and 650. Its population at that time reached between 75,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, that is, about half the population of Tenochtitlan-Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. Around 750, Teotihuacan was destroyed, but around 900 the Aztec gave a new life to that prestigious city. Teotihuacan has been the only city in the pre-Columbian history to dominate the whole Mesoamerica. Its empire was vaster than the future Aztec Empire, but much smaller than the future Inca Empire. At its acme, it was an economic and commercial metropolis as well as a major manufacturing center whose products (pottery, cylindrical vessels, figurines, jade and obsidian objects) were spread over Mesoamerica thanks to an important pedestrian network made of trails and paths rather than roads. Those exports were exchanged for mainly agricultural imports, but also cocoa, quetzal feathers, shells, jade, and obsidian. In AD 493, Teotihuacan founded a colony called Kaminaljuyu, located to the south of present Guatemala. That colony played a major role in the development of the Maya civilization, which had begun to emerge around AD 200–300. About 650 Teotihuacan was attacked and ransacked by the invading Toltec living about 50 kilometers northwest of Teotihuacan. The city outlived that attack, but its empire progressively crumbled. The Maya civilization somewhat developed in the political shadow of the empire of Teotihuacan since the Maya were not conquerors, and their cities were city-states, which at various periods accepted the suzerainty of Teotihuacan. The pre-urban urbanization of the Maya country goes back very far. The Maya city of Cuello, now in Belize, is thought to have been founded around 2000 BC, about the same time as Babylon (founded around 1900 BC). It is estimated that the classical Maya culture began around AD 200.

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Something is certain: many millennia ago, the Maya, who were living in the plain but not necessarily close to waterways, were mastering irrigation. This is proven by a satellite discovery made in 1980. The presence of a welldeveloped system of irrigation canals was then discovered over a zone covering a total of 14,000 square kilometers. That system supplied water to some 1,250 to 2,500 square kilometers of fields, as well as to cities with large populations like Tikal, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants, or Dzibilchaltun, which had forty thousand or more.63 The Maya civilization has had its ups and downs. After having triumphed and built great cities such as Tikal, Copán and Palenque, for unknown reasons, it declined from 800 BC. Only certain cities such as Xochicalco survived. Around AD 889, the Maya civilization revived, and its renaissance was associated with the founding of new cities, like Uaxactun, a good example of the Puuc style. Around 900, once again for mysterious reasons, the Maya civilization experienced a new decline, and all the Maya cities of the southern plains were abandoned. In 980, the Toltec invaded Yucatán and established their capital in Chichen Itza while preserving the Maya civilization. Around 990 a new Maya renaissance took place with the constitution of a new Maya Empire and the foundation of new cities like Uxmal. About 1200 a new Maya capital was built in Yucatán: Mayapan, which exerted its hegemony till 1441, when the Maya fell into decline. Archaeologists distinguish three Maya zones: the North, which corresponds to Yucatán, the Center, which is the northern part of modern Guatemala called Petén, and the South, which includes the highlands of the Mexican Chiapas region and some of the southern highlands of Guatemala. Uxmal belongs to the North, Tikal to the Center, and Copán to the South. As for Palenque, which is the most beautiful of Maya sites, it is located at the border between the three regions, west of the center, and at the border between the North and South. None of those four major Maya cities lies on the coast or on an important river. From a location point of view, the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures had in common a preference for highlands, for mountain sites, and for regions little connected with the seas or even with the main rivers. None of the main cities of these three civilizations can be seen as a significant port. None are on the coast, and none are located on an important river. These were truly urbanized civilizations that ignored wheel transportation and only used very primitive boats in regions where the main mode of transportation was human, without wagons or carts. Moreover, the horse, which originated from America, was not used in pre-Columbian societies. Most of America’s big wild mammals (including its horses, most of its camels, and other species 63.

Richard E.W. Adams, “Swamps, Canals, and the Location of Ancient Maya Cities,” Antiquity, 54, 212 (1980): 206–214.

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likely to have been domesticated had they survived) became extinct about 13,000 years ago.64 As for llama and alpaca, they were unknown north of the Andes. Maya cities were essentially linked by pedestrian networks. Of all the pre-Columbian civilizations, the Maya were the most intellectual: they have been called the “Greeks of the New World.” They were the most advanced in mathematics and astronomy. The Maya writing was the most sophisticated in Central America. Most Classic Maya hieroglyphs are logograms with a mainly ideographic orientation, but, in the Post-Classic period, a well-defined syllabary supplemented or even replaced logograms. The Maya created a calendar system that was partly shared with other Mesoamerican groups but that they perfected into a tool capable of recording important historical and astronomical information.65 The first year of the Maya calendars corresponded to 3113 BC. Curiously enough, this date is very similar to that of the beginning of the Jewish Era, which is supposed to be the year of the Creation, 3761 BC. Only 648 years separate the two dates. In spite of their science, the Maya had no metal technology except that which produced a few gold and copper ornaments. Like the Aztec and the other Mesoamerican peoples, they practiced sacrifice, and even cannibalism on a very large scale, essentially for religious purposes. It is estimated that three million persons have been sacrificed by the Maya through the centuries. Uxmal is much more difficult to reach than either Palenque or Tikal. This may explain why it continued to prosper for a century or so after the decline and abandonment of the southern Maya lowland centers such as Tikal and Palenque. The site of Uxmal is far from any river. It is a dry grass savanna area surrounded with heavy tropical forests. Water was furnished by wells and rain-collecting pools. These pools caused huge problems since they were an ideal site for malarial mosquitoes. Uxmal was a most important ceremonial center, and it is a masterpiece of the Puuc architecture. When the Toltec (coming from the northwest of the Valley of Mexico) or their allies invaded Yucatán about AD 980 and established their capital at Chichen Itza, northeast of Uxmal, the city continued to be occupied and became a member of the political League of Mayapan. About 1450, the League ended, and Uxmal was abandoned. Tikal is the largest and best-known city of the more than 50 known major Maya sites66. It is situated in the central part of the Maya territory.

64. 65. 66.

Jared Diamond, op. cit., 162. The Maya calendar had leap year corrections almost as accurate as those of the present day. Opinions differ as to whether or not the Maya settlements amounted to “cities.” Some authors consider them as being just ceremonial centers buried under an almost unbroken canopy of tropical forest.

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Between AD 480 and 830, Tikal’s population may have exceeded 50,000 inhabitants. Neither Tikal nor any other Maya center shows signs of town planning or neatly laid-out streets. If city planning was lacking in Tikal, public management was, however, good enough to provide water to everyone. Ten large reservoirs, partly or entirely artificial, supplied the scarce drinking water for the residents. The city seems to have been the site of an important urban renewal operation around AD 320, when a well-known “acropolis” was built. In the Early Classic period, from AD 100 to 500, Tikal and Kaminaljuyu, located a little more to the south, were important posts in the trading pedestrian network that Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico, had established in southern Mesoamerica. It must be stressed that the civilization of Teotihuacan was much more urban and trade-oriented than that of the Maya. When Teotihuacan came to decline from 650, Tikal may have somewhat dominated much of the Maya lowlands. The decline of Tikal started about 800. Its population decreased as well as its artistic production. The last dated stele of Tikal is placed at 879 or 889 (Tikal’s oldest stele bears the date of AD 292). Along with the other Mayan centers of the southern lowlands, Tikal was abandoned in the tenth century. Copán lay in the highlands of the southern part of the Maya country, in present western Honduras. It was located on a site that overhangs the Motagua River. Its architecture and sculptures are famous for their baroque-evoking richness and profusion. Palenque, which vies with Copán in the field of architecture, is the most beautiful of Maya sites, located not in a mountain region, but in a flat floodplain in northern Chiapas, to the southwest of Yucatán. When the Maya civilization collapsed for a second time around AD 900, the decline seems to have started in the western region, that of Palenque. By 1000, it is clear that almost all the western and central region of the Maya territory was abandoned, most of its inhabitants having gone elsewhere. The reasons for the Maya decline may be related to invasions from the west, inter-city wars, exhaustion of land fertility due to overcrowding, etc. Nobody knows. The ultimate renaissance of the Maya civilization took place far from Palenque and Tikal, in northern Yucatán, in the region of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Mayapan. When the Spaniards arrived in Mesoamerica, the Olmec, Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations had been replaced, the Maya civilization had practically disappeared from 1450, and Teotihuacan as well as Tula, the Toltec capital, were held by the Aztec. In 1370, 150 years before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, Teotihuacan had been conquered by the Aztec of Tenochtitlan, and it had become an Aztec city. The Aztec are in the same position with respect to the Valley of Mexico and the heart of Mesoamerica as the Semites with respect to Mesopotamia or the Mongols with respect to the Chinese Empire, meaning that there

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were less-developed invaders who succeeded, from the periphery, to take control of the center of a pre-urbexplosion or an urbexplosion. At the acme of Teotihuacan, around AD 600–650, the Aztec were probably absent from the Valley of Mexico. They lived then to the north of the pre-Columbian urban world, they were nomads living from hunting and gathering, and they had a primitive agriculture. Like the Mongols in China or the Germans in the Roman Empire, about AD 1150, they came from the north and progressively invaded the Valley of Mexico where they founded Atzcapotzalco on the shore of the Lake Texcoco (also called Lake Mexliapan), which lay at the center of the Valley of Mexico.67 The Aztec (also named Mexicas) were not the first barbarian invaders of Mesoamerica to come from the north, from present Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. They had been preceded first by the Toltec and then by the Chichimec. Tenochtitlan,68 the future Mexico City, was founded later, about 1345, on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan recognized the suzerainty of Atzcapotzalco, to which it paid a tribute. However, rapidly, Tenochtitlan started to assert itself. It conquered Teotihuacan in 1370, and other conquests were made. About 1420, the ruler of Atzcapotzalco, named Chimalpopoca, attempted to strengthen his domination over various cities including Tenochtitlan. A coalition of the vassal cities was formed, which succeeded in breaking the power of Atzcapotzalco, and Tenochtitlan came out the new ruler of the area. It must be said that, at this time, TenochtitlanMexico had already built the basis of an empire. It had conquered between 400 and 500 states in total. The land conquered by the Aztecs was grouped into 38 provinces. The small island occupied by Tenochtitlan spread out over the surrounding marshes and swamps, and became a place of fountains and gardens. Canals were built, and an extraordinarily intensive system of farming developed that resorted to plant and animal fertilizers, short-cycle fallowing, irrigation, earth and maguey terraces, and stone terracing. The region attained a density of 200 per square kilometer, the highest ever attained in Mesoamerica. At the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, in 1519, Tenochtitlan’s population was somewhere between 150,000 and

67.

68.

The Valley of Mexico lies at 2,150 meters above sea level. It is surrounded with high mountain chains. The great salt Lake Texcoco was fed at the south by two freshwater lagoons, at the northwest by two more, and at the northeast by a sluggish stream, which drained the fertile valley. The area attracted a teeming abundance of wild fowl. During the rainy season thick alluvial deposits, ideal for primitive agriculture, were washed down along the lake shore. Tenochtitlan’s name refers to the Tenochas, a small but warlike group living on islands in Lake Texcoco who became the most successful of a number of competing predatory tribes.

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170,000 inhabitants (some experts even suggest a population of 300,000). The population of its close hinterland was around 500,000 inhabitants, and the 8,000 square kilometers of the Valley of Mexico supported a population of one million and a half persons. The Aztec had a writing system, the Nahualt writing, that combined ideograms, sound symbols and figurative images. Various Aztec “codices” exist that have been made right after the conquest (the latter using both Spanish and Nahualt). They provide a better understanding of the Nahualt writing and Aztec Empire. Among them, the Codex Mendoza, Codex Borbonicus, and Codex Telleriano-Remensis are the best known. From the beginning of the Olmec civilization’s blooming around 1200 BC to the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in AD 1521, 2,700 years elapsed. On the other hand, from the emergence of true urban cities around 400 BC to the conquest, less than 2,000 years had passed. During that period, only two cities, Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, really dominated the whole Mesoamerican urban system. It is likely that, at the time of the conquest, an urbexplosion was forming. The urbanized territory of Mesoamerica had then about the same area as Mesopotamia. However, that emerging urbexplosion was probably facing serious deficiencies in terms of mobility and modes of transportation, as well as important lacks in long-distance commercial exchanges, especially with the Inca Empire to the south. That being said, it must be underlined that exchanges effectively existed between Mesoamerica and the Andes before the Spanish period. The incense, twisted ropes made of agave fibers, animal skins, and crystallized fruit from Mesoamerica reached the Inca Empire, while the gold, silver, copper, and metallurgic techniques from the Inca were exported to Mesoamerica.69 Those exchanges remained marginal, and the lack of intensive interactions between the two great pre-Columbian empires partially caused the biological fragility and technological backwardness which facilitated the triumph of the European urban civilizations in America. Such deficiencies explain that Spain has been able to conquer the whole Mesoamerica in just two years (Cortés entered Tenochtitlan as a guest on November 8, 1519, and as a conqueror on August 13, 1521), and, later, the Inca Empire also in just two years with a handful of soldiers.

Urbanization in the Southern Pre-Columbian Corridor Compared with the Mesoamerican urbanization, the Andean urbanization of the Southern pre-Columbian Corridor appears to be late, less sophisticated, but more conquering and more structured. At the time of the arrival of 69.

The Inca were in the Bronze Age when discovered by the Spaniards. Their craftsmen made knives, chisels, axes of a mixture of copper and tin, but these tools were often not hard enough to cut rock.

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the Spaniards, the Inca Empire was much vaster than the Aztec Empire, but the latter was more populated than the former. The population of North America north of the Rio Grande may have been then around 20 million inhabitants.70 That of Mesoamerica was probably also about 20 million. Bairoch estimated the total population south of the Rio Grande around 40 million, which means that the population of South America was about 20 million. As for the population of the Inca Empire, it is estimated at about 12 million. The first urban cities appeared in South America much later than in Mesoamerica. In the latter case, the date 400 BC can be accepted, while, in the case of South America, AD 1100 is more appropriate, which implies a huge difference of one and a half millennia. In other words, when the great Inca cities were founded, Tenochtitlan-Mexico already had conquered Teotihuacan, and the Aztec urbexplosion was already close to its peak. If, in Mesoamerica, the empire of Teotihuacan was the forerunner of the Aztec Empire, in South America, the Inca Empire was preceded by the Chimú Empire, whose emergence went back to about AD 1200. The Chimú Empire was the first organized state of South America. Its capital was Chan Chan. The core of the Chimú Empire was situated on the northern coast of Peru, whereas the core of the Inca Empire was located in the interior and in southern Peru. The fact that urbanization first developed in South America on the coast of Pacific gave rise to a debate among anthropologists because everywhere else, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Indus Valley, urbanization developed along rivers and not on maritime coasts. Despite their exceptional character, all indicates that South American settling process and urbanization did start on the Pacific coast and, after 1800 BC, progressively expanded upstream along the waterways up to the mountains.71 The hearth of the Chimú Empire lay between two small rivers that ran towards the Pacific Ocean, the Virú and the Chicama rivers, in the very region where the Mochica people developed a remarkable culture between AD 200 and 700. Its capital, Chan Chan, was located on the coast, in the Moche Valley, about halfway between the two rivers. In fact, the Chimú were the successors and heirs of the Mochica people as well as the Chavín culture. The whole area surrounding Chan Chan was irrigated, and an irrigation canal took water from the Chicama Valley to Chan Chan. The capital of the Chimú Empire was carefully planned. Its orthogonal grid covered an area of 36 square kilometers with a central fortified area of about four square 70.

71.

Ibid., 211, but Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 211) estimates that the population north of the Rio Grande was only between one and four million. About the estimates of the populations in the rest of the Americas, see Jared Diamond (op. cit., 210), and Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 97–98). Manus I. Midlarsky, Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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kilometers. One of the main differences between the Mesoamerican and the Andean cities probably comes from the fact that the latter are usually walled, while the former rarely are. In Chan Chan, the city walls were mainly made of mud, while the Incas used gigantic stones. Another difference comes from the fact that Mesoamerican empires just developed networks of paths and trails whereas the Chimú rulers developed a road system that is partly at the origin of the impressive Inca road system. The Chimú Empire covered a large part of the coast of Peru. It must be stressed that the Chimú and the Inca built an elaborate and often paved road network despite the absence of wheeled transportation. Their main reasons for building roads were probably military. The Chimú needed roads to move troops quickly through their empire; the same rationale that was at the origin of the Roman road system. The acme of the Chimú Empire lasted from 1360 to about 1462, when Chan Chan and the Chimú Empire were conquered by the Inca. To the south of the Chimú Empire and the southwest of Cuzco, close to the Pacific coast, a strange and fascinating culture developed: the Nazca culture, reputed for its polychrome pottery and, even more, for its “geoglyphs,” those immense drawings representing animals and geometric motifs made out of the soil and better seen from the sky. The geoglyphs, some of which are eight kilometers long, and that can only be seen from the sky, probably were meant to communicate with divinities. The Nazca valleys were urbanized, and they were eventually integrated into the Inca Empire. At the time of the arrival of Pizarro in 1533, the Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, was omnipotent. It stretched along the Pacific Coast over an area of 950,000 square kilometers (which is the equivalent of Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy altogether) and a distance of about 4,000 kilometers (the distance between New York City and the Panama Canal). The forming of the Inca Empire is a long story. The people of the core of the Inca Empire were the Quechuas, and the language used by the Inca was Quechua. The term “Inca” refers only to the nobles, who probably originated from Amazonian zones and came to the region of Cuzco as migrants who settled in caves located 24 kilometers south of Cuzco. They were partially assimilated by the Quechuas and the Inca adopted their language before dominating them and becoming the local aristocracy. From that point of view, their history resembles that of the Franks in France. Cuzco became the Inca capital about 1050. Cuzco is located at an altitude between 3,000 and 3,350 meters, in the highlands of Peru between two affluents of the Amazon River, the Urubamba and the Apurimac. Cuzco is drained by the Huatanay River, which flows into the Vilcanota River, a tributary of the Urubamba. Cuzco was transformed, around 1461, by an important urban renewal operation. When the Spaniards conquered Cuzco, its population was about 60,000 inhabitants, which is very

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inferior to Tenochtitlan’s population at the same period. However, some specialists pretend that the population of “great Cuzco” reached 225,000 persons at its peak. The city was fortified, and it had a fortress called Sacsayhuamán. As a capital, it was at the head of an empire that included more than 100 independent ethnic groups who spoke at least 20 unrelated languages. The Inca culture was less advanced than that of the Maya or the Aztec. The Inca had no writing. They used professional “memorizers” to record their official history. The knotted cords, called quipus, were used for computing, as well as for transmitting messages and memorizing tales. So the Inca had no written literature, and their astronomical knowledge was limited. In science, they did not succeed in generalizing mechanical principles. They used various forms of levers, without understanding the tool’s abstract principle. In agriculture, they transformed the territories they conquered. They channeled rivers, leveled valley floors, and built terraces. Within the Inca Empire, dozens of crops, with thousands of varieties, were domesticated, the most famous being that of potato, manioc, and sweet potato. Andean peoples developed preserves of freeze-dried meat, fish, and mealy tubers that kept indefinitely and weighed much less than the original food. The giant warehouses that lined the Inca highways were filled with these preserves. Between 1450 and 1500, the Inca completed a road network whose origins probably went back to their predecessors and which constitutes one of the most outstanding engineering achievements of the pre-Columbian period. Centered on Cuzco, it included two major north-south axes; the first ran along the Pacific Coast for about 3,600 kilometers and the other one was located in the interior. Both roads were linked with many interconnecting transverse ways. Since it crossed the Andes, the network included rock tunnels and vinesupported suspension bridges. It was only partially paved, since the Inca did not have wheeled vehicles, and grades were sometimes negotiated by steps carved in the rock. The roads were designed for foot messengers, packed animals (llamas and alpacas), and, above all, troops and administrators. A relay system existed with stations and warehouses disseminated along the roads. Long convoys of llamas and alpacas supplied the warehouses. The Inca road network was as structuring as the Roman one. The modern cities of Santiago (Chile), Quito (Ecuador) and Lima (Peru) can be seen originating from this network. Santiago was the point where the two north-south roads met in the south. Quito was the northern terminal of the system and Lima was an important crossroads on the coast. Moreover, the Argentine city of Mendoza lies close to the old network.

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Francisco Pizarro, arrived with three ships, twenty-seven horses and close to two hundred soldiers, conquered and destroyed Cuzco in 1533.72 Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, was taken prisoner, and he offered Pizarro, as a ransom, to fill with gold the room where he was kept. Pizarro accepted the deal, and the room was filled with gold. However, the Spaniards broke their promise, strangled Atahuallpa by garrotte on July 28, 1533, and kept the ransom. Atahuallpa’s brother was chosen by the Spaniards as his successor, and became Emperor Manco Cápac II. He revolted against the invaders, was forced to flee Cuzco, and took refuge in the mountains where he waged an ambush war. The last emperor probably passed the rest of his life in the region of Machu Picchu, that famous and mysterious city located about 100 kilometers northwest of Cuzco, at an altitude of 2,045 meters, on a high plateau that dominates the valleys of the Urubamba and Vilcanota rivers. Machu Picchu had about 10,000 inhabitants at the time, and the Inca abandoned it in 1572 after having been chased out by viceroy Toledo. Thereafter, Machu Picchu fell into oblivion for 339 years till the American Hiram Bingham rediscovered it in 1911. Pre-Columbian urbanization bears much specificity when compared with those of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, or China. Its relative independence from the fluvial system is most striking. None of the three pre-Columbian cities that have been the most dominant, namely Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan, and Cuzco, has been a fluvial port nor even a city linked to a river by any advanced fluvial transport mode. This is all the more surprising since, in Eurasia, the cores of urbexplosions generally correspond to regions crossed by a multiplicity of waterways and canals. To tell the truth, pre-Columbian urbanization better compares with the emergence of pre-urban cities, like Çatalhöyük and Jarmo, located in the highlands or very far upstream. On the other hand, by their size and their interconnections, pre-Columbian cities were clearly urban. To understand the contrast between the pre-Columbian and Eurasian cases, we must return to theory. Eurasian urbanization was the product of wheeled transportation and boat navigation. In that context, it was just logical that the hearts of the urban systems be in the flat zones, in the valleys, and in places where there were numerous waterways. By contrast, the pre-Columbian urbanization originated from civilizations that ignored wheeled transportation and boat navigation (despite that they used pirogues and rafts). For them, the

72.

Pizarro left Panama for Peru in December 1530. He landed in Peru in mid-January 1531. He entered the important Inca city of Caxamarca on November 15, 1532. Pizarro arrived at Cuzco on November 15, 1533, and, the day after, he conquered the city in a single afternoon on November 16, 1533. Pizarro founded Lima as the new capital city on January 18, 1535.

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mobility of goods, persons, and information depended on the improvement of pedestrian transport and, in the Andean case, of animal-driven transportation. Pre-Columbian urban societies seem to have carried that type of mobility to a record level, which made possible a major urbanization. In fact, most of the time, waterways constitute a major obstacle to pedestrian mobility. That explains why, in pre-Columbian America, the zones that better favored pedestrian mobility (and, consequently, urbanization) have been the zones where waterways were either rare or very narrow (hence, easy to cross). The clash between the Eurasian and pre-Columbian civilizations has been brutal, among other things, because the transportation modes of the European invaders gave them an overwhelming superiority over pre-Columbian Amerindians. The introduction of those transportation modes provoked a radical upheaval of the pre-Columbian urban systems. With the notable exception of Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City, and Cuzco, which still exists, pre-Columbian cities were generally replaced with new cities better adapted to the new transportation modes: Acapulco, Veracruz, Guadalajara, Caracas, Cartagena, Valparaíso, Buenos Aires, etc. However, as already mentioned, some cities succeeded to adapt while taking advantage of the ancient networks, as in the case of Lima, Quito, and Santiago.

CHAPTER

2

Understanding the First Urban Revolution

W

hy did the first urban revolution take place? And why did it take place in Mesopotamia? Does theory help to understand such a major event? In this chapter, these questions will be addressed. Five aspects of the first urban revolution will be examined in a very theoretical way (those who dislike theory can skip over Chapter 2 and move directly to Chapter 3 without interrupting the thread of the story; the same will be true about Chapters 4, 6, 10, and 12). These points relate to the role of networks’ critical points, breaking points, central places, network systems, and agglomeration economies.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND NETWORKS’ CRITICAL POINTS After having summed up the history of the appearance of urbanization, let us now resort to space-economic theory to better understand what has just been presented. If, more than 5,000 years ago, urbanization emerged in Mesopotamia, particularly in the Sumer region, it is probably because, with the invention of wheeled transportation, road networks had to be built and, with the invention of boat and improvement of navigation, fluvial transportation networks were developed. The same explanation also applies to the urbanization of the Indus Valley and China, as well as, in part, the case of the pre-Columbian urbanization, since pre-Columbian urban systems were also based on transportation networks which, however, involved pedestrian trails and paths instead of roads conceived for wheeled vehicles. The historical link between transportation networks and urbanization cannot be questioned. Let us see why networks contribute to polarization and, consequently, to urbanization. To demonstrate that, let us present a few concepts based on a simple example. When a location has to be found for a new activity, for instance a shoe factory, the decision-maker is guided by a location function. In the classical shoe factory example, the location function consists of minimizing the total cost

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of transportation for the shoe factory, including the cost of transporting the leather and the soles to the factory and the shoes to the market. Transportation costs exist because space friction does (because of gravity, moving from one point to another on Earth requires fighting against the “friction of space”). Through the location function, the decision-maker takes into account various reference points: in this case, the location of the leather supplier, of the sole supplier, and of the market. If there is an advantage in locating the shoe factory closer to a given reference point, this reference point is referred to as an attraction point (since it “attracts” the location of the new activity). Similarly, if there is an advantage in locating the activity farther from a given reference point, this reference point is designated as a repulsion point; for example, it could be better for the decision-maker to locate the shoe factory far from downtown where the land prices are high, downtown being a repulsion point as far as land prices are considered, in a situation where land prices regularly decrease as the distance from downtown increases, which is typical. The advantage the decision-maker finds in locating the shoe factory one kilometer closer to an attraction point is called the attractive force exerted by the attraction point on the activity to be located. The attractive force can be measured. In our example, the attractive force exerted by the location of the leather supplier corresponds to the savings made in terms of transportation cost of the leather used by the shoe factory when the location of the shoe factory is moved one kilometer closer to the leather supplier. This is equal to the “quantity of leather, in terms of tons, used by the shoe factory in one year” (for instance) times the “transportation rate applied to transporting a ton of leather over a kilometer.” The attractive force is, then, equal to (quantity ⫻ transportation rate), which (in terms of calculus) is the first derivative of the location function with respect to the variable “distance from the leather supplier.” Let us suppose that all the transportation required by the shoe factory takes place on a road network. A network is made of segments that are linking two critical points, which are intersections or segment extremities, two reference points, or a critical point and a reference point. In a network, movements must follow the network segments and all distances are calculated along the network segments (and not “as a crow flies”). The main thesis of network theory in space-economy is simple: In a network, if a location problem involves only attraction points exerting attractive forces which do not vary with distance, the optimal location must coincide either with a critical point of the network or with an attraction point.

The intuitive proof of this is quite simple. If the decision-maker considers any location C between A and B on a given segment AB, the location force pulling to the right will be equal to the sum of the attractive forces of all

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the attraction points which can best be reached by going to the right on the network, whereas the location force pulling to the left will be equal to the sum of the attractive forces of all the attraction points which can best be reached by going to the left on the network. This means that, at point C, the decisionmaker will consider only two forces: the one pulling to the right (that is to point B), and the one pulling to the left (that is to point A). The probability of the two forces being equal is considered equal to 0%. So, with a 100% probability, one of the two forces will dominate the other, and the decision-maker will be led to consider locating at point A or at point B, before considering other locations situated on the other segments of the network. On these other segments, for the same reasons, he will also be led to prefer either a critical point or an attraction point. At the end of the process, the optimal location will coincide with either a critical point or an attraction point. Thus, critical points are likely to be optimal for numerous activities that will normally locate there. This will normally induce a polarization (and eventually an urbanization) process at the main critical points of the network. It must be noticed that, if attractive forces vary with distance, things are a little more complex. In an animal-transportation context (where attractive forces increase with distance since animals get tired and their tiredness increases with distance), optimal locations can be found on a segment between the two extremities of the segment. Then the polarization probability will be smaller while remaining clearly superior to 0%. Before September 27, AD 1825 and the appearance of railways, all terrestrial transportation modes were animal-driven (or human-driven, which is similar).

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND BREAKING POINTS A second factor played a role in the appearance of the first urban revolution: the existence of breaking points. In an attempt to sum up the list of the locations that have favored urbanization, Bairoch wrote: “But throughout all subsequent changes, the basic principles have remained the same: transport lines constitute the essential factor governing the location of cities. And this is as true for the cities of traditional societies as for those following the Industrial Revolution. This brings us back to the tyranny of distance … In traditional societies, waterways are the determining element. Cities are born and grow in size and importance at the mouths of rivers, at the confluence of rivers, at places, such as waterfalls, where rivers become unnavigable, on the shores of lakes (as a rule at exit points), near sites suitable for the establishment of seaports, and so on. Many towns are created near fords for crossing rivers. Naturally the importance of waterways derives not only from their own intrinsic properties, but also from the economic value of the hinterlands they serve: an excellent natural harbor in a desert region without resources will

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remain rural. After the Industrial Revolution, canals and, especially beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, railroads have fulfilled a function similar to that of rivers. The critical role played by transport in the location of cities does not rule out exceptions … The exceptions are for the most part religious centers, military centers, mining towns (precious metal), and capitals built by princely decree. Another sort of exception … is a relatively inaccessible site as a shelter from attack. And … thermal springs or spas.”1 In this quotation, falls, ports, fords, mine cities, religious cities, shelter cities, and thermal cities are all examples of breaking points. These are characterized by the fact that, at their location, the values of location functions change suddenly and abruptly. Two cases will be distinguished: 1) the case where the attractive force exerted by an attraction point radically changes when we consider two points located on both sides of a breaking point or line (this will be referred to as the “interface” case) without there being transshipment costs, and 2) the case where the attractive force does not radically change, but where crossing the breaking point or line involves “transshipment” costs (the “transshipment” case).

1. The “Interface” Case Coasts attract people and activities. This must be explained. Most of the time, it is assumed that attractive forces behave the same way in all directions: a movement involving a given distance costs the same, whatever the direction and whether the attractive forces vary with distance or not. In fact, on Earth, there are areas where transportation costs and location forces have certain characteristics, and other areas where these characteristics are different. The most obvious example refers to land and sea transportation. Shipping a ton of merchandise over 100 kilometers by boat is not the same as transporting a ton of merchandise by train: the transportation rates are different, as are the loading and unloading costs, the constraints in terms of networks or Euclidean (“as the crow flies”) distances, the time involved, etc. In sum, there exist “zones of mobility,” which possess their own conditions of traveling and transportation. All locations that are at the interface between the two types of mobility area readily have access to both systems of transportation without having to pass from one to the other. If a shoe factory is located at the interface (on the coast) it can send shoes directly by boat or directly by train without having to send them by train first and then by boat, or the other way around. This represents a real advantage, in terms of time, costs, and management. 1.

Paul Bairoch, De Jéricho à Mexico : villes et économie dans l’histoire (Paris : Gallimard, “Arcades, ” 1985), 143.

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Moreover, the shoe factory can choose the most economic mode whenever the two transportation systems compete with each other. In itself, the very competition between the two systems presents a great advantage for those who have access to both. This last advantage exists even if the transshipment costs between the two systems are equal to zero. However, all factors being considered, the global advantage of locating at an interface gets greater when the transshipment costs increase. It must be noted that, in itself, what we have just said about interfaces does not completely explain the fact that so many people and activities are located on the coast. The coast is not only an interface, it is also a location offering advantages that are not found elsewhere: a view, beaches, access to fishing, access to various sports, etc. Those aspects are important, but the “interface” factor also plays a role. The development of the Phoenician and Greek colonial networks was essentially based on the “interface” case.

2. The “Transshipment” Case Some points that are not located at an interface, that are neither critical points nor attraction points, constitute likely optimal locations because they are breaking points involving transshipment costs. Breaking points correspond to points of discontinuity in the location function. All around these points, the location function varies in a continuous way, whereas at the points of discontinuity it takes on a discrete value that has no connection with the surrounding values. Let us note that, in the interface case, on both sides of the interface the transportation cost functions vary in a continuous way, while at the points located on the interface, they take on discrete values, as in the case of the breaking points, which makes the breaking points and interface cases quite similar. A classical example of a breaking point is that of cities such as ancient Nineveh and Changan-Xi’an or modern Montreal, Washington, and Basel, which are located on important rivers at the furthest point upstream that boats can easily reach. Those cities are natural transshipment points. The advantage of locating at a transshipment point comes from the fact that the only way to avoid paying the transshipment costs is to locate at the transshipment point itself. Let us take the example of an ancient Chinese factory producing silk fabrics out of silk filament and thread coming from downstream Huang He (Yellow River) for the Western market served by the Silk Road. Locating the silk factory between Changan-Xi’an, which was the terminal of the Silk Road on the Wei River (an important tributary of the Huang He) and the Yellow Sea involved paying for transshipping the silk at Changan-Xi’an. Similarly,

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locating the silk factory between the Changan-Xi’an and the Western market involved paying for transshipping the silk filament and thread at ChanganXi’an. The only factory location where the owners could avoid paying for the transshipment of the silk fabrics and of the silk filament and thread, was Changan-Xi’an. The transshipment case is most important in terms of polarization. It explains that (almost?) all the great economic metropolises of the world (Babylon, Memphis, Changan-Xi’an, Rome, Constantinople, London, New York City, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai…) have been and still are ports, located on the coasts or on important rivers. But there are exceptions such as São Paulo, Johannesburg, and Mexico City. In modern cities, the strategic importance of subway stations is also linked to the fact that they constitute breaking points, transfer points. The “breaking point” or “discontinuity point” concept can also be relevant in cases where there are no transportation costs involved. There is a discontinuity point wherever a location bears advantages that an activity can benefit from only by being located at that point, and not by getting close to it. A discontinuity point is neither an attraction point (getting closer to it does not give anything) nor a critical point (it does not have to be at the junction of two network segments); it is a point with special features which benefit only the people or the activity located right there. At the beginning of urbanization, all the oasis cities (for instance, Jericho, Damascus, and Petra), bridge-cities (like Ugarit, Babylon, Nineveh, or Hattusa), or even religious cities (whose location was considered sacred or magic) represented discontinuity points.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND CENTRAL PLACES The passage from pre-urban to urban cities corresponds to the birth of urban systems that resulted from the polarization of the urban poles themselves. From the beginning, diverse urban systems took form, and existing theories help to understand that diversity. Let us start with Christaller and Lösch’s central place theory, which provides certain explanations to the polepolarization phenomenon by insisting on the role of spatial competition.2 These authors stress the fact that, if population is spread throughout space, if goods and services require different minimum markets, and if regrouping sellers of various goods and services is advantageous, all goods and services 2.

About central-place theory, see Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and August Lösch, The Economics of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); about the notion of circular isotropic space, see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale : rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Boucherville, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1983, second edition).

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will not be offered everywhere nor will they be offered in every central place, and the possibility for certain central places to dominate some others will exist. It must be noted that this domination factor is much more present in Christaller’s approach, where to the hierarchy of goods directly corresponds a hierarchy of central places, than in Lösch’s, where the very idea of central place hierarchy becomes fuzzy. Conversely, the notions of “core” and “periphery” are much better illustrated by Lösch’s model, where only one central place provides all goods and services, than by Christaller’s, where many central places of the superior rank coexist. Central place theory is based on Christaller and Lösch’s common desire to conceive a theory allowing for regrouping sellers of different goods and services who are forced by spatial competition to scatter in order to maximize their market area. The main reason for attempting to regroup otherwise-scattered sellers is the desirability of “multiple-purpose trips.” Buying many different goods during a single trip is something everybody does and likes to do, simply because it is convenient. This habit favors polarization, since it induces traders offering various goods and services to congregate in market places, shopping centers, and central places. Central place theory attempts to determine how regrouping sellers of different goods can be achieved in a way that maximizes the satisfaction of consumers. Both for Christaller and for Lösch, central places exist to fulfill the needs of the consumers of their hinterland (in Dutch) or umland (in German)—their surrounding area. Both authors start their reasoning by assuming that hinterlands preexist, and that they are characterized by a homogeneous spatial distribution of consumers. However, they differ to the extent that Christaller assumes that the population is completely scattered with a homogeneous density, whereas Lösch assumes that it is regrouped in small villages having the same population and located at the vertices of a regular triangular grid. Both consider conditions of spatial competition that result in a scattering of the competitors. Both admit that, in such conditions, the optimal form of market areas is the hexagon and that, at the equilibrium corresponding to the social optimum (that is the optimum from the consumers’ point of view), all market areas then must be equal, hexagonal, and as small as possible provided that all competitors have enough customers to survive. Both distinguish superior and inferior goods and services, the superior ones having large market areas (opera or high-tech surgery are good examples of superior services), while the inferior ones have small market areas (fast food and barbershops correspond to inferior goods and services). They both classify goods and services with respect to the size of their market areas. Finally, both admit that regrouping sellers of different goods and services is desirable from the point of view of the inhabitants of the hinterlands.

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The difference between these authors comes from their two unique ways of building central place systems. Christaller contends that, if a central place can offer opera or sophisticated surgery, it should be in a position to also offer fast food and barbershop services (in practice this is what is usually observed). So he requires each central place offering a given superior good to offer, at the same time, all the goods and services that are inferior to that superior good (that means that, in Christaller’s system, all central places having the same good as their highest superior good offer exactly the same bundle of goods and services: they are identical in terms of their functions). Lösch rejects this and replaces it by the requirement that all central places in his system coincide with one of his “small villages located at the vertices of a regular triangular grid,” while accepting that a central place could offer opera, but not fast food. Why is Lösch rejecting Christaller’s way of building his central place system? For a very serious reason: in economics, one of the most important features of “social optimum” is the fact that it is characterized by a complete absence of “economic profits” (that is of accounting profits that are higher than the “normal profits” in the system; if sellers of a good are making economic profits, it means that buyers are paying too much for the good, and this is “socially sub-optimal”). Of course, forcing sellers to regroup into central places, as both Christaller and Lösch do, involves accepting that some regrouped sellers will be located at central places having market areas larger than their own “minimal” market area (they could not be located at central places having a market area “smaller” than their own minimal market area because they would go bankrupt). Those lucky sellers will end up having a market area larger than their “zero-economic-profit” market area, and they will make “abnormal profits” (that is “economic profits”). Both Christaller and Lösch knew this, and they were prepared to accept the existence of some economic profits in their systems in order to benefit from the advantages of “multiple-purpose trips.” The problem with Christaller’s system is that, even in its less economic-profit-yielding form (that is when K ⫽ 3, K being the number of times the surface of an immediately inferior market area enters in the surface of the immediately superior market area in a given system), economic profits are important, so important that Lösch decided this was unacceptable (because it meant that consumers had to pay too much for the goods they bought and, consequently, for the advantages associated with “multiple-purpose trips”), and a better system needed to be conceived. Lösch succeeded to a great extent. His system yields very little economic profits compared to Christaller’s K ⫽ 3 system. The problem is that Christaller and Lösch’s systems end up being extremely different. (It should be noted that Christaller’s system is the classic example and when authors speak of “central places” without mentioning Christaller or Lösch, they are usually referring to Christaller.) In Christaller’s system all central places of a given rank are identical. Within this system there exist many central places

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offering all goods, and those of the highest rank are surrounded by an identical central-place environment. Christaller’s system is totally symmetrical, repetitive, and well behaved. On the contrary, Lösch’s system is awkward: it allows for only one central place offering all goods, it includes central places offering strange bundles of goods and services (like opera and fast food, and nothing else), and it includes areas offering very few goods and services and areas offering a great variety of them. That being said, both models are relevant and help to understand the complexity of the pole-polarization process at various scales and throughout history, during both the first and second urban revolutions. For instance, if one looks at the Babylonian urbexplosion in terms of the domination of one pole, Babylon, over a whole urban system, Lösch’s model is more enlightening since it implies that only one central place dominates the whole system. However, to understand the structure of the Egyptian urban system, which belongs to an agriculture-oriented territorial state located in the semi-periphery of the Babylonian urbexplosion, Christaller’s model is more appropriate since it is more hierarchical and adapted to a public-administration logic that confers on each provincial head-city a central-place role with respect to its hinterland, to which it is geared and on which it very much depends.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND NETWORK SYSTEMS If the gestation of the Babylonian urbexplosion very much corresponded to Christaller and Lösch’s central place models, its triumph gave birth to an expansion of the urbexplosive urban system that differed from the central place logic. Usually a central system takes form out of an already developed and exploited territory (as was the case in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Chinese Loess Plateau, and Mesoamerica). A triumphant urbexplosion is characterized by the fact that it irradiates in all directions and annexes new undeveloped or little developed territories. This gives birth to the emergence of tentacles, which penetrate into further and further lands by means of the founding of new settlements whose role is to develop the new territories. In such areas, polarization is less a convenient way to serve an already developed hinterland than a way to invade, discover, conquer, and develop undeveloped areas. To understand polarization in such a context, we need to leave centralplace theory and to resort to another approach, proposed by Vance, and by Hohenberg and Lees—that of “network systems theory.”3

3.

See James E. Vance, Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), James E. Vance, Jr., “Cities of External Trade in a Feudal Countryside,” Journal of Urban History 1 (1975): 484–488, and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

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Hohenberg and Lees presented the network system theory by contrasting it with respect to the central-place theory: We propose two models of such urban systems … The first model is based on the role of the city as a central place, supplying its surroundings with special services—economic, administrative, or cultural—that call for concentration at a point in space. A hierarchy of such centers, the higher-level ones serving as central places for central places, form a region around the principal center. The region, key to the relationships of town and country and to the hierarchical links among nearby towns, will receive much attention as we discuss Central Place Systems in Europe. Yet cities are more than the points around which the treads of regional unity wound. They also link the region with the world beyond, permitting it to reconcile the advantages of specialized activity with the enriching experience of diversity. In economic terms, cities enable the region to pursue its comparative advantage. In this perspective cities also belong to networks of trade, information, and influence that reach far beyond the borders of a country. As an example of the working of a Network System, consider Bordeaux. To understand its activities, the reasons for its growth or stagnation, one cannot look at the city alone or merely at its role as the capital of a region of southwestern France, its influence bounded by that of Toulouse to the east and Nantes and Limoges to the north. Bordeaux has long been an important link in international trading networks along which flowed wine, of course, but also grain, fish, timber, sugar, and oil. To follow the city’s fortunes we would need to look to London, to the Antilles or Africa, even to the Levant and the Baltic. Just as in analyzing regions we distinguish hierarchies of centers, so urban networks have their nodes and junctions, their gateways and outposts, their cores and peripheries … Thus, the two sorts of urban systems model contrasting modes of development, from the rural base upward in one case and from the urban core outward in the other.4

Most of the time, the central place scheme is seen as a corollary of rural development, the central places’ main function being to supply agricultural zones with goods and services. The network systems theory insists on the commercial basis of urban development, and on cities’ interdependence. In fact, network systems can include classical central places as well as outposts, relays, crossroads or colonial trading posts. They can also include urban sub-systems. Hohenberg and Lees (1985, p. 245) may have helped to build a bridge between the theories of urban systems and Braudel’s conception of core and periphery inside economy worlds: 4.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 4–6.

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The French geographers E. Juillard and H. Nonn (1976) have proposed a typology of West European regions in the 1970s … The authors emphasize the spatial distribution of towns by size and activity as well as by the quality and intensity of transportation and communication links. What strikes the historically minded reader is how nearly their results recreate the regional typology that Hechter and Brustein (1980) applied to the medieval Europe … The contemporary schema also distinguishes three classes of regions, called Rhenish, Parisian, and peripherical … The “Rhenish” areas are densely urbanized and tightly bound together by transportation networks. A number of medium-sized cities share organizing functions with no one place dominating. This model holds sway from the English Midlands to Switzerland, and it also applies to much of eastern France and parts of Northern Italy. The “Parisian” regions, strongly organized by a dominant city but more rural overall than the Rhenish, are recognizable descendants of their “feudal” counterparts. While Paris and London remain archetypes, cities from Vienna to Lisbon fit this model. It is interesting to note that the retardation of Northern Italy has displaced it toward the Parisian model. Today Milan dominates the once-proud oligarchy of north Italian cities. Although far more developed than in the Middle Ages, the European periphery retains its weak urban structure. The Industrial concentrations in Scotland, Wales, and northwest Spain have only limited effects beyond a short radius. Agricultural work occupies a larger share of the work force here than elsewhere, and the urban networks tend to be anemic or incomplete.5

It is clear that, in the structure of Braudel’s economy-worlds, the Rhenish type of cities is characteristic of the core, the Parisian type, of the semi-periphery, and the “peripheral,” of the periphery, strictly speaking.6 The relations between the urban centers and their environment are much more complex in the network systems than in Christaller’s systems of central places. In the latter, each center is dominated by only one central place, and each zone of the hinterland gets supplies of each given good or service from only one central place. In network systems, relations are not exclusive and one-to-one. Each center keeps up relations (commercial or otherwise) with many other centers. Each center is active within various networks of centers. 5.

6.

Ibid., 245. The authors refer to Etienne Juillard and Henri Nonn, Espaces et régions en Europe occidentale (Paris : Éditions du CNRS, 1976), and Michael Hechter and William Brustein, “Regional Modes of Production and Patterns of State Formation in Western Europe,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1980): 1061–1094. Jean-Pierre Orfeuil proposes a different typology of urban regions based on the urban dynamics characterized by the relation between the transportation techniques and land uses. He distinguishes three different types: Californian, Rhenish, and Saint-Simonian. See Jean-Pierre Orfeuil, Je suis l’automobile (La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1994).

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One of the space-economic features of the network theory relates to the fact that, contrary to the central-place theory, which is based on a Euclidean isotropic space, the network theory neglects Euclidean distances to focus on commercial links, often across the oceans, that are established between cities. Hohenberg and Lees7 even suggest that if these links could take a mathematical form, it would be through topology, and not through Euclidean geometry. For them, “time and money count for more than geometry.”8 In the network systems approach, cities are seen as complementary, whereas, for Christaller, they are basically standard and similar. Centrality characterizes the central places, while the centers of the network systems are marked by their nodal nature. The role and importance of each center of the network systems are destined to evolve through time, while the functions of central places do not change, central place theory being basically static. Road and railways crossroads, industrial cities and mine centers play a role in the network systems, and they are ignored by central-place theory. Hohenberg and Lees go further by observing that to the two types of cities (central-place and network) correspond two cultural types of urban community. They resort to the concepts of orthogeneticity and heterogeneticity developed by Redfield and Singer.9 According to them, orthogenetic cities elaborate and diffuse a prevailing culture they attempt to impose, whereas heterogenetic cities either favor a heterogeneous cultural environment or elaborate and diffuse a culture that is alien to their surroundings within a clearly defined structure of dominance and dependence. Putting together the contributions of Braudel, Juillard and Nonn, Hechter and Brustein, Redfield and Singer, and Hohenberg and Lees, it can be said that, inside an economy-world: – network systems of the Rhenish type composed of heterogenetic cities that favor a heterogeneous cultural environment predominate in the center (as in the ancient Babylonian region or modern London or New York regions); – central place systems and regions of the Parisian type composed of orthogenetic cities prevail in the territorial states of the semi-periphery (as in ancient Egypt or modern France); – network systems of the “peripheral” type dominated by heterogenetic cities that elaborate and diffuse a culture that is alien to their surroundings within a clearly defined structure of dominance and dependence are observed in the periphery (as in the ancient Phoenician or Greek colonial outposts located in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, present France, or Italy). 7. 8. 9.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, op. cit., 66. Ibid., 94. Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, “The Cultural Role of the Cities,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 3, 1 (1954): 52–73.

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Numerous historical examples can be given of these statements. The Spain of the Inquisition persecuting heretics, the absolutist or Jacobin France imposing a uniform Parisian culture, or the Germany unified by Bismarck or Hitler ensuring the triumph of a certain form of Germanic culture over all its territory constitute eloquent examples of what prevails in the semi-periphery according to this vision. By contrast, at the center, very often cities developed, which were intellectually open to new ideas, welcoming for foreigners and foreign cultures, little conformist, and more mercantile than sectarian. We can think of Amsterdam welcoming Descartes, Geneva accepting Calvin, London receiving Marx or Zurich welcoming Lenin. We refer also to all those central cities, starting with Ugarit, Babylon, and Memphis, which let develop inside their limits foreign communities (Levantine, Greek, Jewish, etc.) specialized in maritime trade, banking, brokerage, exchange, or navigation, all those activities that are essential to the functioning of network systems. Finally, in periphery, numerous colonial cities diffused an imperialist foreign culture in the midst of militarily submitted populations. We can think of Greek Alexandria in Egypt, Roman Caesarea in Palestine, Spanish Mexico City in Mesoamerica, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or Léopoldville (future Kinshasa), Dakar, Lagos, Bombay, Calcutta, Alger, Tunis, and Casablanca in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The preceding scheme bears much likelihood. However, in the midst of a same society, most of the time, both orthogenetic and heterogenetic currents coexist. For example, at the court of Versailles, at the time of absolutism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the clan of the Colberts defended a vision of France close to the network systems model, an image characterized by maritime imperialism and mercantilism, while the clan of the Le Telliers de Louvois was inspired by a much more agricultural vision of France that was very close to the central-place theory.10 If the clan of the Le Telliers de Louvois was at the origin of liberalism, it also played a decisive role in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which led to the persecution of the French Protestants, and a secondary role in the birth of Jacobinism. The Colberts bore heterogenetic values while the Le Telliers de Louvois were clearly marked by the search for orthogeneticity, but both currents coexisted at Versailles for more than a century. A similar coexistence of the two philosophies is also observed in cities. None completely fits the central-place or network-systems schemes. All is a matter of degree. All cities exert, at various degrees, functions related to supplying their hinterland, and functions of contact with the main commercial 10.

Luc-Normand Tellier, Face aux Colbert : les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot et l’avènement du libéralisme (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1987).

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and financial centers of the world. All are both, at various degrees, orthogenetic and heterogenetic. All are defined with respect to territories (as in the centralplace theory), but also to transportation and communication networks (as in the network-systems theory). Even in the most ancient agricultural societies that gave birth to cities, both schemes already coexisted. Already in the time of the Phoenicians, Greeks, and their predecessors, the agricultural societies practiced long-distance trade. Historians even pretend that long-distance trade preceded the appearance of urbanization. The diffusion, from 8500 BC, of domesticated vegetal species such as wheat and barley from Mesopotamia to Western Europe, India, and China amply demonstrates that. In sum, both approaches must be seen as being complementary and not dissociable.

s THE FIRST URBAN REVOLUTION AND AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES Another factor probably played a role in the unfolding of the first urban revolution: the existence of agglomeration economies. Some savings can be made by producing goods or services on a larger scale: they are called “scale economies.” Scale economies are to be distinguished from “agglomeration economies,” which are derived from activities being located close to one another. In the first case, scale is the saving factor, whereas, in the second, proximity is. The two concepts overlap each other to some extent in the case of economies linked to the scale of agglomerated populations or production activities. For example, the quality of the pool of qualified workers generated by the concentration of computer firms in a given city may be seen as a source of both agglomeration and scale economies. The problem with agglomeration economies is not that they are not important (in fact, they constitute one of the possible explanations of polarization and urbanization), but rather that they are “external economies,” and as such, they are not exchanged on the market place. Consequently, they have no price, their transactions are not registered (since there are none), and they are neither directly measurable nor countable. This makes it very difficult to pretend that agglomeration economies are more prevalent in given circumstances, and less in others. Building a theory on the concept of agglomeration economies is not an easy thing, and it will not be attempted here. Agglomeration economies relate to real advantages economic activities of consumption or production draw from their geographical proximity. For instance, an apiarist and an apple grower produce more each if they are located close to each other than if they are far from one another (the bees of the apiarist pollinating the apple trees of the apple grower, and the apple trees feeding the fees). Or else a lesser-known art gallery may benefit from the proximity of a better-known gallery that attracts a selected clientele. There exist

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agglomeration economies, but also diseconomies. Agglomeration diseconomies are linked to disadvantages that are associated with the proximity to certain activities. Everybody knows the classical examples of pollution and congestion. When agglomeration economies result from regrouping similar activities (art galleries, for example), we talk of “location economies,” whereas when they involve different activities (as in a shopping center), the expression “urbanization economies” is used (in the case of the apiarist and apple grower, the term “urbanization” seems odd, but this is it). Nobody disputes the fact that agglomeration economies exist, and that they played and still play a role in the polarization of populations and economic activities. However, it is important to realize that they are not a necessary condition for polarization to develop.11 Attraction points, networks’ critical points, breaking points, points of discontinuity, and even spatial competition (as will be seen) can cause polarization in a complete absence of agglomeration economies. In fact, the concept of agglomeration economies is often redundant in comparison with the classical concepts of space-economy. For instance, in the case of the art galleries, the already famous galleries can be seen as attraction points, but also as competitors in the context of the location problem of the small lesser-known galleries. Mathematically, in the location functions, agglomeration economies are implicitly taken into account since they influence the value of the parameters of the function in the same way as transportation costs, land prices, or market potentials do. Some authors tend to see agglomeration economies everywhere and to explain the urban phenomenon essentially by their existence. This is a big error. There are true agglomeration economies only when the level of the advantages stemming from spatially grouping together activities is superior to the sum of the advantages that those same activities would produce separately at the same location. In other words, there are agglomeration economies only if the productions of the apiarist and apple grower are superior when the apiarist and apple grower are producing side by side than when they are producing alone (without the other one producing) on the same location. Trying to explain urbanization only by agglomeration economies is a deadend. It leads to defining the optimal size of cities (why should agglomeration economies behave differently in one city from another?) and to questioning the very idea of an urban system grouping together cities of various sizes when everybody knows that, since the very beginning of urbanization, all urban systems are made of cities of different sizes. Moreover, as will be seen, it is easy to demonstrate that, in a context where there are no agglomeration economies at all, a simple sequence of interdependent attraction-repulsion 11.

Luc-Normand Tellier, “Et si les économies d’agglomération n’existaient pas, notre monde serait-il différent?” Organisations et territoires 13, 3 (2004): 77–80.

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problems is enough to generate cities and urban systems that are identical to those that exist. Finally, agglomeration economies are usually accompanied with agglomeration diseconomies, which cancel the former, the relative importance of those economies and diseconomies being almost impossible to determine. From an analytical point of view, the concept of agglomeration economy must be resorted to only when a phenomenon cannot be understood only with the concepts of space friction, attractive force, and repulsive force. That being said, agglomeration economies played a role in the first urban revolution. For instance, defending people was probably made easier by grouping them together and better defending them made them more efficient. Having trade activities grouped with craft activities surely benefited both. The same goes with agricultural activities and management activities related to organizing irrigation. Cities were born diversified, and diversity is their very essence and raison d’être.

CHAPTER

3

The Two First Economy-Worlds: The Roman and Chinese Empires

T

he two first economy-worlds the world has known appeared in an interval of only 250 years at the two extremities of the Eurasian continent: in the Mediterranean region and in China. They have in common the fact that they are compact, and they became politically united thanks to two empires, which covered them. However, they differ by their geography. The Roman Empire was, above all, a maritime empire built around the Mediterranean Sea, mare nostrum also called mare internum, while the Chinese Empire was basically continental although, at some epochs, it tended to make of the China Sea a Chinese mare nostrum. There is another major difference: the Roman urbexplosion was relatively recent when it gave birth to the Mediterranean economy-world, whereas the Chinese economy-world was dominated for a long time by the old Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion. Actually, before dominating, the Roman urbexplosion had to supplant the old Babylonian urbexplosion and marginalize the emerging Greek urbexplosion, while, in order for the Chinese economy-world to take form, the Changan-Xi’an urbexplosion did not have to yield ground to a new urbexplosion. It is just around AD 1400 that the urbexplosion dominated by Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou came to defi nitely take away from Changan-Xi’an’s urbexplosion the leadership of the Chinese economy-world. The very long domination of Changan-Xi’an is all the more worth underlining since, between AD 800 and 900, the center of gravity of the Chinese Empire passed from the north to the south, and China moved from a civilization based on wheat and millet to a civilization based on rice. On the contrary, in the case of the Roman Empire, the economic and geographical basis of the economy-world remained the cultivation of wheat, vine, and olive trees, even after the center of the economy-world had moved from Rome to Constantinople.

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s THE EMERGENCE OF THE ROMAN ECONOMY-WORLD At its peak, under the Antonine dynasty and, more precisely, at the end of Trajan’s reign that lasted from AD 98 to 117, the Roman Empire covered the whole Mediterranean Sea and most of the Black Sea. It extended to the limits of Scotland, the Rhine, the Danube and its tributary the Pruth River, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, the Tigris, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Desert, the Red Sea, the Nile’s first cataract, the Sahara, and the Atlantic. Its territory was criss-crossed by the immense network of the Roman roads, which is at the very origin of the present-day European urban system. Needham estimated that the Roman Empire had about 164,000 kilometers of paved roads over a 5.2-million-square-kilometer territory, while the Chinese Empire had 35,200 kilometers of paved roads over a 13.9-million-square-kilometer territory.1 Finally, the spine of the Roman Empire was the very central axis of the Great Corridor (see Map 7).

Romans roads Maritime roads

340 km

Map 7 The Roman Empire at Its Peak (around AD 100)

1.

Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China: Physics and Physical Technology (Vol. 4) (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1971), 29.

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When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, nothing really indicated that, 440 years later, the city of Rome, whose conquest never interested Alexander, would dominate in this way the entire developed Europe, the richest part of Western Asia and the whole Mediterranean Africa. Yet, at that time, with about 150,000 inhabitants, Rome was already one of the two largest European cities, as big as Athens and larger than Syracuse, the two most important Greek cities of that period. Alexander could not consider Rome as a serious competitor nor a valuable prey: its hinterland was too little developed and its military force too recent. Had not the Gauls invaded Rome 67 years earlier, in 390 BC? Wasn’t Greece at its peak? And wasn’t the Persian Empire, which, under Cyrus II, had annexed Babylon and Mesopotamia in 539 BC, the most serious of Greece’s challengers? How could Alexander imagine that, 175 years later, Rome was to conquer his own kingdom of Macedonia when Rome was still to take 73 more years to establish its domination over the whole Italian Peninsula (which was only done in 250 BC)? However, from a topodynamic point of view, the rise of Rome to power made sense. Inside the Great Corridor, that city possessed many advantages. It was on the trajectory of the northwestward movement that had so benefited Phoenicia and then Greece, and which was predominant to the west of the Persian Gulf since the triumph of the Euphrates’ axis. In the wake of that movement, the Romans, like the Greeks before them, learnt from the Phoenicians the alphabet, the art of glass-making, the purple dyeing of fabrics and the secrets of dry-farming.2 Rome had a fertile and well-watered hinterland while many Greek cities presented deficiencies in that respect. The Roman hinterland was continental and compact when Greece’s was broken up and made of islands and pieces of continents. Rome was located on the Tiber, one of the most important rivers of Italy, while most of Greece was deprived of significant rivers. Compared with Greece, Rome occupied a more central site inside the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed it to transport goods and troops more easily to and from all parts of the Mediterranean coasts. Finally, Rome had the advantage of being situated farther from the core of the Babylonian urbexplosion than Greece was. It must not be forgotten that, in the combat a young urbexplosion has to fight to affirm itself, the distance from the old dominating urbexplosion constitutes a protection. Rome was ideally placed: it was far enough from the Babylon urbexplosion to free itself from its influence, while being close enough to benefit from its radiance. Moreover, the fact that Rome belonged to the Great Corridor gave it the benefit of being on the axis followed in the past by the diffusion of agriculture and, later, urbanization. The Roman Empire came to include all the first regions 2.

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Vol. 1 (Paris : Armand Colin, 1966), 130.

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of western Eurasia that had known, right after Mesopotamia, agriculture, settling process, and urbanization, that is, to say Egypt, Judaea-Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. The Romans took control of an already urbanized territory, but they preserved and considerably developed the urban system they inherited.3 The pax Romana favored the building of a most efficient and unprecedented transportation system, an increase in the rate of urbanization, the growth of existing cities, and the creation of numerous new cities (especially in Western Europe, as illustrated by the cases of Lyon, London, Paris, and Cologne).4 Very few cities disappeared under the Roman rule. The Latin civilization pervaded, above all, the populations living in cities, along the littorals, in the plains and valleys, but much less those living in the mountains and hardly accessible zones. Mountain dwellers kept their language, habits, and primitive techniques for making everyday tools and objects such as potteries.5 From a geographical point of view, the most striking feature of the Roman urban system is its astonishing correlation with the cultivation of olive trees and the Mediterranean climate. As much as 85–90% of the total urban population of the Roman Empire at its climax lived in the area where olive trees were grown, that is in central and southern Italy, Greece, in the Mediterranean coasts of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, as well as in the northern Maghrib region, the southern and eastern parts of the Iberian Peninsula, and southern Gaul. It could be said that the Roman urbanization was as much “olive-tree-dependent” as the expansion of Islam was later “camel-dependent.” The southern limit of the area of olive-tree cultivation approximately corresponds to the isoline of 25 cm annual rainfall (which is the minimum rainfall for dry farming) while the northern limit corresponds to the southern limit of the zone where freezing temperatures are reached during the year. The Roman Empire extended beyond those limits only, to the

3.

4.

5.

The Romans distinguished three classes of imperial towns: the coloniae with full Roman status and privileges, the municipae with only partial Roman citizenship for their inhabitants, and the civitates, which were market and administrative centers for tribal districts. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 58. The philosopher Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca), who lived from 2 BC to AD 65, wrote about the Roman urban boom: “All barriers have been knocked over. On virgin lands, cities have been built. The world is criss-crossed by roads. Everything is changing. Nothing is left of the old order.” Quoted by Laurent Ferri, Ils racontent la mondialisation. De Sénèque à Lévi-Strauss (Paris : Saint-Simon, 2005), 20. Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel : La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 1923–1947 (Athens : Institut de recherches néohelléniques/F.N.R.S., 1999), 56.

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north, in regions where vine or wheat could be cultivated (the case of northern Gaul and Britain), and, to the south, in regions where wheat could grow (the case of Egypt, which was one of the main producers of wheat in the whole empire). The Roman Empire reached unprecedented urbanization rates. At its peak, the European part of the empire probably had an urbanization rate of at least 8%, and even possibly 15%. Those rates may have been surpassed in the Anatolian, Syrian, and Egyptian parts of the empire. Effectively, as illustrated by the Roman road network, the most urbanized part of the empire skirt round the Mediterranean Sea by the east, from Italy to Egypt, through the cities of Rome, Ravenna, Milan, Salona (present-day Split in Croatia), Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Pergamum, Ephesus, Antioch, Palmyra, Caesarea Maritima (in Palestine), and Alexandria. It is estimated that the Roman Empire contained at least 400 and maybe 750 cities and towns with populations of more than five thousand on a territory whose total population was about 50 million. It must be noted that any estimate of the population of the Roman Empire has to be considered with skepticism. Bairoch estimates that the population of the Roman Empire was around 50–55 million including that of Roman Europe, which was around 9–12 million. According to Beloch, in the first century, at the death of Augustus, the Roman Empire had 23 million inhabitants in Europe, 19.5 million in what became the Byzantine Empire, and 11.5 million in Africa, for a total of 54 million. Maddison takes a stand that is closer to Beloch’s than to Bairoch’s. He estimates that, in the first and second centuries, the Roman Empire had a population of 20 million in Europe, another 20 million in Western Asia and 8 million in North Africa, for a total of 48 million.6

The Rise of Rome According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC by Romulus, a descendant of the Troyan Aeneas and his wife Lavinia, the daughter of the king of Latium. Archaeologists and historians believe this date is realistic, but at the beginning Rome was probably a colony of Alba, which was the oldest city of Latium and struggling against the Etruscans. Three groups were competing at that time in Italy: the Greeks, Italics, and Etruscans. Both the Greeks and the Italics spoke Indo-European languages. Italic peoples included the Aequi, Latin-Falisci, Mamertini, Marrucini, Marsi, Paeligni, Sabini, Samnites, Sicani, Siculi, Vestini, Villanovans and Volsci. As for the Etruscans, like the Basques, they lived in Europe before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a

6.

See Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 91–92; Karl Julius Beloch, Die Bevölkerung der Griechisch-Römischen Welt (Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1886), 507; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 50.

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non-Indo-European language and mainly lived between the Tiber and Arno rivers, that is, between Rome and Florence. The Etruscan country later became Tuscia, and then Tuscany (in Latin, “Tusci” means Etruscans). Perugia, Arezzo, and Tarquinia-Corneto are among the modern cities that were Etruscan at the origin. After some time, the Etruscans succeeded in taking control of the region and Rome became a vassal of Veii, the ancient Etruscan town about 16 kilometers northwest of Rome that held hegemony over Rome in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. An Etruscan dynasty came to reign over the Roman kingdom. In 509 BC, a revolution took place and the Etruscan dynasty was replaced with a republic. The struggle with the Etruscans went on till the conquest and destruction of Veii by the Romans, in 396 BC. Then started the rise of Rome. At that time, Rome had a population of about 150,000 inhabitants, which is about the maximum population ever reached by ancient Athens. Thus, Rome was one of the largest cities of Europe even before becoming a political power. Rome’s development was due to its location right in the middle of Italy on Tiber River, in a rich alluvial plain at a distance of about 30 kilometers from Ostia, which is its harbor on the Mediterranean Sea at the mouth of the Tiber. Between Rome and Ostia, the Tiber was navigable, but upstream from Rome it was hardly so. Thus, Rome was a natural breaking point on the Tiber. From a military point of view, Rome’s site was easy to defend. It was located on heights (the seven hills of Rome: the central Palatine Hill surrounded with the Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine hills, which form an irregular hexagon), and far enough from the sea to be out of pirates’ reach. The development of the city started on the Palatine Hill, the home of the early Romans, and the Capitoline, that of the Sabine tribe. Though its hinterland was particularly fertile, Rome owed much of its expansion to the fact that it was a natural “ford and bridge city” built around, first, an important ford due to the presence of a small island (Tiber island) in the middle of the Tiber River and, later, the Sublicius bridge on the Tiber (to which the Cestius, Aemilius, Aurelius, Agrippa, Probus, Nero, and Aelian bridges were added later). It was also a crossroads between the northsouth axis made of the Aurelia Road coming from Pisa in Etruria and the Appia Road leading to Capua in Campania, and the east-west axis made of the Salaria Road between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas, which constituted a part of the Salt Road (Via Salaria in Latin). The Salaria Road linked Rome with Castrum Truentinum (modern San Benedetto del Tronto), which faced Salona (in the vicinity of modern Split, Croatia) across the Adriatic Sea. Salona was an important economic city because it shipped to Rome the iron, gold, and silver from Bosnia, and because it produced salt (which the name Salona refers to). At the time, salt was one of the most important traded goods in

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the Western world. Rome’s strategic position on the Salt Road played a major role in the economy since salt and other products from Salona bound for the western Mediterranean Sea were transshipped at Rome on boats heading for Ostia and the Mediterranean. In return, Ostia’s port sent to Rome the grain coming from Egypt and the Black Sea (especially from Crimea). For more than 250 years (from 753 to 500 BC), Rome contented itself with being an important commercial city without manifesting any significant political ambition out of its immediate surrounding. The Romans just applied themselves to build a strong and rich city. Unlike the Greeks, for a long time, they did not create colonies. Rome started creating colonies just between 375 and 275 BC. After the creation of the republic, it took Rome close to 250 more years to stretch its influence over the major part of Italy. This required fighting and defeating the Etruscans, the Italic Samnites, other Italics, the Celtic Gauls who dominated Northern Italy and sacked Rome in 390 BC, and other Indo-Europeans, like the Greek who dominated southern Italy. During this period of expansion, there were setbacks such as a seven-month battle against invading Gauls. At the end, the Gauls were fought off, but left Rome in ruins, forcing the Romans to rebuild their fortifications (first built in 550 BC; the Capitol had been built in 509 BC, the year the Republic was established). The new fortifications were efficient and for eight centuries no foreign invader was to breach Rome’s walls. In 250 BC, Rome was finally master of Italy, and in a position to become the fons et origo (“source and origin”) of the Roman Empire, its civilization, power, and culture. Out of Italy, Rome’s main enemy was Carthage, whose name meant “New Town” in Phoenician. Carthage was founded in 814 BC by Phoenicians coming from Tyre, of which it remained for a time a colony. Carthage was located on a peninsula, to the south of the mouth of the Medjerda River, which is, west of the Nile, one of the four significant rivers of North Africa which open out into the Mediterranean Sea. Carthage was located between the sea and the Lake of Tunis. It benefited from a natural port and a fertile hinterland, the valley of the Medjerda. The Carthaginians showed a remarkable talent for trade and industry. They became the first maritime and commercial power of the western Mediterranean Sea by allying themselves with the Etruscans against the Greeks, whom they defeated in 540 BC at the naval battle of Aleria. A few decades later, in 510 BC, Rome signed with Carthage its very first international treaty. In this treaty, Rome recognized the trade monopoly of Carthage in the whole western part of the Mediterranean Sea. As for the Carthaginians, they agreed not to harm Rome or any of its allies. During the period that followed, the Mediterranean Sea was shared out among three naval great powers: Carthage in the west, Persia in the east, and the Greeks in the middle. During the glorious Age of Pericles in

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Athens (483–429 BC), Athens dominated the Greek part of the Mediterranean Sea, and it constituted the third naval power of the region. For close to 300 years (from 540 to 264 BC), Carthage was the undisputed master of the western Mediterranean Sea, which was, however, the less developed from an economic point of view. At its acme, its empire included the southern part of Spain, the Balearic Islands, Malta, Sardinia, the western part of Sicily, and most of the North-African coast west of Egypt. The Carthaginians exploited important silver mines in North Africa and Spain, and gold mines in Morocco. They also traded pewter from Cornwall, amber from the Baltic, as well as ivory and slaves from Africa. They became famous for producing purple and fabrics, jewels, pottery, arms, joinery, furniture, beds, cushions, and mattresses. After having practiced barter for a long time, they had their own currency and created a major commercial empire. Then, for 118 years (from 264 to 146 BC), Carthage fought against Rome during the three “Punic Wars” (the word “Punic” comes from Poeni, which means Carthaginians in Latin, and Poeni comes from Phoenikes in Greek, which means Phoenicians; the Carthaginians spoke Punic). Carthage became the obsession of the Romans. This obsession was made famous by the historic sentence: “Delenda est Carthago” (“Carthage must be destroyed”), repeatedly pronounced by Cato the Elder. At the end of the Third Punic War, in 146 BC, Carthage was destroyed by Scipio the African and the Romans. Its destruction may be considered as the tragic end of the Phoenician maritime empire that had lasted for about 850 years. It meant also the triumph of the IndoEuropeans over the Semites (it must be remembered that, like the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Phoenicians were Semites, while the Romans were Indo-Europeans). Finally, Carthage’s defeat put an end to the last chance Africa had to dominate an economy-world. In 146 BC, it had become clear that the urbexplosion that would succeed the Babylonian one was to be Roman and not Carthaginian. From a topodynamic point of view, Carthage was disadvantaged. Actually, its position in the Mediterranean Sea was as central as that of Rome, and its link with the Medjerda River was as good as that of Rome with the Tiber. However, the continental hinterland of Rome was clearly more fertile and vaster than that of Carthage, and Rome was much closer to the central axis of the Great Corridor and the core of the Mediterranean urbanization of the time, which, undoubtedly, lay to the east and to the north of the Mediterranean Sea, and not in the southern and western regions controlled by Carthage. Finally, a last factor played a determining role: if the Tiber was part of a complex fluvial network that included the Arno, the Po, the Rhône, and the Rhine, the Medjerda River was quite alone in its sector of the Maghrib.

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STAGES OF THE FORMING OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE The decline of Carthage contributed to the rise of Rome, which took control of Carthage’s former colonies, without, however, contenting itself with them. After the First Punic War with Carthage (264–241 BC), Rome captured Sicily, occupied Corsica and Sardinia, and penetrated into Cisalpine Gaul. The Second Punic War (218–201 BC) allowed it to take control of a large part of the Iberian Peninsula (the conquest of the whole peninsula was completed by 133 BC; at that time, the Iberian Peninsula had considerable deposits of gold, silver, and copper, which had been exploited in the past by the Phoenicians and the Greeks). Illyria (that became Yugoslavia in the 20th century) passed under the control of Rome from 167 BC. In 148 BC, Rome submitted Macedonia, and, in 146 BC, the rest of Greece followed. The same year, Rome took control of Carthage and of what was left of its empire. In 133 BC, Rome inherited the kingdom of Pergamum (in Anatolia). About 120 BC, Southern Gaul was occupied in order to link the Iberian Peninsula to Italy. In 64–63 BC, Pompey conquered Syria and Judaea. Around 50 BC, Caesar added Northern Gaul to the empire. At the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, Ptolemies’ Egypt was integrated into the empire. Between AD 43 and 83, Rome conquered Britain (that is, to say England; Julius Caesar had invaded Britain in 55 BC, but had to go back to Rome; Emperor Claudius launched the colonization of Britain in AD 43). The Roman Empire reached its maximum size when it briefly controlled Mesopotamia, between AD 116 and 129, that is for about 13 years. Trajan took it away from the Parthians between AD 115 and 117 (he conquered Ctesiphon in AD 116). His heir, Hadrian, gave up Mesopotamia to the Parthians in AD 129 in order to consolidate the borders of the Roman Empire. According to Hadrian’s policy, the Upper Euphrates River constituted a part of the eastern limit of the empire. The parts of the empire of Alexander the Great that were the first to assert their independence from the Hellenistic world were those that lay farther from the central circle of the Great Corridor, that is the Greco-Bactrian State (that included the Indus Valley), Media Atropatene (between Armenia and the Caspian Sea), Armenia (northeast of Cappadocia), Cappadocia (between the Taurus Mountains and the Black Sea), Pontus (on the southern shore of the Black Sea), Paphlagonia (on the south shore of the Black Sea), and Bithynia (northern Anatolia). The Hellenistic kingdoms that resisted the longest as Hellenistic states were crossed by the Great Corridor’s central axis. They ended up being assimilated into the Roman Empire, and, later, they constituted the very basis of the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire took control of the Antigonids’ Macedonia and Achaea (which was the heart of ancient Greece) in 148 BC, Attalids’ Pergama in 132 BC, Bithynia in 75 BC, and Seleucids’ Syria in 65–64 BC. As for Ptolemies’ Egypt, it was integrated in 30 BC. The Persians who, in 280 BC, had taken away the kingdom of Pontus from the Hellenistic world thanks to Mithradates I Ktistes, waged war against Rome three times. But, in 47 BC, Caesar defeated them and annexed the kingdom of Pontus to the empire. The only declared and organized enemies of Rome that were left were the Parthians, descended from the Scythian nomadic tribe of the Parnians and established in a region situated to the southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Scythians are Indo-Europeans from the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian branch. Their language belonged to the Iranian speech family. From about 250 to about 200 BC, the capital of the Parthian Empire was Nisa, located north of the Silk Road. This “city of the interior” was located to the east of the Caspian Sea and to the north of the Atrak River, which runs towards the Caspian Sea. Around 200 BC, the Parthians moved their capital to Hecatompylos, located on the Silk Road a little to the east of present-day Tehran, and later, about 50 BC, to Ctesiphon on the Tigris River. The shift of the Parthian capital followed the Silk Road down to the central axis of the Great Corridor (Ctesiphon being on that axis).

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The Consolidation of the Roman Empire The heroic epoch of the empire, that of its expansion, extended from Caesar and his adopted son Augustus to Trajan, who died in AD 117.7 That of the empire’s consolidation went from Hadrian, Trajan’s heir, to the death of Alexander Severius in 235.8 Then came a long period of attempts to reorganize the empire from Maximin to the death of Theodosius I in 395.9 This was followed by the tragic decline of the Western Roman Empire till the fall of Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476. When Hadrian came to power, he judged preferable to put an end to the expansion of the empire, not because, militarily, conquering new territories was impossible, but because the urbexplosion dominated by Rome had triumphed and transformed into the first economy-world in history. Of course, those concepts never came to his mind, but Hadrian was conscious that the city of Rome was approaching one million inhabitants (it is estimated that, at its acme, in AD 150–160, the city of Rome had a population between 800,000 and 1.3 million inhabitants, probably closer to the latter figure), which was unprecedented. Rome was then three or four times more populated than Babylon had been at its peak. Rome had reached the threshold of 300,000 inhabitants three hundred years before, around 150 BC. Hadrian was also conscious that the territory of the empire corresponded in his time to an economic universe that was to a very large extent self-sufficient. The Roman Empire constituted an immense common market served by a road network that had no equivalent (that network had been built for military more than commercial purposes) where a single currency prevailed. Within the empire, few customs duties were imposed, and the tolls were very moderate, around 2–5% of the value of the merchandise. For merchandise 7.

8.

9.

The emperors of that period belonged to the Julio-Claudian, Flavian, and NervaTrajan dynasties. The Julio-Claudian dynasty included the emperors Augustus (27 BC– AD 14), Tiberius (14–37), Gaius Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54), Nero (54–68). Galba (68–69), Otho (69), and Vitellius (69). The Flavian dynasty included the emperors Vespasian (69–79), Titus (79–81), and Domitian (82–96). As for the Nerva-Trajan dynasty, it included Nerva (96–98), and Trajan (97–117), Nerva and Trajan reigning together in 97 and 98. The emperors of that period belonged to the Antonine and Severus dynasties. The Antonine dynasty included the emperors Hadrian (117–138), Antoninus Pius (138–161), Marcus Aurelius (161–180), and Commodus (180–192). The eight emperors of the Severus dynasty included, among others, the emperors Septimius Severus (193–211), Caracalla (211–217), and Severus Alexander (222–235). During that period, at least sixty emperors or usurpers dominated the whole Roman Empire or parts of it. The main emperors of that period were Valerian (253–269), Aurelian (270–275), Diocletian (284–305), Constantine (306–337), Julian (355–363), and Theodosius (379–395).

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crossing the imperial frontiers, customs duties were about 12.5%, on both entry and exit.10 Moreover, the common market enjoyed peace (Pax romana) and security. The Mediterranean Sea was free from pirates and rivalries between competing states, which would not be seen again during the 1,500 years that followed the fall of Rome. Under Hadrian , the only serious external threat came from the Parthians, whom Hadrian succeeded to coax by giving them back Mesopotamia. The Parthian empire, whose capital was successively Nisa, Hecatompylos on the Silk Road, and Ctesiphon on the Silk Road and the Tigris River, covered Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, a part of India, and the major part of present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Parthians had become Rome’s main enemy in 53 BC when they decisively won the battle of Carrhae (present-day Harran, southern Turkey) over the Romans.11 That had happened at a time when the heirs of Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, the Antigonids, and the Attalids had ceased to constitute an obstacle to the Roman Empire expansion. At the time of the battle of Carrhae, the Parthian Empire already covered Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq, and parts of present-day Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It was getting very close to the Mediterranean Sea, and Rome had decided to react by attacking it. The victor, a Parthian general named Surena, was murdered by the Parthian king, Orodes, who was jealous of his general’s triumph. Conscious of the importance of resisting the Roman threat, he decided to move his capital from Hecatompylos to Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, southeast of modern Baghdad and opposite Seleucia. The Romans counterattacked. Between AD 115 and 117, Trajan took Mesopotamia and Armenia away from the Parthians, but in 129 his heir, Hadrian, gave them back Mesopotamia, but not Armenia. A successor of Hadrian, Septimus Severus, went back over Hadrian’s position, and briefly took control of Mesopotamia between AD 197 and 199. In 227, Ardachir, of the Persian Sasanian dynasty, defeated the last Parthian king, Artaban V, and put an end to this important empire. The defeat of the Parthian Empire was not good news for Rome because the Persian Sasanians were worse enemies than the Parthians. In fact, the Parthians, like the rulers of the kingdom of Pontus, had accepted the cultural influence of Greece and Rome, but the Sasanians had not. 10. 11.

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 4 volumes; Paul Bairoch, op. cit. That battle was lost by Marcus Crassus, Roman governor of Syria. According to the legend (?), the Roman troops were defeated, among other things, because of the reflection of sunshine on the silk banners unfurled by the Parthians. That reflection dazzled the Roman soldiers and scared their horses.

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BETWEEN AD 100 AND 200, THE SILK ROAD CROSSED ONLY FOUR EMPIRES The Indo-European Parthians were cousins of the Kushans (called, in Chinese, Yue-Che, also written Yüeh-chih) who had conquered the Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria around 100 BC and founded, about AD 30, the Kushan Empire that stretched over the major part of the Indian sub-continent, present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of central Asia. Together, the Parthians and the Kushans took progressively control of the continental Silk Road, which made them rich and powerful between AD 100 and 200, at the peak of the Roman Empire, and at a time when China was still united (China disintegrated in 220, and was to unite again just in 589). So, between AD 100 and 200, only four empires shared the continental Silk Road, namely, from west to east, the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Kushan Empire and the Chinese Empire. That period was one of the most flourishing for the Silk Road. At the same time, the Kushan and Chinese empires almost completely controlled the continental part of the Asian Corridor.

Between the reign of Hadrian and that of Septimius Severus, the German threat had, little by little, overridden the Parthian threat. It is possible that the fate of the Roman Empire was decided around AD 180. The Parthians having tried to recapture Armenia, Marcus Aurelius, nephew, son-in-law, and heir of Antoninus Pius, the nephew and heir of Hadrian, sent troops that succeeded in beating off the attack. However, the Germans took advantage of that diversion to cross the Danube and penetrate into Roman territory. Marcus Aurelius had no choice but to counter-attack. He even undertook to annex the Germans’ territory (Germania in Latin) to definitely put an end to the Barbarian threat by romanizing the Germans, like the Gauls had been two centuries before.12 The Emperor died in 180 while his troops were winning over the Germans. Commodus, his son and heir, probably jealous of his father’s success, decided not to carry on his father’s plan despite that all indicated that it could succeed. Instead, he quickly came to terms with the Germans. Had he done what his father intended to do, the Germanic invasions that later devastated the empire might have been averted, the Germans could have become as good Roman subjects as the Gauls, and the fall of Rome, three hundred years later, in 476, could have been avoided. The construction of roads, military camps, forums, thermal baths, amphitheaters, aqueducts, sewers, reservoirs, and cities has been one of the main means used by Romans to integrate and romanize conquered territories.13

12. 13.

See Anthony King, Roman Gaul and Germany (London: British Museum Publications, 1990). The city of Rome was served by a system of aqueducts and reservoirs, which eventually attained a total length of some 500 kilometers. Around AD 275, Rome had 11 great thermae, 926 public baths, 1,212 public fountains, and 247 reservoirs. See Rodolfo Lanciani, The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome (London : Macmillan, 1897; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1968).

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In those endeavors, they manifested a great geographical intuition. A large number of present-day European cities have been either founded by the Romans or favored in their growth by the magnificent network of Roman roads. Lyon is a good example of the role of cities in the Roman colonization. Caesar defeated Vercingetorix in 52 BC. From that date, Romans radically transformed Gaul and made of this little-developed country one of the most prosperous parts of their empire. By developing the Lyon-Paris-London axis, they prolonged the Great Corridor, which had so much favored them. Lyon occupied a strategic position at the junction of the Saône and the Rhône, which is, after the Nile, the main Mediterranean river. The Rhône originates from Switzerland, and the Saône from Burgundy. The Saône connection with the Seine River was the first to be developed by the Romans, but, progressively, the Rhône link with the Rhine Basin proved also to be important. LugdunumLyon, founded by Munatius Plancus in 43 BC and then designated as the capital of Gaul14, rapidly became the most prosperous city of the region and the crossroads of all the traffics between Italy and northern Gaul, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Rhine region, and between western Gaul and Northern Italy. It must be noted that, more than 2,000 years after the founding of Lyon, the only maritime link that exists through the continent between the North Sea and the Mediterranean goes through the Rhône and Lyon.

CITIES FOUNDED BY THE ROMANS Among the European cities founded by the Romans, we find Lutetia -Paris , Londinium-London, Lugdunum-Lyon , and Colonia Agrippina-Cologne , but also Aquincum-Budapest , BurdigalaBordeaux, Tolosa-Toulouse, Colonia Nemausus-Nîmes, Augustodunum-Autun, Duecortorum-Reims, Rotomagnus-Rouen, Lindum-Lincoln, Glevum-Gloucester, Eburacum-York, Verulamium-St Albans, Mancumium-Manchester, Regina Castra -Regensburg , Confluentes-Koblenz, MogontiacumMainz, Augusta Treverorum-Trier, Vindobona-Vienna, Singidunum-Belgrade, Corduba-Cordoba, Salmantica-Salamanca, Hadrianopolis-Edirne (in Turkey), etc. Outside of Europe, Caesarea Maritima, which was the largest city of Judaea in Jesus’ time, and Tingris-Tangier (in Morocco) were also founded by the Romans.

The Triumph of Christianity and the Decline of the Western Roman Empire About AD 150, the famous Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemaeus, said Ptolemy, produced a map of the world that says a lot about the knowledge the Romans had of the world at the acme of the empire. It reveals that the best-known regions precisely correspond to the Great and

14.

Lugdunum was the only city in Gaul to be honoured with full Roman citizenship. See Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 80.

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Asian Corridors from the Atlantic to the end of the continental and maritime Silk Roads in China. The regions of the Great Corridor that are accurately described are the Mediterranean Sea, Western Europe, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the mouth of the Indus River, and the Ganges River. In the Asian Corridor, the Indus Valley, as well as the continental and the maritime Silk Roads up to China are well known. By contrast, the regions that lie outside of the two corridors are only sketched or totally ignored. Scandinavia is assumed to be an archipelago when it is not. The Sahara Desert is presented as having an inner river network. It must be said that the Sahara was not yet totally a real desert then, and that, between 7000 and 4000 BC, during the period called the “Holocene climatic optimum,” the major part of presentday Sahara was rain-watered, covered with vegetation, inhabited by animals and humans, and crossed by rivers, like the Azawag and the Tilemsi, that have disappeared since. Sub-Saharan Africa and America are unknown to Ptolemy, and they don’t appear on his map. India south of the Indus and Ganges is incredibly atrophied compared with the better-known CeylonSri Lanka, which lay on the maritime Silk Road. As for Russia, it is almost as much a terra incognita as America is. Finally, it is clear on the map that, obviously, Ptolemy did not know whether continents were islands or oceans were lakes. The world had to wait for the discovery of America to learn that continents are islands in the midst of oceans. What Ptolemy’s map reveals is that the Roman emperors had a vision of the world which incited them to think that the northwestward movement within the Great Corridor led nowhere. To the northwest, the Great Corridor was a dead end. By reaching the North Sea and the borders of Scotland, the Roman Empire had brought the northwestward movement following the Rome-Lyon-Paris-London axis to its ultimate limit or almost. On the other hand, the Roman emperors increasingly had to face the unprecedented polarization associated with the Roman economy-world. The existence of the common market and the Mediterranean monetary union created by the Roman Empire, joined to an exceptional security level and a flourishing urbanization, had allowed to reach higher development levels and created major economic gaps between the empire and its external periphery. Those gaps generated ever greater tensions, invasions, wars, and even conflicts between the Roman generals who went to the frontiers to gain a reputation and had to accumulate ever larger spoils for acceding to power and staying there. All this was accompanied by a lowering of the Roman social morality and an increasingly frantic quest for luxury and material wealth. The most structured and sophisticated external threat was coming from the part of the Great Corridor situated immediately to the east of the Roman Empire, that is from the Persian Sasanians who, from AD 227, had succeeded the

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Parthians. However, the most unpredictable and potentially savage threat was coming from the north and its relatively uneducated, nomadic, and underdeveloped Barbarians. Between AD 286 and 293, Emperor Diocletian judged that war had to be waged on all fronts and, for that purpose, the empire had to be divided in four prefectures headed by four co-emperors called tetrarchs. The division of the empire by Diocletian followed the historical logic of the progression of urbanization within the Great Corridor. First, the prefecture of the Orient, whose urbanization was the oldest, fell to Diocletian himself, who received the title of augustus. It included Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, Libya, and Thrace, and its capital was Nicomedia, eighty kilometers southeast of Byzantium. Second, the prefecture of Illyricum covered present-day Greece, Skopje-Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Austria, and the western part of Bulgaria. Its capital was Sirmium (modern Mitovica, Kosovo), and it was attributed to Co-Emperor Galerius with the title of caesar. Third, the prefecture of Italy included present-day Italy, Spain, and Maghrib. Its capital was Mediolanum-Milan, and it was given to Co-Emperor Maximian, who received the title of augustus. Finally, the prefecture of Gaul, which was the most recently urbanized, went from the Rhine to Spain and covered present-day France, Belgium, England, most of Switzerland, and small parts of Germany and the Netherlands. It was bestowed on Co-Emperor Constantius Chlorus (the father of the future Emperor Constantine) with the title of caesar. His capital was Augusta Treverorum (modern Tier, Germany). None of the four capitals of prefecture lay farther than 350 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. Emperor Constantine put an end to the system of the tetrarchs and judged that the priority was to protect the economic heart of the empire, which corresponded to the northeastern surround of the Mediterranean Sea that went from Rome to Alexandria. In 324, he decided to reverse the historical northwestward movement and to relaunch the empire on a more oriental basis by creating a new capital at Byzantium, which became Constantinople.15 The richest part of the empire had the shape of number 3: the upper arc of a circle included Rome, Ravenna, Salona-Split and Thessaloniki, and the lower arc passed through Byzantium-Constantinople, Ephesus, Antioch, Caesarea Maritima and Alexandria, which, before the rise of Constantinople, was the most populated and richest city of the empire after Rome and ahead of Antioch. Protecting that part of the empire was all the more essential that

15.

From about 150 BC, Byzantium became a free, tribute-paying city on the fringe of the Roman Empire. In AD 73, Emperor Vespasian formally incorporated the city into the empire. In 196, Septimus Severus renamed it Antoninia. In AD 324, Constantine made it Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul in 1923.

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the trade of the Roman Empire with India and China was increasingly developing, particularly because of the growth of the Chinese economy-world. In that context, Constantine’s decision to select Byzantium as the new capital was understandable since that city was located on the most developed part of the Mediterranean coast, precisely half-way between Rome and Alexandria. The designation of Byzantium-Constantinople as the oriental capital of the empire had an immediate effect on the development of the city. Between 324 and 330, the city was entirely rebuilt, and in 330 it officially received the title of oriental capital of the empire. Thirty years later and more than one hundred years before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Constantinople took from Rome the title of largest city in the world. It kept that title for more than 300 years, approximately from AD 360 to 650, when ChanganXi’an carried it. Around 400, Constantinople was a magnificent city with its 11 imperial palaces, 14 churches, 5 markets, 8 public and 153 private baths, 140 bakeries, a hippodrome, 322 streets and 4,388 houses. Several huge reservoirs16 provided the city with water, which was brought into the city by the impressive aqueduct of Valens. Constantinople’s triumph was due to the decline of Rome as much as the rise of the new capital of the Orient. In AD 390, Constantinople’ population reached between 250,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, which was far from the million and more that Rome had had at its peak. If the population of Constantinople had exceeded that of Rome, it was, to a great extent, because Rome’s population had radically declined for many reasons including the difficulty to manage such a big city. For instance, Julius Caesar was forced to ban carts from Rome’s streets during the daytime in favor of the pedestrian traffic.17 Before 21 BC, Rome had neither police nor fire protection. Fire destroyed large parts of Rome in AD 64 under Nero and in AD 191 under Septimius Severus.18 Moreover, the city was several times sacked by barbarian invaders. Rome was also affected by flooding, malaria and other diseases, river pollution, the poor bearing capacity of its soil, and its hilly topography. Between 200 and 300, the Barbarian Saxons, Franks, Alamans, Visigoths, Gepidae, Heruli, Alans, and other German Goths started invading the western portion of the Roman Empire coming from the northeast. Once again, Barbarians coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor were trying to attain the central axis of the Great Corridor. Those intrusions and,

16. 17. 18.

At least three of them could readily accommodate a modern football stadium. Anthony Edwin James Morris, op. cit., 16 and 63. Julius Caesar required the use of tiles as an incombustible roof material, and Augustus created a corps of fire-fighting night watchmen, the vigiles. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance (London: George Godwin, 1972), 64.

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particularly, those of the Alamans and Franks who had crossed the Danube border, had so weakened the empire that, between AD 260 and 274, a Roman general, Postumus, sat himself up as an independent Gallo-Roman emperor ruling over Gaul, Hispania, and England, while, in the East, from 260 to 272, King Odaenathus and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra succeeded to free from Rome their kingdom situated between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea to the southeast of Antioch. After the death of her husband, Queen Zenobia dreamed of making Palmyra, the Silk Road oasis-city located on the central axis of the Great Corridor between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, the true capital of the Orient. She succeeded to take control of Syria and its capital, Antioch, as well as a large part of Asia Minor. Egypt was dragged by the movement initiated by Zenobia, who succeeded to free Egypt from the Roman authority. Emperor Aurelian, fearing that Zenobia could ally with the Sasanian Persians, intervened militarily to recapture the control over the Orient. He succeeded to do so and, in 272, Zenobia was taken prisoner and sent to Rome to keep her out of mischief. The Germanic invaders were Indo-Europeans ; however, soon, Mongoloid invaders added. Around 370, the Ephthalite Huns (also called White Huns) originating from the Altai Massif and Mongolia attempted in their turn to penetrate into the Great Corridor towards the west and Europe (through the Corridor of the Steppes and the Mongolo-American Corridor), the southwest and India, as well as the south and China.19 The great terrestrial mobility the steppes of the Mongolo-American Corridor provided the hordes of horsemen-bowmen allowed them to swoop down like predators on the accumulated wealth of the urbanized zones of the Great and Asian corridors. That greatly contributed, to the west, to the increasingly marked division (from the reign of Diocletian) of the Roman Empire between that of the Occident and that of the Orient, and, ultimately, the fall of the Western Roman Empire completed in AD 476. To the east, during the same period, invasions coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor caused the break-up of the Chinese Empire. During the 369 years between AD 220 and 589, China was united just for twenty-four years, that is, between 280 and 304. The invaders from the Mongolian Hsiung-nu confederation broke through the Great Wall of China in AD 304; within a decade, they reached the Huang He (Yellow River), and, for the next three centuries, a succession of invaders from the steppes dominated northern China. The thrust of Ephthalite Huns towards the west caused a profound destabilization of the Germanic peoples. It pushed the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, Suebi, and Vandals even more towards the West, leaving them with no other choice but to once more invade the Roman Empire. Those movements 19.

Gérard Chaliand, Guerres et civilisations (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2005).

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lasted many years. Around 370, the Alans and other tribes from Eastern Europe were overwhelmed by the Ephthalite Huns and fled westward, crossing into Gaul. The Vandals and Suebi followed them many years later, in AD 406. In 443, Attila and the Huns entered the very Roman Empire and defeated the Eastern Roman forces around Constantinople. In 452, they threatened Rome itself and the Western Roman Empire. Thus, the sedentary and urbanized world stemming from a long process of wealth polarization within the Great Corridor was subjected to the more and more violent assaults of the extremely mobile barbaric nomads coming from the Mongolo-American Corridor. It then appeared that the most fragile part of the Great Corridor was the one that had been more recently urbanized: the Occident. Almost one thousand years later, the same scenario re-occurred: Mongol hordes followed the Mongolo-American Corridor, created the vastest continental empire of world’s history, and provoked the fall of what remained of the old Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. The strength of the Mongolo-American Corridor was based on the exceptional mobility of horses in the plains and the steppes. That of the Great Corridor came from the low transportation costs associated with fluvial and maritime transportation, while the strength of the Asian Corridor relied on the complementarity of the productions of the Orient and the Occident, complementarity that justified the merchants’ skirting round the Himalaya by the continental and maritime Silk Roads. Curiously enough, the weakening of the Roman Empire coincided with the rise of Christianity. That religion, born in Judaea, spread, like Buddhism some time before, by following the dominant currents and the logic of the topodynamic corridors. From Judaea, Jerusalem, Galilee, and the Jordan Valley, it reached Samaria, and then the coast of Joppa (presentday Tel Aviv-Yafo) and Caesarea. It followed the northwestward movement within the Great Corridor and it reached Damascus, Akko (Acre), Tyre, Sidon, Antioch (where the word “Christian” was used for the very first time), and the Syrian Corridor to attain Anatolia with Ephesus and Colossae, Greece with Philippi and Corinth, Macedonia with Thessaloniki, as well as Italy with Rome. The Letters of Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude, and the Acts of the Apostles allow us to reconstitute to a large extent that course, which later prolonged to the Iberian Peninsula and Gaul. After having suffered many persecutions, Christianity escaped illegality in 313 thanks to Emperor Constantine I and his co-emperor, Licinius, who established religious freedom by the Edict of Milan, and then it became the official religion of the empire in 380, under Theodosius I. From its designation as capital, Constantinople was meant to be as Christian a city as Rome had been pagan at its acme.

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The recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire coincided with the rise of the influence of the African Church with the impressive figure of saint Augustine. This Berber who studied in Carthage and later in Milan became the bishop of Hippo (in present-day Algeria, about 200 kilometers from Carthage) in 396. Braudel stressed the fact that, at that time, spiritually, North Africa was the main support of the Christian Church and the Latin culture, much more than Italy that was then incomparably less rich than North Africa.20 The Church of Africa adopted Latin as the only official language, and imposed it to Occident’s Christians through the translations, from Greek to Latin, of the Old and New Testaments, and through the written works of Apulae, Tertullian, saint Cyprian and, later, saint Augustine who, as the true leader of the African Church, gave its definite form to the Catholic dogma and assured the unity of the African Church, a unity that was often missing elsewhere in Occident.21

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire Rome ceased being the capital of the Roman Empire long before the “fall of Rome.” As soon as AD 293, Diocletian chose Milan as the capital of the prefecture of Italy. Rome was then left without any title of capital. It must be said that the repeated barbarian invasions and plague had already begun to decimate the city, whose population declined from the third century of this era, and that the port of Ostia was progressively disintegrating. In 330, Constantinople became the main capital of the Roman Empire. In 395, at the death of Emperor Theodosius and according to his will, the Roman Empire was split between Theodosius’ sons following the logic of the topodynamic evolution. The eldest son, Arcadius, received the Eastern Roman Empire, which was the richest and whose urbanization was the oldest, while the youngest son, Honorius, got the Western Roman Empire, whose urbanization was more recent. Later, in 402, Honorius moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Milan to Ravenna, those cities being significantly closer to the central axis of the Great Corridor than Rome was. At the time of its “fall,” in 476, Rome had not been the capital of the Roman Empire for 183 years. In 476, the Western Roman Empire was the mere shadow of its former self. The Germans were already in control of most of Italy. In 397, Illyria had been occupied by the Visigoths under the command of Alaric who, in AD 410, during the first truly systematic barbarian invasion of Italy (the preceding invasions had rather been incursions), penetrated into Italy and destroyed Rome, but the Roman general Stilicon, who was a Vandal, expelled him and

20. 21.

Fernand Braudel, op. cit., 137. Erato Paris, op. cit., 59.

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forced him to retreat to Dalmatia. A little later, in 415, the same Visigoths had founded a kingdom in Southern Gaul, and the Franks had occupied Northern Gaul about 406. The Burgundians had penetrated in Savoy in 443. The Vandals, under the command of King Gaiseric (also called Genseric), had conquered a part of North Africa around 450 and destroyed Rome itself in 455, just three years after Rome had been threatened by Attila and the Mongolian Huns who were sacking Italy after having been defeated in 451 in Gaul by the Roman general Aetius and Theodoric, the Visigoth chief, at the Catalaunian Plains of Champagne. From about 450, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had started invading and occupying Britain that the Roman troops, administrators, and coinage had left in 409 following the orders of the usurping emperor Constantine III who, between 407 and 411, successively controlled Britain, as well as parts of Gaul and Spain.22 In 470, six years before the “official” fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman authorities had lost all power in North Africa, Britain, Gaul, and Hispania. The Franks, the Visigoths, and the Burgundians controlled Gaul and Hispania, and the Vandals had established an independent kingdom in North Africa. The Western Roman Empire was already limited to Italy, but this one had been, from 456 to 472, under the effective control of the Suebi and their chief Ricimer, who sacked Rome in 472 before dying. In 476, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned by a German warrior named Odoacer (c. 433–493) who, after having served in the Roman Imperial Guard at Ravenna, became the first official barbarian king of Italy. Odoacer was a member of the Sciri German tribe. He was the son of Idico (or Edeco), one of the generals and ministers of Attila the Hun. Odoacer was assassinated in 493, then the Heruli, originated from Scandinavia, and the Ostrogoths took control of Italy while recognizing a form of suzerainty to Byzantium. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, famous for his illustrious system of laws, succeeded in reconquering Rome in 552, and then most of Italy and a part of Spain. He somewhat reconstituted the old Roman Empire. Unfortunately, his nephew and successor, Justin II, lost most of Italy to the Lombards who invaded it from 568. The capital of the Lombard kingdom was Milan, and Ravenna was relegated to the status of capital of the few remaining possessions of Byzantium in Italy. As for Rome, it became increasingly the city of the popes from Gregory I, who reigned from 590 to 604, and was the first pope to be the practical lord of Rome in municipal affairs. What characterized the end of the Western Roman Empire was observed again close to one thousand years later at the end of the Byzantine Empire, as in the case of so many other empires that build up from a central nucleus, which progressively spreads its domination over an increasingly 22.

The Roman legions withdrew from Britain as soon as AD 407.

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large territory and ever farther lands. At the beginning, that expansionist movement enriches the center of the empire. But in the long run, this attracts invaders who attempt to capture by force the whole empire or, at least, some peripheral regions of it. The empire must then mobilize increasingly important resources in order to defend its borders. This generates inflation and weakens the center’s economy because considerable resources and troops are concentrated at the borders. Sooner or later, the central power gets contested. The emperors and the central authorities are then more and more frequently overthrown, while the leaders of the periphery progressively free themselves from the center, till the whole imperial structure disrupts almost by itself. In the case of Rome, the socioeconomic dimension of the process took a great importance. Rome had emerged thanks to its economic and commercial dynamism. The expansion of the empire led to replace free workers from the region with increasingly numerous slaves. Unemployment increased and various forms of parasitism and patronage developed.23 Through various forms of taxes, Rome pumped an increasing part of the surplus out of its empire, making the economy of the city of Rome less productive and more dependent upon these pumped surpluses, and on inefficient slavery.24 Rome, which originally was a city of producers, became a city of parasitic consumers.25 That being said, the greatness of the economic and other material achievements of the Roman Empire must never be underestimated. There is no doubt that the Roman Empire was the most advanced the world had ever seen till then. Even compared to China at the same epoch, it was still unrivalled even on the eve of the fall of its western part.26 In the fields of military engineering, civil engineering, road transport, navigation, city planning, architecture, agriculture, and organizational skills, the Roman 23.

24.

25.

26.

Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 101–104) estimates that, under the Roman Empire, slaves represented about 20% of the total workforce of the Italian Peninsula. As for Rome, mass unemployment and underemployment, taken together, must certainly have exceeded 30 percent, if not 40 percent, of the population of working age (ibid., 82–84). Free Roman citizens enjoyed an incredible number of holidays. During the time of Claudius (41–54), there were 154 holidays annually. That number rose to about 200 in the third century. Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance, op. cit., 68. Agriculture and manufacture were carried on by slaves who were reluctant and careless labor, wasteful of material. Slavery discouraged innovation and improvement in tools and methods. Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Roman Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), and Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) advance that commerce and industry occupied a minor place not only in Rome, but also in most of the Roman cities, which would have been centers of consumption more than production. Jean-Michel Poinsotte, “Les Romains et la Chine: réalités et mythes,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 91, 1 (1979): 431–479; Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris : OECD, 1998), 38.

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Empire clearly equaled or surpassed the Chinese Empire at the beginning of the fifth century of this era. In the domain of construction, the Romans introduced the vaulted dome, the pane of glass, and the aqueduct bridge. The tonnage of some Roman ships exceeded 1,300 ton, while the Greek ships had an average tonnage of just 130 ton, that is, to say ten times less. Other examples could be given of the superiority of the Romans in a large number of sectors. The best illustration of the exceptional nature of the Roman world is probably given by the description of the catastrophic consequences the fall of the Western Roman Empire had on urbanization. The proportion of the population of that part of the empire living in cities with 10,000 inhabitants or more passed from about 5% under the empire to 0% after the fall of Rome.27 As for cities with 2,000 inhabitants or more, the urbanization rate declined radically: it went from about 8–15% to 5–8%. It is considered that the only structured relic of the urban system of the Western Roman Empire that survived till the midst of the Middle Ages was Septimania, that urban region of Southern France grouping together seven cities: Narbonne, Béziers, Carcassonne, Agde, Elne, Maguelonne, and Lodève.28 The fall of Rome shattered the very foundations of the Western European economy. The Mediterranean Sea definitively stopped being a secure economic space characterized by trade freedom and monetary unity. During the centuries that followed, that sea became a military and commercial battlefield for the barbarian kingdoms, the Byzantine Empire, the Arab world, and the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the economic and political unity of Western Europe broke up for a millennium and a half. Thanks to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire for close to one thousand years, the Roman economy-world did not disappear completely, but it came out from those events greatly weakened.

s THE EMERGENCE OF THE CHINESE ECONOMY-WORLD At the other extremity of the Eurasian continent, with an interval of about 250 years, another economy-world emerged, that of the Chinese Empire stemming from the integration of three important economic regions (the Loess Plateau, the Red Basin and the Great Plain of China) under the ascendancy of the first urban pole of the history of China, that of the Loess Plateau dominated by Changan-Xi’an (Map 5).

27. 28.

Raymond W. Goldsmith,“An Estimate of the Size and Structure of the National Product of the Roman Empire,” Review of Income and Wealth (September 1984). In some parts of Western Europe, as in England, urban life effectively disappeared after the fall of Rome.

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China was unified for the first time in 221 BC. Thereafter, it experienced three periods of division. The first one lasted just 60 years, from AD 220 to 280; the second one lasted 285 years, from 304 to 589, and the last one, 372 years, from 907 to 1279. The Chinese economy-world took form during the first period of unity of the empire, which lasted 441 years, and the first period of disunity was too short to jeopardize it. By contrast, the second period of disunity, which (it must be noticed) coincided with the barbarian invasions in Occident and with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, disrupted as much the Chinese economy-world as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire disturbed the Roman economy-world. All in all, the penetration of the mobile populations of the Mongolo-American Corridor into the part of the Great Corridor that had become rich and developed thanks to the Roman Empire occurred at about the same time the Chinese part of the Asian Corridor, that had also become rich and developed thanks to the Chinese Empire, was subjected, for the same reasons, to the assaults of nomads coming from the northern steppes. However, while the Roman Empire never regained its unity after the fall of Rome, the Chinese Empire did after numerous perturbations. In 1279, when China regained its unity after some four centuries of disunity, its population had fallen from 100 million to just 60 million inhabitants.

From the Loess Plateau to the Great Plain of China The emergence of the Roman economy-world was preceded by the rise of Rome and its economy. Similarly, the growth of the Chinese economy-world started with the ascending of Changan-Xi’an, which reached one million inhabitants around AD 700, about 550 years after Rome had attained that threshold. Fifty years before, around 650, the capital of the Chinese Empire had succeeded Constantinople as the largest city of the world. Changan-Xi’an kept that title for 200 years till Baghdad dethroned it about 850. At its peak, Changan-Xi’an was surrounded by a 36-kilometer wall. The city was then a first-class administrative, agricultural, craft, and commercial center. Xi’an and Luoyang are traditionally considered as the two terminals of the Silk Road. The Ancients referred to Sera Metropolis and Sinae Metropolis as the two eastern terminals of the Silk Road. The exact location of those two cities is not precisely known yet, but it is accepted that Sera Metropolis was to the west of Sinae Metropolis as Xi’an is to the west of Luoyang, which is considered by some as Sinae Metropolis (see Map 5). Luoyang reached its acme at about the same period Xi’ang did: around 700, its population was about 350,000 persons. Basically, the whole urbexplosion of the Loess Plateau was then in turmoil, and its energy was increasingly canalized towards the east, towards the great Plain of China through the city of Zhengzhou.

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Zhengzhou is located about 270 kilometers east of Luoyang, at the eastern extremity of the Chinese continental mountain range, and to the south of the Huang He, where its valley broadens into the great eastern Chinese Plain. That immense plain forms a triangle whose three vertices are Zhengzhou, Peking-Beijing, and Hangzhou. Zhengzhou is the western entrance door of the Great Plain of China, which means a lot since the Chinese urban development started to the west. Very early, the Chinese understood the importance of establishing links between the three vertices of the Great Plain triangle. This gave birth to the most impressing canal network humankind had seen up to then. By its size, that network was absolutely comparable to the Great Wall or to the vast Roman road network, which played a similar role in the Roman Empire. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the Romans, who ruled over an empire which was, above all, maritime built a huge network of terrestrial roads, while the Chinese, whose empire was then essentially continental, built an unprecedented canal network destined to navigation. That being said, if the canals played a major role in China, it must not be forgotten that the Chinese emperors also built a road network. That network extended over 35,200 kilometers (the Roman road network was about 4 to 5 times larger), and, from 1280, the Mongol postal service covered the whole territory with 200,000 horses. The Chinese built three long canals (see Map 11). The first one, called the Northern Bian (or Pien) Canal, went from Zhengzhou to Peking-Beijing through Tianjin. The beginning of its construction would go back as far as about 350 BC. The second one, called the Southern Bian (or Pien) Canal, linked Zhengzhou to the Jiangnan Canal that led to Hangzhou. It followed the Asian Corridor, and it was built twice. The old Southern Bian Canal was built between AD 206 and 220, and it followed the Sze River, whereas the new Southern Bian Canal was constructed between 581 and 618, and followed the Kuei River. The third long canal (the most famous of them all) is called the Imperial Grand Canal. It was 1,782-kilometer long and went from PekingBeijing to Hangzhou. It was built from AD 1282–1283. Its main purpose was to supply Peking-Beijing with rice and agricultural products stemming from the south. Zhengzhou dominated the Bian canal system till 960, when the new Song dynasty chose Kaifeng as their new capital and the new terminal of the Bian canals.

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THE CHINESE DYNASTIES The Chinese history is usually divided up according to the imperial dynasties. The following list gives their name, their period, and their capital.

Dates

Dynasty

Capital

(China before unification) Xia Shang Western Zhou Eastern Zhou

Anyi (in Shanxi province) Anyang (in Henan province) Hao Ching (southwest of Changan) Luoyang

(united Chinese Empire) Qin Western Han Xin (Wang Mang’s interregnum) Eastern Han

Xianyang (west of Changan) Changan-Xi’an Changan-Xi’an Luoyang

220–280 220–265 265–280

(divided Empire) The three Sanguo Kingdoms Western Xi Jin

Luoyang

280–304 280–304

(united Chinese Empire) Western Xi Jin

Luoyang

304–589 304–316 304–439 386–581 220–589 581–589

(divided Empire) Western Xi Jin The Five Barbarians’ Sixteen Kingdoms The Five Northern Dynasties The Six Southern Dynasties Sui

Nanjing Changan-Xi’an/Luoyang

589–907 589–618 618–907

(united Chinese Empire) Sui T’ang

Changan-Xi’an/Luoyang Changan-Xi’an

907–1279 907–960 907–960 960–1127 947–1125 1127–1234 1234–1279 1127–1279

(divided Empire) (disintegrated Empire to the north) Southern T’ang Northern Sung Liao (Khitan Mongol dynasty) in the North Jin (Golden Tartar Jurchen) in the North Yüan (Mongol) in the North Southern Sung

Nanjing Kaifeng Peking-Beijing Peking-Beijing Karakorum/Changtu/Peking-Beijing Hangzhou

1279–1911 1279–1368 1368–1644 1644–1911

(united Chinese Empire) Yüan (Mongol) Ming Qing (Manchu)

Peking-Beijing Nanjing/Peking-Beijing Shenyang-Mukden/Peking-Beijing

⫾2150–⫾1650 BC ⫾1650–⫾1040 BC ⫾1040–771 BC 771–256 BC 221 BC–AD 220 221–206 BC 206 BC–AD 8 AD 9–23 AD 23–220

Luoyang

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It is while Zhengzhou exerted its economic ascendancy that the most important economic transformation China has experienced before the twentieth century occurred. Around 800, a new rice species arrived from Vietnam, which matured so rapidly that it allowed producing several crops per year. That species proved to be ideal for cultivating rice in the valley of the Yangtze River. In one century, from 800 to 900, vast marshy zones of the Yangtze River were put into exploitation, and the agricultural and economic heart of China, which was, till then, located on the Loess Plateau and the Huang He Valley, moved along the Asian Corridor to the Yangtze River Valley. According to Maddison, if, during the eighth century, only one-fourth of the Chinese population lived to the south of the Yangtze River, at the end of the thirteenth century, more than three-quarters lay to the south of the river, which appears rather exaggerated.29 It may be more realistic to say that at the end of the thirteenth century, more than three-quarters lived in the Yangtze-River Basin or south of it. The topodynamic movement from the northwest to the southeast within the Asian Corridor had profound consequences for the Chinese society. In one century, the whole China passed from a civilization based on wheat and millet to a civilization of rice requiring an intensive use of work, irrigation, and sophisticated cultivation methods. In order to favor the development of a more intensive agriculture, the Chinese leaders printed calendars and handbooks of best practice in farming as early as in the tenth century, 500 years before Gutenberg “re-invented” printing (it must be noted that the Greeks of Phaistos had discovered the principle of printing with mobile characters around 1700 BC, but they did not further exploit their invention). Those handbooks contained numerous illustrations. The very first printed book in world’s history was a Buddhist Sutra published in China, in AD 868. Under the Sung dynasty, printing became widespread. In 960, the capital of China was moved to Kaifeng, which also replaced Zhengzhou as the terminal of the Bian-Pien Canal, whose traffic was booming as a consequence of the development of Southern China. From 960 to 1060 approximately, the volume of merchandise increased threefold. Around 1078, Kaifeng’s population probably reached between 600,000 and 700,000 inhabitants. During that period, its region experienced what Hartwell called a true “industrial revolution,” its iron production increasing ninefold from 806 to 1078.30 For the first time in Chinese history, the capital of the empire was also an industrial metropolis.

29. 30.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 18. Robert M. Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 1 (1966): 29–58.

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The Cities of the Great Plain of China The accession of Peking-Beijing to the title of capital of China involved three steps: in AD 936, Peking-Beijing became the southern capital of the (Mongol) Khitans under the Liao dynasty; in 1127, it became the capital of Northern China under the (Golden Tartar Jurchen) Jin dynasty, and, in 1279, it became the capital of the whole China under the (Mongol) Yüan dynasty. The rise of Peking-Beijing really started with the Khitan tribes and their Liao dynasty that ruled from 947 to 1125 over Manchuria, Mongolia, and the northeast corner of China proper. The Khitans created a dual government to rule their conquests, and Peking-Beijing was their southern capital from 936 to 1115. Later, in 1120, the Jin dynasty from the Juchen tribes coming from Manchuria who had formally been subjects of the Khitans defeated the Liaos and captured PekingBeijing. Seven years later, in 1127, the Jins also defeated the Northern Sung dynasty, whose capital was Kaifeng, and they decided to move the capital of Northern China from Kaifeng to Peking-Beijing, while the Sung dynasty was taking refuge in Southern China, where they chose Hangzhou as their new capital. Finally, in 1234, the Jins were beaten by the Mongols, who replaced Peking-Beijing with two capitals: Karakorum (in Mongolia) and Changtu (in China). However, in 1260, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founder of the Yüan dynasty, became emperor, and, in 1264–1267, he made PekingBeijing his only capital. But in 1279, Kublai Khan defeated the Southern Sungs, and only then did Peking-Beijing become, for the first time, the capital of the whole China. At the time Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, and Kaifeng dominated China, Peking-Beijing was a rather secondary city despite that it had become urban rather early, around 450 BC (it must not be forgotten that Peking-Beijing’s region has been inhabited for half a million years, as the discovery of the Sinanthropus pekinensis or Homo erectus pekinensis has demonstrated). To explain how it rose to the status of capital of the whole China, it must be understood that Peking-Beijing is located at the exit of the Nankou Pass, which makes Peking-Beijing the northern entrance of the Great Plain of China. What has been observed in the west about the invasions of the Great Corridor from the Mongolo-American Corridor was also observed to the east with regard to the Asian Corridor. In the case of the northeastern part of the Asian Corridor, the only significant invasions of the corridor originating from the south were linked to the Tibetans who invaded the heart of China in the eighth century of this era. All the other significant invasions came from the north, from the MongoloAmerican Corridor, from Mongolia and Manchuria. The favorite routes of the invaders were the Nankou Pass leading to Peking-Beijing and the Ordos Desert that lies between the northern Huang He and the Loess Plateau. The Great Wall of China (see Map 11) was built, completed, and reconstructed many

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times during two millennia, from the third century BC to the seventeenth century of this era, in order to protect China from the repeated invasions from the north, from the Mongolo-American Corridor. In that context, militarily controlling Peking-Beijing was tantamount to controlling the Great Plain of China and, most of the time, China itself, especially after the Great Plain of China had replaced the Loess Plateau as the heart of China’s economy. The Jin dynasty was the first to realize that and to act accordingly. However, this did not prevent it from being overthrown by the Mongol Yüan dynasty in 1234. From 1127 to 1911, five dynasties ruled over China, three of whom came from the north: two from Manchuria (the Jins, who were Golden Tartar Jurchen, and the Qing), and one from Mongolia (the Yüans). Only the Sungs and the Mings came from China. From an agricultural point of view, the Peking-Beijing region presented serious deficiencies because of the proximity of mountains and desert zones. This explains why the Imperial Grand Canal had to be constructed: it served to feed the most strategic northern entrance of China. The topodynamic movement, which, within the Asian Corridor, went from Changan-Xi’an and Luoyang to Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, continued towards the southeast, towards the Yangtze River, Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou. The three longest reigning capitals of China have been ChanganXi’an, Peking-Beijing, and Nanking-Nanjing. This last city, whose name means “capital of the South,” whereas Peking-Beijing is the “capital of the North,” was the capital of China from 1368 to 1421, and then from 1928 to 1937, and from 1946 to 1949. The origins of Nanking-Nanjing are fuzzy. It became a true urban city in AD 220 when it was designated as a regional capital. Later, from 907 to 960, it became the capital of the part of China that remained under the control of the Southern T’ang dynasty. The rise of Nanking-Nanjing, between AD 500 and 1368, from the title of regional capital to that of capital of Southern China and then to capital of China, corresponded to the southeastward movement, to the construction of the canals of the Great Plain of China, and to the shift of economic primacy from the Loess Plateau to the Yangtze River Valley. Nanking-Nanjing is the main city and port of the lower Yangtze region. It is situated about 80 kilometers west of the Imperial Grand Canal on the southeast bank of the Yangtze River, which is the longest in Asia. Its location made it an ideal link between Northern China and the part of China that lay to the south of the Yangtze, between the old China of the Loess Plateau and the new China of the Great Plain, as well as between the east-west axis of the Yangtze River and the north-south axis of the Imperial Grand Canal. Noted during centuries for its satins, pongees (home-woven silks), velvets, brocades, porcelain, paper, and ink sticks, Nanking-Nanjing never had, before 1300, a population that could be compared to those of Changan-Xi’an, Kaifeng, Luoyang, Zhengzhou,

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or Peking-Beijing. Its demographic expansion really started in 1368, when it became the capital of China thanks to the advent of the Ming dynasty. However, in 1421, the Mings took the decision to give back to Peking-Beijing the title of capital of China. To the southeast of Nanking-Nanjing, the port city of Hangzhou (which the Sungs called Lin’an between 1129 and 1277, and the Europeans called Quinsay) has played a major role in the evolution of China. Located on the coast of the China Sea at the end of the Imperial Grand Canal, it became, in 1127, the capital of the Southern Sung dynasty when the latter was chased out from northern China and Kaifeng by the Mongol Yüan dynasty. Hangzhou was the only capital of China located on the coast, and, like Amsterdam, it was crossed by a high number of canals. Around 1275, at the time of Marco Polo, it had 347 bridges, and its population was around 350,000 inhabitants, when China had five or six cities exceeding 200,000.31 The topodynamic movement from the Loess Plateau to the region of Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou joined, in the seventeenth century, another topodynamic movement coming from the west within the Great Corridor. The latter movement, which will be called, here and in the next chapters, the “Great Ebb,” followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The joint impact of the two movements that converged towards the great region of the lower Yangtze River was such that, at the end of the nineteenth century, that region, to which Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou belonged, was clearly the most urbanized and developed region of China, altogether from an agricultural, industrial, and commercial point of view.32 The urban system of that region was then very complex, and each city was specialized in the production and trade of different goods such as cereals, rice, or silk.33 The grain trade was concentrated around Suzhou, which was the largest city in the lower Yangzi region during the mid-nineteenth century.34 According to a Chinese proverb, “In heaven, paradise; on earth, Hangzhou and Suzhou.” That latter city is located on the Imperial Grand Canal, 160 kilometers north of Hangzhou. Thanks to its countless canals, Suzhou is one of the most 31.

32. 33.

34.

Joseph Needham, op. cit., 148; Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston, N.Y.: St. David’s University Press, 1987); Tertius Chandler and Gerald Fox, Three Thousand Years of Urban Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1974). G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211–229. Liu Ts’ui-Jung, “Demographic aspects of urbanization in the Lower Yantzi Region of China, c. 1500–1900,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 350. Ibid., 330.

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beautiful cities of China. On top of grain trade, silk production characterized Suzhou, which became such an important producer of silk that it came to be known as the true origin of the Silk Road.

The Cities of the Red Basin The economic expansion of the Yangtze River Valley that followed the building of the Imperial Grand Canal also attained the upstream region of the Yangtze River Basin, called the Red Basin, where the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, which already occupied an important place in the Chinese urban system, experienced a revival of activity. Chengdu is an old city, which was founded around 300 BC by the Qin dynasty that, from the city of Xianyang close to Changan-Xi’an, achieved control of the whole of China and created for the first time, in 221 BC, a united Chinese Empire. The north-south spine of their empire was the “Straight Road” going from Fengxiang in the Shaanxi province of Changan-Xi’an to Chengdu, the Yangtze River, and the Red Basin in the Sichuan province, located to the south. The Qin dynasty built in the Red Basin one of China’s most ancient and successful irrigation systems, watered by the Min Jiang, a tributary of the Yangtze River. The system diverted half of the waters of the Min Jiang eastwards to irrigate the plain through a dense network of channels. The successor of the Qin dynasty, the Western Han dynasty, built at Guanxian a system for controlling irrigation called Dujiangyan, which greatly contributed to Chengdu’s development. Today, that irrigation system, which has been only slightly modified, still supports the densest agrarian population in the world. The Western Hans also developed the metallurgical industry of the Red Basin, as well as its sectors of salt deposit exploitation, lacquer production, and silk manufacturing. In medieval times Chengtu-Chengdu was famous for its fine brocades and satins, and notable for its refined culture and display of luxury. Thanks to the Straight Road and the surrounding waterways, Chengdu constituted a crossroads. From there, the traveler coming from Changan-Xi’an could take the canals and rivers to reach the Yangtze River and the China Sea or follow the Straight Road towards Tibet, towards the Mekong River leading to the Yunnan province and to Vietnam, towards the Salween River leading to Burma-Myanmar and Thailand, or towards the Brahmaputra River leading to the Brahmaputra-Ganges’ common delta. Thanks to the shift of economic primacy from the Loess Plateau to the lower Yangtze River region, Chengdu became, in the tenth century, one of the most prosperous commercial cities of China. In 812, one of the greatest commercial revolutions in the history of the world took place in Chengdu when its merchants introduced the use of paper money, which rapidly spread throughout China. It must be stressed that China was about 700 years ahead of Europe in that field. The

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first paper money was issued in Europe just in 1694 by the Bank of England. Paper money greatly favored the development of trade in China. Because of it, the proportion of the state’s revenue taking the form of money went from almost nothing to more than 50%.

MONEY BEFORE THE INVENTION OF PAPER MONEY The Greeks were the first ones to introduce coin money around 700 BC. Various materials served as money through history. The Mesoamericans (Maya, Aztec , etc.) used cocoa grains as money. To the north of Rio Grande, Amerindians used Wampuns, which consisted in shell necklaces. In India and Black Africa, people resorted to cowries, which are shells of the porcelain group. In the Fiji Islands, whale teeth were used. In the British colonies that became the United States , tobacco served as money. In Europe and Africa, the cattle was also used (the term “pecuniary” comes from pecus, which means “cattle” in Latin).

The importance of the invention of paper money comes from the fact that its supply did not depend anymore on external factors such as the availability of gold, silver, shells, cattle, or cocoa. It only relied on the will of those who issued money. Issuing money became a matter of policy and trust. Issuing money then depended, more than ever, on the good judgment of the issuers because increasing the monetary mass had become easier, but also more risky. It allowed helping the economy by increasing the demand for goods and services, but it also increased the risk of harming the economy by creating inflation. Paper money augmented the leeway, which, however, had to be used with wisdom. When it did, trade and all the economic activities benefited from it. China has been the first state in the world to experience it and to observe its effects. Those were important. It is not by chance that the appearance of paper money was followed by one of the greatest economic mutations of the whole history of China, that is, the transfer of the economic heart of the country from Changan-Xi’an’s region to the Yangtze River Basin where Chengdu lay. In the same way as the increase of the monetary mass in Europe after the discovery of the gold and silver of the Americas favored the transfer of the European economic heart from Northern Italy to Northern Europe, the creation of money resulting from the invention of paper money in China caused a major acceleration of the topodynamic movements within the Asian Corridor. To the southeast of Chengdu, Chongqing is situated at the junction of the Jialing Jiang and the Yangtze River. The Jialing Jiang is parallel to the Min Jiang. Those two tributaries of the Yangtze and the Yangtze River itself constitute the main waterways of the Red Basin. Chongqing signifies “double happiness.” The city bears that name only since AD 1088 even though it was

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founded about three thousand years ago. The considerable development of Chongqing is due to the fact that it is the port city of the Red Basin that lies the most upstream of the Yangtze River. So it is a typical “breaking point” city. From about 900, after the deep transformation of the Chinese economy due to the southeastward movement within the Asian Corridor, the Chinese economy-world was based on three strategic regions: the Great Plain of China, dominated by Peking-Beijing to the north, Zhengzhou to the west, and Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou to the south; the Loess Plateau, dominated by Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, and Kaifeng; and the Red Basin, dominated by Chengdu and Chongqing. The largest of the Chinese cities remained Changan-Xi’an, but the center of gravity of the Chinese economy was clearly moving towards Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou. The southeastward movement was accentuated by the fact that, further south, Canton-Guangzhou and the Xi Jiang (Pearl River) were emerging, as will be seen. Within the Asian Corridor, to this day, the southeastward topodynamic evolution of China has never been really reversed, but nothing precludes this happening. The urban pole of the Loess Plateau has ceased to dominate China a long time ago.

The Greatness of the Chinese Economy-World Steel was probably invented by the Chinese in the second century BC. Under the Roman Empire, the best steel available was Seric steel brought into the empire from India. Modern steel was invented by the American William Kelly in 1845 with the help of four Chinese experts. Needham estimates to one thousand years China’s lead over Europe in iron and steel metallurgy.35 The Chinese invented lacquer in the eighth century BC, if not before. They have discovered petroleum and natural gas in the first century of this era. They invented the wheelbarrow and porcelain at about the same time as paper, around AD 100, the stirrup in the third century, matches in 577, printing before 868, the mechanical clock around 690, cast iron in 954, gunpowder around 1000, and the magnetic compass around 1100. Moreover, the Chinese invented canal lock gates, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, kites, and sternpost rudders. They built canals on a large scale one thousand years before the Italians and the Dutch did the same (Italians did from 1458 and the Dutch from 1560).36 The Chinese agriculture was profoundly innovative, and, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the seventeenth century, it was ahead of the European agriculture. The Chinese generalized the rotation of crops. They produced more efficient plows. They systematically selected the cultivated species. They developed rice species allowing for two and three 35. Joseph Needham, op. cit. 36. Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 170.

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harvests per year. They diversified their agriculture by introducing numerous new species like tea, cotton, and sorghum, and even, only fifty years after the discovery of America, American crops such as maize, peanut, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. All that allowed China to quadruple its population between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.37 The Chinese also developed coastal navigation thanks to wellconceived ships of about one thousand metric tons. Chinese trading ships were active in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea in the ninth century. It is also proved that, later, Chinese junks frequented East African ports.38 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, China became the first maritime power of the world. It created a navy of 28,000 sailors and sent seven fleets, each composed of hundreds of vessels (some of which were 125 meters long), to Java, India, Persia, Arabia, and even the eastern coast of Africa. Under the Ming dynasty, Emperor Yung-lo (also named Chengzu) sent his eunuch admiral, Cheng Ho, on major expeditions.39 From 1405 to 1433, Cheng Ho traveled the length and breadth of the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Had his curiosity led him towards Siberia and Alaska, he could well have discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Unfortunately, a struggle opposed the eunuchs, who favored navigation, and their opponents at the Chinese court. The opponents gained the upper hand in the power struggle, stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade oceangoing shipping. This considerably weakened China in the face of foreign powers. Despite that, in 1600, the Chinese still dominated the maritime trade east of the Malacca Strait. Thanks to its navigation, canals, paper money, and road system, the Chinese trade prospered and favored the development of agriculture and industry. This allowed China to reach an urbanization rate that, around 1300, exceeded by one or two points the rate of Western Europe. The technological advance of China over Western Europe lasted from the fall of Rome to 1600 approximately.40 To a large extent, it rested on an important bureaucracy and a mandarinate based on merit and not on aristocracy. If the Greeks gave the world democracy, the Chinese gave it meritocracy.41 In Europe, it took one thousand more years for a statesman, Napoleon, to install meritocracy as the basis of the state. ***

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 14. Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 101. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Joseph Needham, op. cit. Étienne Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste: recherches sur l’économie et la société de la Chine traditionnelle (Paris : Gallimard, 1968).

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In this chapter, the Asian Corridor has been presented as the spinal column of the Chinese economy-world in the same way as the Great Corridor was the spine of the Roman economy-world. This has been worth for the period from about AD 200 to 700. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, from the beginning of the eighth century, the influence of the Great Corridor became stronger and stronger up to the point where it came to marginalize the influence of the Asian Corridor. Moreover, at the end of the nineteenth century, the modern American Corridor stemming from the ancient MongoloAmerican Corridor also entered the stage in a dazzling way. The Chinese economy is unique because it is the result of the topodynamic evolutions of the three world corridors, all of them crossing China’s territory. Comparing the Chinese economy-world between AD 200 and 1300 with the Roman economy-world between 50 BC and AD 476 can only be done with caution. Among the differences, we found the maritime character of the Roman Empire and the more continental character of the Chinese Empire, as well as the definitive disruption of the Roman Empire and the long-run stability of the Chinese Empire, despite its long periods of disunity. But among the similarities, we must rank the invasions originating from the MongoloAmerican Corridor, which disturbed the two corridors that formed the spines of the two economy-worlds, and the shift within both economy-worlds of the economic leadership from one pole to another, from Rome to Constantinople in one case, and from Changan-Xi’an to Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou in the other. The dynamics of the urban systems is similar in both cases with expansion phases, rivalries between the various urbexplosions constituting an economy-world, topodynamic movements, a certain inertia of those movements, the channeling of those movements through the topodynamic corridors, and the omnipresence of the polarization phenomenon, which constitutes the very foundation of the observed processes. An economyworld is made if many neighboring urbexplosions polarize each other in the sense that one of them establishes its leadership over the others without any of them renouncing to assert itself. The fact that, within an economy-world, the leadership switches, after a long period of time, from one urbexplosion to another is not at all exceptional. It is even a normal evolution, which was observed in both the Roman and the Chinese cases.

CHAPTER

4

Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Evolution

L

ike we have done in Chapter 2, let us now think about the theoretical lessons that can be drawn from the development of the two first economyworlds. Hereby, four aspects will be discussed: the influence of spatial competition, the challenges of the management of municipal services, the impact of multiplier effects, and the major role of repulsive forces.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND SPATIAL COMPETITION Competitors can compete in various ways. They can challenge their rivals by lowering their prices or by launching a publicity campaign. But they can also move to a better location (some even said that, in retail trade, there are three rules: location, location, and location). Spatial competition is, without any doubt, one of the most important concepts in space-economic theory. It explains how location advantages end up being factors that determine, to a great extent, who will be the winners and the losers in the economic struggle. It also allows to understand how a solution can prevail in the spatial distribution of the competitors in a situation where, initially, nobody had an advantage over the others. However, in this last case, spatial competition can play tricks. It can have opposite effects in different circumstances. In some cases, spatial competition favors the regrouping of competitors and, consequently, polarization, while in other cases it favors a scattering of the competitors and, consequently, a form of “de-polarization.” Spatial competition acts at all levels of the economy, at the levels of small enterprises, cities, regions, countries and continents, which are all, actually, competing with each other. The concept of spatial competition is the master key for understanding the evolution of the world economy through centuries and millennia.

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The most classical analysis of spatial competition is Hotelling’s study of the behavior of two hot-dog sellers on a “Euclidean isotropic” beach where swimmers are uniformly scattered.1 In Hotelling’s example, the beach is limited (it has a beginning and an end), and each swimmer eats a given number of hot dogs a day, whatever the location of the sellers (this is the famous assumption of “unelasticity of the hot-dog demand with respect to the price of hot dogs including transportation costs,” which means that each swimmer’s demand stays the same whatever the distance he has to walk in order to get his hot dogs). When the first seller arrives at the beach, he learns about these assumptions and he readily concludes that he can locate his stand anywhere, since the demand will not change according to his location. He finds a shaded spot close to the western limit of the beach and locates his stand there. A rival observes the scene and decides to compete with the first seller. Cleverly, the rival drives his stand to the east of the first seller’s stand, because the eastern part of the beach is larger (and has more customers) than the western part. Since swimmers buy their hot dogs to the closest furnisher, the first seller soon realizes that the best location he can choose is the one that is immediately to the right of the rival. By locating there, he diverts from his competitor all the swimmers located to the right, while the rival keeps only the customers located to the left, which are a minority. Of course, the rival reacts in his turn, and a series of actions-reactions ensues. Finally, the two competitors will come to the conclusion that their best locations are side-by-side right in the middle of the beach, each having half of the customers. This is how the story goes, and its conclusion is “polarization,” since the two competitors finally congregate. One could hastily conclude from this story that spatial competition favors polarization. It is not always the case. In fact, the conclusion of the story depends very much on the assumptions. For example, if the beach were around a lake, and if it were, consequently, unlimited (without a beginning and an end), the two competitors could locate anywhere, and polarization would be unlikely. Even in the case of a limited beach, if the demand were “elastic” (that is, if the swimmers bought less hot dogs when they had to walk a long distance), the two competitors would have to move closer to the location that is more convenient for the swimmers, that is, if the beach is four kilometers long, at one kilometer from the western limit, and at one kilometer from the eastern limit (minimizing the average distance covered by a swimmer to get a hot dog). There would be a scattering of the competitors, and no polarization. In spatial competition, the rule is simple: circumstances alter cases. 1.

Harold Hotelling, “Stability in Competition,” Economic Journal 39 (1929): 41–57.

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What is to conclude from such an analysis? In fact, very important conclusions can be drawn from the hot-dog story. First, in certain circumstances, spatial competition may favor polarization, especially when the space is somewhat limited (or, better, “organically centered” with a core and a periphery) and when the considered competitors aim to serve the entire limited market. There are good examples of this, both with stores at the scale of a city and with cities at the scale of an economy-world (cities and economy-worlds both being “organically centered areas”). Of course, contrary to stores, cities cannot move and change location; however, as with stores, those with better locations succeed and those with poorer locations do not. Inside modern big cities, it is well known that department stores (which aim to serve an entire agglomeration) tend to locate side by side in the middle of downtown. Without knowing, they behave like Hotelling’s hot-dog sellers. However, the most interesting example (and the most original one) may be given by commercial cities in Braudel’s concept of “economyworlds.” As mentioned, economy-worlds tend to be somewhat self-sufficient: like simple cities, they include a center and a periphery. In the same way that in the center of big cities we find department stores, which intend to serve an entire agglomeration, in the center of economy-worlds we find a large number of competing commercial and financial cities, which intend to serve the entire economy-world. For instance, in the Chinese economy-world, in the Loess Plateau, which dominated at the beginning, Changan-Xi’an was competing with Luoyang and Kaifeng, and, later, in the Lower Yangtze River region, Hangzhou, Nanking-Nanjing, and Suzhou competed with each other. Similarly, in the Mediterranean economy-world at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, at the center of the economy-world in Northern Italy, there were the main competing commercial and financial cities of Genoa, Venice, Milan, and Florence. A few decades later, at the center of the North-European economy-world, the Flanders and surrounding area, the main competing commercial and financial cities were Bruges, Gent, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. Similarly, the non-polarizing scattered solution will normally prevail in the case of activities or cities whose functions are not intended to cover a whole organically centered area, but solely parts of it. At the city level, supermarkets, variety stores, shopping centers, liquor stores, etc. will be scattered all over the metropolitan area. Similarly, in the economy-worlds, cities (and even very large cities) having national and regional vocations are scattered over the whole economy world from the core to the periphery. In the Roman Empire, at the peak of the domination of Rome, the cities of Lugdunum-Lyon, LutetiaParis, Londinium-London, Colonia Agrippina-Cologne, Augusta TreverorumTrier, Corduba-Cordoba, Antioch, and Alexandria played a regional role. Much later, in the seventeenth century, in the case of the North-European

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economy-world, we find in this category important cities such as Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and Moscow. They were major cities playing important national (and even colonial) functions, but they were not at the center of the commercial and financial game. Their role corresponded more to that of a “central place” (in the sense of Christaller and Lösch) than to an “economy-world trading place.”

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPAL SERVICES Cities are “locations” (they are considered to be just that every time their existence is said to be linked to networks, breaking points, and spatial competition). They serve hinterlands (this is the central-place vision). They help to conquer the world, as in the network system theory. But, in a much more pragmatic way, they constitute some kind of “clubs” whose function is to deliver services and goods (like water) to their members—the citizens. Living in a city is a good way to get various public and even private goods and services at a good price. There are even goods and services which can only be found in cities (“winter” theater, rock-and-roll concerts, sophisticated police services, high-tech medicine, etc.). Forming cities in order to get such goods and services at a good price could be considered. This happens rarely, but there are exceptions (the case of high-security senior-citizen new towns is a very good one, that may become increasingly popular). Even when the project of forming cities in order to get cheaper services is not explicit, the cost of providing municipal services influences the growth of cities through their tax competitiveness. It must be stressed that costs of municipal services are subject to both scale economies and scale diseconomies. In that field, “bigger” is not always synonymous with “cheaper.” Moreover, the growth of cities creates the need for new public services (museums, well-developed public libraries, planetariums, aquariums, botanical gardens, public exhibitions and festivals, etc.). Historically, the polarization process has been and remains influenced by the social need to have access to such more and more specialized services. While attempting to understand the various causes of the fall of Rome, an allusion has been made to the fact that Rome had become very difficult to manage. A reference has been made to the fire service and to police. Such explanations are not linked to location, hinterland, or urban systems, but directly to the management of municipal services. It is not impossible that one of the reasons for the reversal of the traditional northwestward movement within the Great Corridor was related to this precise factor. When Emperor Constantine decided to found Constantinople, he may have been influenced by the conviction that Rome had somewhat failed as a gigantic metropolis.

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In fact, it had already failed before Constantine, since his predecessor Emperor Diocletian imposed the system of the four tetrarchs and chose Milan, instead of Rome, as the prefecture of Italy.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND MULTIPLIER EFFECTS As mentioned in Chapter 1, agglomeration and scale economies are difficult to estimate because they are not bought or sold in the market. On the contrary, multiplier effects correspond to series of interrelated transactions. In a closed economic system where there are no leakages, any exogenous (or “autonomous”) investment generates, in theory, infinite multiplier effects, since the initial transaction, which corresponds to the autonomous investment itself, generates an infinite sequence of induced transactions where the money spent in the first transaction is spent again and again throughout the infinite sequence of induced transactions. As soon as there are leakages in the system because of imports or of the subtraction from the multiplier flow of certain expenditures, the sequence of transactions becomes finite, as does the sum of the multiplier effects. A multiplier corresponds to the ratio of the sum of the induced effects divided by the initial effect of the autonomous investment. Multiplier effects play a role in the dynamics of polarization. A city whose economy is diversified and which offers a large number of goods and services is likely to benefit to the maximum from all the exogenous investments that are made in the city thanks to its ability to capture the maximum of the induced transactions and multiplier effects of that investment. By contrast, a mono-industrial city is hardly in a position to limit the leakages, any new autonomous investment made in such a city being likely to induce much more imports than local purchases precisely because the mono-industrial city offers very few goods and services. Multiplier effects play also a role in the “polarizarion of the poles” process and, consequently, in the evolution of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds. The ability of a city to dominate an urban system, an urbexplosion, or an economy-world is related to a great extent to its capability to attract a high proportion of the multiplier effects of the system it attempts to dominate. A dominating city is characterized by the fact that it succeeds to capture to its benefit a significant part of the multiplier effects of almost all the autonomous investments that are made within the system it dominates, including in the most remote parts of its periphery. When the leadership passes from one core, one urban system, one urbexplosion, or one economy-world to another, the division of the multiplier effects between the old dominating centers and the emerging ones undergoes a radical change, the emerging centers succeeding to capture an increasing proportion of the

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multiplier effects to their benefit and to the detriment of the old dominating centers whose power falters and then declines rapidly. The fall of Rome may be a good illustration of that. At the beginning, Rome was a city of producers and traders who succeeded to attract more and more multiplier effects in their region. When Rome transformed into a city of consumers and parasites, its ability to capture the multiplier effects of its hinterland diminished considerably. Moreover, the taxes collected throughout the empire were spent in Rome for consumption purposes (panem et circenses, “bread and games”) rather than for reinvestment. Then Rome stopped being a dominating city from an economic point of view. When Constantinople replaced it, the new capital captured an increasing part of the multiplier effects of the empire, which probably contributed to weaken the western part of the empire and to make it more vulnerable to barbarian invasions. Similar evolutions were observed in China when the economic leadership passed from the Loess Plateau to the Yangtze River region.

s TOPODYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND REPULSIVE FORCES To understand the expansion phase of urbexplosions as well as the decline of dominating metropolises such as Rome and Changan-Xi’an, it is necessary to resort to the concept of repulsive force.2 The world of location cannot really be explained without resorting to that concept. At the outset, the idea evokes something negative and repugnant. For instance, the examples of repulsion points that come to mind are those of garbage dumps, noisy

2.

The concept of repulsive force was first developed by Luc-Normand Tellier, who was also the first to formulate the attraction-repulsion problem: see Luc-Normand Tellier, Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Chicoutimi, Quebec: Gaëtan Morin, 1985), 42–46; Luc-Normand Tellier and Boris Polanski, “The Weber Problem: Frequency of Different Solution Types and Extension to Repulsive Forces and Dynamic Processes,” Journal of Regional Science 29, 3 (1989): 387–405; these contributions led to the topodynamic theory presented in this book, and they contributed to the launching of the New Economic Geography, whose main references are: Masahisa Fujita and Jacques-François Thisse, Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002); Masahisa Fujita, Paul R. Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999); Gianmarco Ottaviano and Jacques-François Thisse, “Agglomeration and Economic Geography,” in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Volume 4, J. Vernon Henderson and Jacques-François Thisse (eds.) (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004). In the New Economic Geography, agglomeration forces are attractive forces, and dispersion forces are tantamount to repulsive forces. See Paul R. Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), and Jacques-François Thisse and Tanguy Van Ypersele, “Métropoles et concurrence territoriale,” Économie et Statistiques 326–327 (1999): 19–30.

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spots (discotheques, noisy factories), boroughs of ill fame, nuclear plants, air pollution sources, nauseating places, high-crime zones, macabre sites (as cemeteries), zones of poverty, discriminated-against urban sectors, congested crossroads, noisy highways, etc. The list could go on and on. But, on reflection, it is realized that attraction points can also constitute repulsion points even for the same person. Thus, downtowns, which are the most frequent examples of attraction points in the theories of the urban form, are also seen by the population as repulsion points because of pollution, congestion, anonymity, smell, and noise. That being said, the most frequent repulsive forces are not caused by such negative factors. On the contrary, quite often, they originate from an excess of attraction, and they play a positive and essential role in location systems. Actually, repulsive forces are so necessary to the general equilibrium of location systems that the market generates them spontaneously every time there is, so to speak, an “overflow” of attractive forces, that is, every time the action of attractive forces gives birth to a strong competition around certain particularly coveted locations. This gives rise to the appearance of location rents, of which land and property prices are the most common, but not unique expression.3 When a consumer accepts to pay a drink twice the normal price at certain prestigious spots (such as the Champs-Élysées in Paris or Via Vittorio Venetto in Rome), he accepts to pay a location rent similar to the location rents included in land and property prices. Actually, all the polarization process, which is based on the greater desirability of certain locations compared to others, generates such overbids, and these overbids can lead to equilibrium solutions just through the spontaneous appearance of repulsive forces. The most classical example of this process is given by the theory of land rent.4 The basic thesis of this theory is relatively simple in the light of the concept of repulsive force. It simply says that if a large number of location problems are defined with respect to a single point of reference that is an attraction point (that single attraction point is the village market in the

3.

4.

Repulsive forces can also stem from spatial competition in both Cournot-type and Bertrand-type competitive contexts. Cournot-type competition focuses on quantity, while Bertrand-type competition focuses on prices. Antoine Augustin Cournot and Joseph Bertrand are French mathematicians who made contributions in economics. See Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer, and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique. L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris: Economica, 2006), chapter 9. Theory elaborated by Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Der Isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie (Hamburg: Puthes, 1826), and adapted to the urban context by William Alonso, Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1964).

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middle of the countryside for von Thünen, and the central business district in the middle of the city for Alonso), then the land market must arbitrate the conflict opposing all those who would like to be located at the unique attraction point. The solution that the market of land values will generate consists in transforming the single attraction point into a “repulsion point as regards land values.” This is done by awarding each location a land price that decreases as the distance to the attraction point increases. This results in transforming the single attraction point (which remains an attraction point from the standpoint of all factors except land values) into a repulsion point as regards land values. Each economic agent, whether consumer or producer, then finds an equilibrium point between the “attractive force that is independent from land values” and the “repulsive force linked to land values” exerted by the single reference point. The location where the economic agent realizes that the attractive force exerted on him by the reference point is canceled by the land-value-related repulsive force exerted on him by the same reference point constitutes his optimal location. This is relatively easy to understand since if, at a location, the “attractive force that is independent from land values” is greater than the “repulsive force linked to land values,” it is in the economic agent’s interest to get closer to the reference point, and if, at another location, the attractive force is smaller than the repulsive force, it is in his interest to get farther from the reference point. The only location which corresponds to equilibrium for the economic agent is the one where both forces are equal in absolute terms, that is, the location where they cancel out. That location is the optimum. That regulating effect of repulsive forces is present in all polarized systems at all scales. Repulsive forces are in action around subway stations, centers of boroughs, centers of “edge cities,” centers of main cities, centers of metropolises, cores of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds, and the center of the world if such a center exists. The more our world is polarized, the more the role of repulsive forces is essential and omnipresent. The appearance of the two first economy-worlds has been a major step in that process. There is a third category of repulsive forces which is neither associated with negative factors nor stemming from an equilibrium-searching economic market. It is the category of the paradoxically “positive” repulsive forces which are related to the spirit of conquest and discovery, the thirst for influence, and the desire to expand the field of the things that are known, exploited, and dominated. While alluding to the theory of network systems, it has been underlined that urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds naturally tend to expand by generating tentacles that penetrate into peripheral zones.

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A similar process takes place within growing agglomerations, which sprawl through their suburbs, and annex the small towns of their periphery. Such centrifugal movements can partly be explained by an excess of attractive forces at the center. However, they are also explained, more positively, by the need for any polarized system to expand not really in all directions, but in the most profitable directions, that is, in those directions that maximize the positive effects for the center in terms of natural resources, development of new territories, or opening of new outlets for the center’s exports. Those repulsive forces are essential to understanding the evolution of urban systems, urbexplosions, and economy-worlds, as well as the competition they are in with each other. The process of succession of urbexplosions within the topodynamic corridors can be understood by resorting to the notion of positive repulsive force, but also by studying the aging process of polarized systems.

Repulsive Forces and the Aging of Urban Structures If there are good reasons to think that the more a system is polarized, the more repulsive forces play an important role in it, it is also likely that the older a system gets, the more the positive repulsive forces are replaced by negative repulsive forces, and the less important the equilibrating repulsive forces are. In the dynamics of cities, urban systems, urbexplosions, and economyworlds, there are phases of growth and decline. The world’s urban systems are constantly being renewed. The dominating cities of yesterday are the tourist and museum cities of tomorrow. For each Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Changan-Xi’an, Peking-Beijing, or Nanking-Nanjing which succeeded to last for millennia, how many cities are there which, like Babylon, Ashur, Nineveh, Carthage, Memphis, Thebes, Persepolis, and Sparta, after having dominated and stood out, are today but fields of ruins, unknown villages, or mere tourist attractions. At the beginning of their ascending phase, the location systems (whether cities or urban systems) are dominated by attractive forces and by the increasing competition between those attractive forces, that competition generating more and more important equilibrating repulsive forces. On the other hand, negative repulsive forces are then very weak, and the positive repulsive forces remain scarce and faint. When the location systems become strong enough to free themselves and to dominate in their turn, the positive repulsive forces associated with the conquest of new territories grow in number, as do the equilibrating repulsive forces.

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At their peak, location systems reach a point where their positive repulsive forces weaken, their equilibrating repulsive forces temper, and negative repulsive forces develop. The latter originate from the fact that the existing infrastructures are aging, new investments decrease (the development prospects being less promising), the competition from the emerging location systems becomes stronger, and the flows of immigrants that accompanied the growth of the system tend to last while the system is less and less in a position to absorb them. If a burst of growth does not occur, the aging scenario goes on and a phase of decline ensues where the positive repulsive forces are increasingly replaced by negative repulsive forces, and where the rents stemming from the equilibrating repulsive forces become smaller and smaller. The system can then die. Its death is characterized by the complete disappearance of positive repulsive forces, by a decrease of the equilibrating repulsive forces, and by the possible persistence of some negative repulsive forces. From the birth to the death of the system, its center is thus progressively transformed from an attraction point into an absolute repulsion point. That theoretical scenario does not preclude, however, a possible renaissance. The best historical example of this relates to Rome, which, after having been the largest and richest city of the world at the acme of the Roman Empire, became a field of ruins at the end of the Middle Ages before reviving and achieving a new splendor thanks to the popes of Renaissance.

Repulsive Forces and Polarization After reading the above paragraphs, someone could get the impression that the multiplication of the repulsive forces constitutes as such a factor which slows down or even stops polarization. Actually, this is not true. Computer simulations clearly demonstrate that multiplying the number of repulsive forces in a location system does not reduce its level of polarization even though it has a radical effect on the spatial form of that polarization. The more numerous repulsive forces there are in a location system, the more polarization benefits the periphery of the considered limited space to the detriment of the center of that same space. That remark is very important since it stresses the determining role played by the multiplication of the repulsive forces in the process by which location systems succeed one another through time and space. When an urbexplosion reaches its peak, the multiplication of the repulsive forces favors the development in its periphery of rivals that more and more strongly compete with the center of the peaking urbexplosion. Thus, the polarization process tends to be renewed through the emergence of new centers at

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the periphery instead of through the re-emergence of the dominating center. In fact, the number of competitors that emerge at the periphery is very limited, and those competitors do not appear anywhere. That suggests the existence of trajectories in the process of spatiotemporal succession of the urbexplosion centers, an idea that will be explored later on. Let us just remark for the moment that, in order for an emerging center to have the opportunity to win in the battle against the dominating center, it must benefit from determining advantages. One of those advantages often relates to the “youth” of the surrounding territory, that is, to its relatively intact development potential. The more considerable that intact potential is, the more the emerging territory has opportunities to benefit from the positive repulsive forces originating from the dominating center. However, the dominating center still remains in a position that allows it to recuperate through the multiplier effects a part of the benefits stemming from the emerging center. This is where distance plays a major role: the greater the distance, that is, the more the emerging center lies at the periphery, the more recuperating the benefits stemming from the emerging center will be difficult for the old dominating center. The distance protects the growth of the emerging center by freeing it from the domination of the old one. This explains that economic development tends to jump through space from aging dominant centers to emerging centers. This is what happened when Athens succeeded Babylon, Rome succeeded Athens, and Constantinople succeeded Rome, or when Nanking-Nanjing succeeded Changan-Xi’an. This is also what happened later when Amsterdam and London succeeded Venice and Genoa, as will be seen.

Repulsive Forces and Geography In that repulsive-forces-driven theoretical dynamics of location systems, the geographic space plays a determining role through its geometry, whatever the characteristics of the geographic environment. However, in practice, it is obvious that the distribution of natural resources, the topography, the fluvial networks, the climate, the presence and quality of arable lands, and the communication networks influence the dynamics of location systems. Unfortunately, too often, geographers have tended to establish direct links between the physical environment and the development of location systems while neglecting the space-economic logic of the systems in evolution, that logic being the most fundamental factor. The geographical characteristics of the environment mainly influence the selection, among all the emerging centers of the periphery, of those that are more likely to eventually reverse to their benefit the hegemony of the present dominant center. Those centers that are located on important communication

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networks or on maritime port sites, surrounded with fertile lands and a rich urban network, naturally have real advantages over their competitors in the struggle for economic power. However, topodynamic inertia, which will be analyzed at the end of the next chapter, is another factor that plays an even greater role. Let us just stress here that the topodynamic inertia that was so conspicuous in the evolution of urban civilization from Sumer to Babylon, Athens, and Rome, or, in China, from Changan-Xi’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, and Zengzhou to Nanking-Nanjing and Hangzhou, was canalized by the Great and Asian corridors, which are, above all, geographical, topographical, and fluvial realities.

CHAPTER

5

The Great Ebb: Islam Out to Conquer the Great and Asian Corridors

T

he fall of the Western Roman Empire, made official in AD 476, is an event among the most fraught with consequences in world’s history. Europe did not really recover from it until more than one thousand years later with the discovery of America in 1492. Moreover, the repercussions of that collapse were felt throughout the Great Corridor, and also in the Asian Corridor, since the fall of Rome was associated with a complete reversal of the northwestward movement that had prevailed to the west of the Persian Gulf since the beginning of urbanization in the Sumer region. “To speak of Europe from the fifth century to the tenth century is to begin with the fall of Rome, drawing to a halt once more at the close of the period of invasions … This was an era in which the center of gravity of the urban world around the Mediterranean shifted from Europe toward the Middle East. This shift was the result of the partition of the Roman Empire into two halves, the eastern capital of which survived the fall of Rome by nearly a thousand years, from 476 to 1453. During three or four centuries, roughly from 400 to 700, Constantinople was probably the largest city in the world, before it was overtaken by Changan-Xi’an in China and then by Baghdad. With this last-named city, we come to the other center of urban gravity in the Mediterranean, the Muslim civilization, whose spread held significant implications for the continent of Europe.”1

The enrichment produced by the Pax romana had accentuated the economic disequilibrium between the Roman economy-world and the surrounding regions, which created conditions that favored the Barbarian invasions. The invaders who better succeeded were those who attacked the most vulnerable parts of the Roman economy-world, that is, the more recently developed

1.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 107.

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and less densely populated ones. When those parts fell, the whole Western Roman Empire trembled and, finally, collapsed. This considerably weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. The time for the pendulum to return had come. To the powerful northwestward movement succeeded an enormous wave, which swept across the whole Great Corridor from west to east. This is what will be called here the Great Ebb. The effect of that wave was to increasingly marginalize Western Europe, the former heart of the Roman Empire, with respect to two rival empires respectively centered on Constantinople and Baghdad.2 The Great Ebb bore two stunning characteristics. First, on its way back, the pendulum slightly veered off course. Instead of going through Athens, it went through Constantinople, and, instead of returning to Babylon, it reached Baghdad. Second, the eastward movement of the Great Ebb did not only propagate through the Great Corridor. It also wormed its way into the Asian Corridor, both corridors being fused together thereafter (see Map 8). It must be said that the diffusion of Buddhism, which passed from the Ganges Valley to the Indus Valley before reaching China through the Asian Corridor, had prefigured that evolution. The progress of the Great Ebb and the binding of the two corridors took the color of Islam from the death of Muhammad in 632. Generally, religions surf on the topodynamic waves that preceded them. This was observed with Buddhism, as with Christianity, whose propagation to the west occurred about three or four centuries after the corresponding topodynamic movement towards Europe, or with Islam, whose propagation began about two hundred years after the beginning of the Great Ebb.3

2. 3.

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 62. Let us mention here the rather daring thesis put forward by David Keys in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (London: Random House, 2000). According to that thesis, the turning point in the period that followed the fall of Rome in AD 476, may have been a huge eruption of the Krakatoa Volcano (Indonesia) that could have occurred in 535. That eruption could have been at the origin of a marked cooling of the climate on Earth, especially in Europe, and that cooling could have favored the appearance and development of plague epidemics. The first one of them, named the Justinian Plague, erupted in 542 and killed several million people in the Mediterranean basin. Keys goes on suggesting that the climatic changes that would have followed the hypothetical Krakatoa eruption could have been responsible for the decay of the Ma’rib Dam, which allowed Yemen to dominate the Arabic peninsula, and that the weakening of Yemen favored the rise of Medina, Mecca, and Islam, which came to dominate the Great Ebb.

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Rome

Constantinople Tokyo Baghdad Shanghai Delhi Guangzhou

360 km

Map 8 The Great Ebb and the Fusion of the Great and Asian Corridors

s FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE ADVENT OF ISLAM The evolution of the population of Rome strikingly illustrates what the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire meant for many West European cities. Rome had a population of more than a million around AD 200. It decreased to only some 50,000 about 700, to around 35,000 in the year 1000 and to just about 15,000–20,000 in 1377. After the fall of Rome, the rate of urbanization of Western Europe (based on cities with more than 2,000 population) dropped from 8–15% to probably something like 5–8% (in 1000, that rate was around 8–9% for Christian Europe, outside Russia). Consider ing cities with more than 10,000 population, Maddison estimates that the urban ratio of Roman Europe was around 5 percent in the first century, and that went to zero in the year 1000, when there were only four towns with more

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than 10,000 inhabitants.4 The urban collapse and other signs of decline warrant the assumption that the living standards in Western Europe relapsed more or less to subsistence levels in the year 1000 (thereafter, urbanization experienced a significant recovery in Western Europe). That being said, through that bleak evolution the legacy of Rome somewhat survived. The Roman road system survived, as did to a great extent the monetary system, many technological advances, the Roman legal system, and the widespread use of Latin. The barbarian invaders were the first to attempt preserving the very ideal of the empire. Odoacer and his successors generally recognized a link of vassalage with respect to the Eastern Roman Empire, and that empire continued to lay claim to Western Europe. Under Charlemagne, the Franks succeeded to revive the Western Empire, and, later, the Habsburgs continued to promote what they called a European “universal monarchy.” Unfortunately, those dreams of unity rarely succeeded to calm down the countless armed conflicts, which put Western Europe to fire and the sword from the fall of Rome to 1945. The Church, whose rise had accompanied the decline of the Western Roman Empire, was its ultimate refuge. It became the true guardian of the western civilization and its most solid hope. In face of often illiterate barbarian sovereigns, it defended the heritage of the Greco-Roman Antiquity. It tempered the zeal for war of many lords. It created the first universities and, when the time had come, it sounded the reveille of Occident by launching the crusades, which had immense stimulating effects on the Western world. Finally, the Church remained the most official link between the Christian Orient and Occident. Despite certain dissensions which led to a first rupture between the Eastern and Western churches from 863 to 867, the unity of the Christian Church was preserved till 1054. In the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, all indicated that the Eastern Roman Empire was in a position to appropriately take over. The Constantinople urbexplosion seemed prepared to softly succeed Rome’s urbexplosion thanks, among other things, to the superiority the Greek civilization of the Orient had regained over that of the Latin Occident, a superiority that was clear in the commercial and artistic fields. Had not Byzantium already dominated for a long time, since at least one century before the conquest of Rome by the barbarians? While the population of Rome was declining, that of Constantinople was rapidly increasing. In 360, only 36 years after its re-founding by Constantine, that city had become the largest in the world, and it remained so till 650 approximately. In 390, its population was between 250,000 and 350,000 inhabitants. Between 430 and 1000, it varied 4.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris : OECD, 2001), 260.

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between 400,000 and 500,000. Its maximum, 600,000, which is about half the population of Rome at its peak, was reached between 1000 and 1070. Later, Constantinople lost more and more ground in comparison with Baghdad and the large Arab cities. When the Crusaders entered Constantinople in 1204, its population had decreased to 200,000 inhabitants. And at the time of the Turkish conquest in 1453, it was only about 40,000 or 50,000 inhabitants. These data illustrate perfectly, better than anything else, the return of the topodynamic pendulum and the rate at which it occurred (see Map 9).

London

Bruges

Prague

Cologne

Milan Madrid

Kiev Sarai

Ratisbon

Paris

Barcelona

Lisbon

Amalfi

Preslav Adrianople Constantinople

Palermo

Córdoba Sevilla Granada

Antioch Baghdad

Fes Marrakech Cairo

Mecca

Timbuktu

Benin City

Mbanza Congo

Great Zimbabwe

590 km

Map 9 The Great Ebb West of the Persian Gulf

Isfahan

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A Byzantine emperor represented the greatest hope for Christianity. Emperor Justinian was a Latin-speaking Illyrian who reigned from 527 to 565. He originated from Illyria in present-day Serbia, but he was not a Slav; the Serbians who are Slavs started settling in present-day Serbia during his reign. That illustrious Christian emperor built St. Sophia, the largest church of Christianity, and succeeded in somewhat reconstituting the Old Roman Empire by chasing the Vandals out of Africa, and by retaking Italy from the Ostrogoths and a part of Spain from the Visigoths. He did this while stopping the Sasanian Persians who were threatening his empire to the east. Unfortunately, his nephew and successor, Justin II, failed to keep the territories Justinian had conquered. The Macedonian city of Thessaloniki contributed, more than any other, to link the Orient and the Occident at that time. It was the most important city on the route that went from Rome to Constantinople. Through Via Claudia Valeria and Via Traiana, Rome was linked to the port of Brundisium (called today Brindisi), which lay in the heel of the Italian boot and faced Dyrrhacium (later called Durazzo and then Durrës, in present-day Albania) across the Adriatic Sea. From the port of Dyrrhacium, Via Egnatia led to Thessaloniki on the Aegean Sea. From there, travelers took a ship to cross the Aegean and Marmara seas up to the Bosporus and Constantinople. That route, which constituted the umbilical cord between the Orient and the Occident, followed the logic of the Great Corridor, its section going from Dyrrhacium to Thessaloniki coinciding with the central axis of that corridor. Via Claudia Valeria, Via Traiana and Via Egnatia became the true spine of the core of the Roman Empire until the fall of Rome. When Rome fell in 476, Thessaloniki had become the second largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire, after Constantinople. In the year 1000, its population was about 40,000 inhabitants. More to the east, another city illustrates the ups and downs of that period: Antioch, the heir of the ancient city of Ugarit, located close to the central axis of the Great Corridor on the left bank of the Orontes River, about 30 kilometers from the Mediterranean seaport of Seleucia Pieria. Founded in 300 BC by Seleucus I Nicator, Antioch occupied, like Thessaloniki, a strategic position at the interface of the Syrian Corridor and the Mediterranean Sea. Under the Roman Empire, it was the main Mediterranean terminal of the Silk Road. It commanded both the east-west and north-south military and commercial communications in northwestern Syria. It was the natural meeting place of Asia and the Mediterranean Sea, as well as of the Far Orient and the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, in the fields of language, culture, and religion. Before the ascent of Constantinople, Antioch was the third largest city of the empire after Rome and Alexandria, and the fourth largest in the world, after Rome, Alexandria, and Ctesiphon (the Parthian and later Sasanian capital

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situated on the Tigris, close to present Baghdad and not far from Babylon), all those cities being at less than 555 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. Antioch was then the best link between the old Babylon urbexplosion and the new Roman one. Antioch was the capital of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom from about 280 BC, and it was conquered by the Romans in 64 BC. Antioch played an important role in the rise of Christianity. In fact, the very word “Christian” was first used in Antioch. The Church of Antioch was founded about AD 36–38, a few years after the death of Jesus, by saint Barnabas, saint Paul and saint Peter. One of the first signs of the weakening of the Roman Empire was the capture of Edessa (located more to the east) and Antioch by the Sasanian Persians in AD 260. One year later, the Sasanians were beaten by King Odaenathus of Palmyra, and Antioch became part of his kingdom under the reigns of King Odaenathus and Queen Zenobia till 272, when Emperor Aurelian of Rome recaptured the region. In 395, Antioch passed under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 612, the Sasanians recaptured it, then, in 630, the Byzantines did the same before the Moslems conquered it in 636, just four years after Muhammad’s death. That last conquest had enormous repercussions. By conquering Antioch and its region, Islam was cutting the access of Christianity to the main Silk Road, and, consequently, to a large extent, to the Far East. The West had to wait for Vasco de Gama to see that link re-established in 1498 by sea, not by land.

s THE RISE OF ISLAM The fact that a city as important as Antioch was disputed by the Sasanians, the kingdom of Palmyra, and the Roman Empire as soon as in 260 shows that a vacuum was developing to the southeast of the Roman Empire at the same time the threat of the barbarian invasions was emerging to the northwest of that empire. It is that vacuum that Islam filled in a flash. The Germans were the nomad invaders of the Great Corridor coming from the northeast, and the Arabs were the nomad invaders of the Great Corridor coming from the south. One more time, the invaders from the northeast were Indo-Europeans, and those from the south, Semites. In both cases, the topodynamic phenomenon is the same, the rich center attracting the poor tribes from the periphery. However, while the former were progressively assimilated into the western culture and Christianity, the latter imposed on a large part of the Great Corridor and even of the Asian Corridor their culture and a new religion, Islam. That was made, to a large extent, by the Arab takeover of the ancient Babylon urbexplosion, which went through a new period of glory by becoming the Baghdad urbexplosion.

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The history of Islam began in AD 570 when Muhammad ibn (son of) Addullah was born at Mecca into the Hashim clan of the leading Quraysh tribe. Ancient Mecca was an oasis on the old caravan route, parallel to the Red Sea, named the Spice Road, which linked the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea through the Arabian Peninsula. Along this road frankincense and myrrh were transported from Yemen and its eastern neighbor Hadramawt, where the “Incense Coast” lay. But were also transported numerous products arrived to Yemen through the Bab el Mandeb Strait, like the herbs from Africa, the pepper and other spices from India, as well as the cinnamon coming from Indonesia through the African trading posts of the Horn of Africa, and, more precisely, from the “Cinnamon Coast” (in presentday Somalia). That traffic insured the prosperity of the Arabs, and, especially, of Yemen, which was called “Happy Arabia.”5 Thanks to its strategic position and to the famous Ma’rib earth dam, which had transformed the whole region into an immense oasis, Yemen was dominating the Spice Road. Three political powers, the kingdom of Aksum (converted to Christianity in 350 thanks to its king Ezana; the Aksum kingdom is at the origin of present-day Ethiopia), the Byzantine Empire, and the Sasanian Persia, and three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, were fighting over Yemen. Yemenites had converted to Judaism in large numbers, and, around 520, the Yemenite king, allied to the Persians, was persecuting the Christians. Kaleb, the Christian king of Aksum, intervened and took control of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula, and of Yemen, where he established a Christian king who favored him. In 527, Justinian ascended the throne of Byzantium, and proposed the king of Aksum to divert the silk traffic from the continental Silk Road, which was then controlled by the Persians, to the maritime Spice Road that passed through the Bab el Mandeb Strait, which the kingdom of Aksum henceforth controlled. Having learned that, the Persians reacted by chasing the Ethiopians from the south of the Arabian Peninsula in 575 and making Yemen a vassal state.6 At the very time Yemen was losing its sovereignty, the Ma’rib dam burst around 570, and Yemen was profoundly weakened. That allowed the cities of Medina and Mecca to attempt controlling the Spice Road. Muhammad, who was a merchant, appeared in that woolly context where no political power or religion really dominated the region and where, outside the region, the two main empires, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanian Persian Empire, were declining and neutralizing each other, while the kingdom of Aksum was in retreat. 5. 6.

Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jehan Desanges, Les routes millénaires (Paris : Nathan, 1988), 105. Ibid., 111–112.

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Mecca was a city of the desert (its potable water supply came only from wells, and was not adequate to support oasis agriculture)7 and a caravan city. But it was also a religious city and a pilgrimage center. Mecca’s Ka’bah, the cube-shaped stone building, which is the holiest shrine of Islam, existed before Muhammad and, when Muhammad was born in Mecca, it was already revered as the replica of God’s house in heaven built by Abraham and Ishmael, his son by his servant Hagar, who is the ancestor of the Arabs. And already Mecca’s god was called Allah. However, for the inhabitants of Mecca and for the noble and holy house of Quraysh, which dominated Mecca as lords of the Ka’bah, Allah was only one of the gods who deserved worship. The Quraysh lords were very tolerant in religious matters and accepted other cults. People from all faiths visited Mecca. Thus, since about 375, many Jews and Christians lived in Arabia, who opposed each other in the name of their own conception of monotheism. Influenced by Judaism , Christianity, and also, possibly, by Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism (that Persian religion accepted the existence of many divinities, but considered that only one of them, Mazdah, was worth adoring), Muhammad proposed a new religious syncretism by amalgamating the cult of Allah, Mecca’s god, and the veneration of the Ka’bah with the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity. By revealing the Koran, which, according to Islam, was inspired to him by archangel Gabriel, Muhammad gave birth to a theology that integrated altogether Abraham, Ishmael, Jesus, Virgin Mary, Archangel Gabriel, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the religious tradition of Mecca. Muhammad had to face the opposition of the Quraysh family that was his own (his clan, the Hashim clan, belonged to the Quraysh tribe). Ultimately, he had to flee Mecca and find refuge in Medina in 622 AD, the year of the hegira, which marks the beginning of the Muslim era. From that moment, Muhammad radicalized his position and instituted the holy war, the jihad, which imposed on Moslems the religious duty to spread Islam by waging war “by the heart, the tongue, the hand, and the sword.” That concept of holy war was probably unprecedented in history, the proselytism of Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity never having, up to then, taken such an extreme form. From Medina, which was a sizeable agricultural oasis city, Muhammad organized military operations and, in 630, he succeeded in marching into Mecca and overcoming the Quraysh rulers. Negotiations followed, and Muhammad came to convert the tribes that had followed the Quaysh lords. When he died on June 8, 632, Islam was dominating the entire Arabia.

7.

Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions (Harlow: Pearson Education & Prentice Hall, 1994), 26.

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Islam then set off to conquer the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery of the old Babylonian urbexplosion. This involved three stages: first, the conquest of the core made of the very Christianized zones of the Near East; second, the conquest of the semi-periphery constituted of Christianized Egypt and Zoroastrian Persia; and third, the conquest of the periphery represented by Christianized Maghrib and Spain, Buddhist Transoxiana, and Hindu Northern India. During the first stage, the Moslem offensive targeted at the central zone of the Great Corridor. That resulted in the conquest, in 633, of the Sumer region, where the Moslems founded Basrah. Then the offensive went along the Euphrates and the central axis of the Great Corridor towards the very Christianized region of Damascus, captured in 635, and the Syrian Corridor, conquered in 636, and, then, from Kufa on the Euphrates, it headed for Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital situated on the Tigris close to ancient Babylon. Ctesiphon was captured in 637. The heart of the old Babylonian urbexplosion crossed by the central axis of the Great Corridor having been conquered, the turn of the semi-periphery had come. During the second stage, the offensive headed for the southwest, which led to the conquest of two very Christianized regions: Palestine, captured in 638, and Egypt, conquered in 641. The northeastern part of the semiperiphery was dominated by Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism and the Sasanian Persians. Islam overcame them. The Sasanians took refuge in Merv (modern Mary), in present-day Turkmenistan, and they were definitely eliminated. The last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, was slain in 651. MazdeanismZoroastrianism barely outlived that assassination. It took refuge in India, where, today, it takes the form of Parsism. The third stage began with the arrival of the famous Arab dynasty of the Umayyads, who revived the strategy for taking control of the Great Corridor. Thereafter, around 710, the project to capture also the Asian Corridor was added. Having conquered the Babylonian urbexplosion, Islam adopted the objective to do the same with the Byzantine one, which also lay in the Great Corridor. A first maritime expedition was organized in 669 to conquer Constantinople, but it failed. A second one led to a long siege of Constantinople from 674 to 678. Once again, it failed. The Umayyads then renounced their project to attack directly the heart of the Byzantine urbexplosion for almost 40 years (in 717, a third attempt to capture Constantinople failed like the two previous ones), and they opted for a different strategy. Instead of concentrating on the conquest of the core, they decided to skirt around it by capturing the northwestern section of the Great Corridor. This led to invading first North Africa and then Western Europe, which were much more vulnerable than the very rich Byzantine Empire.

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That strategy led to the conquest, at Christianity’s expense, of presentday Tunisia in 698, of Algeria in 700, of Morocco in 708, and of the major part of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 714. The attempt to reach the Great Corridor from the west of Europe was stopped at the battle of Poitiers in 732, and the Arabs had to retreat to Spain. Meanwhile, the plan to attack the Asian Corridor was taking form. Various offensives were launched in that direction from 709. Towards the northeast, the vast Buddhist region of Kabul, the Khyber Pass, and Samarkand, covering the Bamian and Transoxiana or Sogdiana, was captured between 709 and 711. That conquest was all the more dazzling that the Indo-European Sogdian language (which belonged to the Iranian language group) was widely used, in its spoken and written forms, in the negotiations between the East and the West. It is through that language that new religions such as Buddhism from India and Manichaeism from Persia, had penetrated into China. To the east, Islam followed the Great Corridor to reach the Asian Corridor. It confronted Hinduism and reached the Indus Valley and the Sind region, close to the mouth of the Indus River, between 710 and 713. Thereafter, in a fourth stage, Islam diffused through the Great Corridor up to the Ganges Valley, present-day Bangladesh, and the Yunnan province in China. It followed the Asian Corridor to the north towards the Chinese Xinjiang province, and, to the south, towards Indonesia and the Philippines. That will be seen later. The diffusion of Islam till about 714 fitted both a topodynamic logic and a transportation one. In the same way that the expansion of the Roman Empire was mainly limited to the cultivation area of olive trees, vine, and wheat, the expansion of Islam during that period was dependent on the survival area of the camel (and, some say, the cultivation area of the date palm). That explains, among other things, that the eastward expansion followed the Great Corridor, whereas, to the west, it ended up following the Sahara axis in the attempt to conquer the Great Corridor by the west. The Arab world never succeeded to extend its domination beyond about the 43th parallel, in the area where the camel is no longer in its habitat. That characteristic of the Arab world bears the highest importance since it partly explains the superiority or the weakness of the Arab world at various periods. It must be said, however, that the Arabs were not the first ones to resort to camels. That animal originates from Asia, and the Persians used it. They are the ones who introduced it in Arabia and Egypt. The camel arrived in the Sahara desert just around the first century of our era. That being said, it is the Arabs who really created an urban civilization based on the camel. For instance, Islamic urban culture had its own requirements with respect to street and lane widths based on pack-animal, mainly camel traffic.8 8.

Ibid., 16.

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THE ADVANTAGES OF CAMEL OVER CART Bairoch stressed that there existed“two features of the mode of transport unique to Muslim societies: the use of camels and the absence of wheeled vehicles … In Europe the use of wheeled vehicles for human transportation was strictly regulated inside cities. But in Muslim societies the use of wheeled vehicles was exceptionally limited, not to say unknown, even in transporting merchandise from city to city or in rural areas … What makes the search for some sort of explanation all the more intriguing is the fact that carts or wagons and other wheeled vehicles were used in the Middle East for at least a few millennia before the advent of Islam. It appears, however, that the use of the wheel had already disappeared before the Arab conquest. The most plausible explanation may be the introduction and eventual predominance of the camel as a beast of burden in Muslim societies … The camel … constituted technological progress and not a step backward. In comparison to the traditional ox-drawn cart before the invention of the harness collar, the camel offered many advantages. In the first place, a camel can carry at least as much as a cart harnessed to a pair of oxen. In the second place, a camel can cover on the average 25 to 30 kilometers a day, as against 10 to 15 for a cart. And one man can drive three to six camels, whereas he can manage only one cart. A further by no means insignificant point is that a cart requires roads, while the camel does not. Finally, while camels can eat anything oxen can eat, they are also able to assimilate semidesert vegetation that oxen are incapable of eating … But though the use of camels marked progress at one stage of development, it also led to a neglect of the wheel that unquestionably had negative consequences at a later stage.” Elsewhere, Bairoch adds: “A man can transport 35–40 kilograms of freight over a distance of 30–35 kilometers per day … A horse can carry a load of 90–150 kilograms per day over a distance of between 20 and 40 kilometers, depending on the terrain and the conditions of the course … making an average of around 3–5 metric ton-kilometers per day. The performance of oxen is even less impressive. The camel, on the other hand, can carry loads twice as heavy and for far greater distances. Even when animals are harnessed to wheeled vehicles, which requires more drivers, their performance does not increase much. Before the general introduction of collars and horseshoes (in medieval Europe), a horse could transport, on good roads, about 4–7 metric ton-kilometers per day. Besides, … the wheel is not always the best solution” (Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, from the Dawn of History to the Present, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988, 375–377 and 11–12).

The adoption of the camel led to dropping the use of wheel. Strikingly, this did not reduce the level of urbanization. On the contrary, it increased it.9 During the whole Middle Ages, the Arab world was significantly more urbanized than the Christian world, and the great Arabian cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo were much greater than any of the largest Christian cities. This does not really contradict what has been said about the historical link between the appearance of wheel transportation and the emergence of urbanization. What favors the latter is not a particular mode of transportation, but the increase in mobility and the existence of transportation networks. The

9.

See the classic about Islamic cities: Besim Selim Hakim, Arab-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles (London and New York: KPI and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

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wheel has been associated with both, and the camel, at that time, allowed to increase mobility even more than the wheel had done. As for networks, the introduction of camel just multiplied them. Caravans followed very precise itineraries from town to town and from oasis to oasis. The Spice Road is the best example of that. Thanks to the camel, the North African networks extended down to sub-Saharan Africa. The increase in mobility and the multiplication of networks allowed the Arab world to reach a rate of urbanization of ten to thirteen percent, which compares with the urbanization rate of the Roman Empire at its peak (between eight and fifteen percent). Around the year 1000, the total population of the Arab world was between 22 to 30 million inhabitants, that is, about half the population of the Roman Empire before the decline. At the same epoch, Christian Europe out of Russia was more populated with 27 to 35 million inhabitants, but its rate of urbanization was just eight or nine percent. In 1000, Christian Europe had not a single city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, while the Arab world had about seven of them.

s THE BAGHDAD URBEXPLOSION The takeover of the Babylonian urbexplosion by Islam and the Arabs gave it a second life. Its center and its periphery went through a profound transformation. At the center, the Arabs little modified the existing urban system. However, they founded a certain number of new cities such as Baghdad, Basrah or Kufa in Mesopotamia, and Fustat-Cairo in Egypt, and many ancient dominant cities such as Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Alexandria, Antioch, or Babylon lost their rank. They were supplanted by Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. By contrast, in the periphery, especially in the west, the Arabs created almost an entirely new urban system made, to a large extent, of new cities. The first great city to dominate the Arab world was Damascus, the city of the Umayyads, that famous Arab dynasty, which added to the Moslem Empire the Indus Plain and northern India, the region of Samarkand (called Transoxiana or Sogdiana), the region of Kabul (called Bamian), and Spain. The Umayyads reigned over the Arab world from 661 to 750, when they were defeated by the Abbasids, who practically destroyed Damascus, which never really recovered. In 1075, the city was left with only 5,000 inhabitants. Baghdad had completely supplanted it. Around 360, Constantinople’s urbexplosion had replaced that of Rome as the dominant urbexplosion of the section of the Great Corridor located west of the Persian Gulf. Around 850, Baghdad’s urbexplosion rose to that top position. The pendulum had come back to Mesopotamia, and it stayed there at least till 1350, when a new urbexplosion dominated by Venice and

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northern Italy emerged as a powerful rival. The city of Baghdad did not exist in Babylon’s time. It seems that it originated from a settlement founded about AD 250–350 by the Persian Sasanians and mainly inhabited by Christian Aramaeans. Baghdad was not far (about 100 kilometers) from Ancient Babylon, but it was still closer to other previous capitals such as Seleucia, the capital of the Greek Seleucids, Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthians and of the Persian Sasanians, Agade, the capital of the Semitic kingdom of Akkad, and Dur-Kurigalzu (now called Aqarquf), the capital of the Kassites who gave Babylon a dynasty. Baghdad really became a major city when al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph, decided in 758 to build himself a new capital on the site of the Sasanian Baghdad. He named the capital Madinat as-Salam, the City of Peace. The city was fortified, and the caliph settled there in 765. Very soon it had a population of some 400,000. In 850, Baghdad replaced Changan-Xi’an as the largest city in the world. It reached a population of one million around 930. It was the first city to reach such a threshold after Rome. The rise of Baghdad is, to a large extent, linked to its location in the central zone of the urbexplosion that had been dominated by Babylon, on the Tigris River at the river’s nearest point to the Euphrates (less than 40 kilometers), 32 kilometers above the Tigris’ confluence with its largest tributary, the Diyala, and at a place where the Tigris can be crossed more easily than elsewhere. The site is a level plain standing a little above a vast zone liable to flooding. Baghdad’s development was favored by the fact that important marshes lay to the south of the city which forced any east-west traffic to go more to the north through Baghdad, which was a natural “bridge city.” Even at the time of Nebuchadrezzar II the Great and the Second Babylonian Empire, the site of Baghdad was used for transportation purposes. Very early a pontoon bridge was built at Baghdad over the Tigris. From Baghdad, the Diyala Valley allows the Zagros Mountains to the east to be reached easily. Baghdad became the main intersection between the east-west axis of the Silk Road leading to Antioch and Damascus, and the north-south axis linking the Persian Gulf, the Tigris, and the Black Sea. Finally, before 1258, Baghdad was about half-way between the two extreme poles of the Islamic economyworld, that is, to say Fes to the west and Delhi to the east, while being a little closer to the latter. Unfortunately, Baghdad had to experience what so often affects the center of an economy-world: in 1258, it was attacked by the Mongols from the Mongolo-American Corridor. They captured the city, sacked it, killed the caliph, and executed 800,000 of its inhabitants. The Mongols kept the control of the region for 152 years. In 1401, the Turkic-Mongol Timur, also called Tamerlane, in his turn, sacked the city at the head of the Turkic-Mongol Tatars. Then came the Turkmen, Altaic cousins of the Mongols, who also came

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from the Far East. They conquered Baghdad in 1410 and dominated it till 1534, when the Turkish Ottomans, other Altaics, captured the city and ruled the region for 368 years until 1917. The economy-world of Baghdad was the first in history to cover at the same time the two parts of the Great Corridor that lie on both sides of the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Sulaiman Range (in present-day Pakistan), from the Mediterranean Sea to the Ganges. In the Islamic economy-world, the great rival of Baghdad, the heir of Babylon, was Cairo, the heir of Memphis. If Baghdad was located at a place where the Silk Road leading to Antioch and Damascus easily crossed the Tigris, Cairo was situated at the strategic point where the southern Silk Road (passing through Qandahar, in present-day Afghanistan, Persepolis, Charax, founded by Alexander the Great at the common mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, and Petra) and the Spice Road crossed the Nile before reaching Alexandria. Cairo is located at the point where the Nile starts transforming itself into a delta. Before the arrival of the Arabs, two settlements had existed on the site of Cairo. The first one was named Babylon (like the Mesopotamian city). It was located on the left bank of the Nile River. It had been occupied by the Romans about AD 30. When the Arabs came, Babylon was inhabited by Christians. In front of Babylon, on the right bank, the Romans had built a military camp (“fossatum” in Latin). When the Arab and Ismaili Shiah dynasty of the Fatimids founded Cairo, they did it from that existing military camp that lay on the right bank. They called the new city Fustat, which is a deformation of fossatum. Fustat became Cairo, “al-Qahira,” in 972. When Baghdad declined, Cairo took over. In 1300, when Baghdad had a population of only 40,000 inhabitants, Cairo’s population was around 400,000 inhabitants, that is, ten times as much. Cairo’s population reached a maximum of 500,000 inhabitants about 1350. Despite that this maximum was about half the maximum Baghdad had attained around 930, about 1350, Cairo was the greatest city of Africa, Europe and Asia Minor. From this period, its population decreased for many reasons including the fact that, in 1497–1498, Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India broke the monopoly of the Spice Road and harmed cities such as Cairo and Alexandria. To the east and west of the heart of the Arabic Islam dominated by Baghdad and Cairo, other routes and other great cities of the Moslem economy-world constituted the outposts of the central urbexplosion. Less than a century after the beginning of the Hegira, Arabic Islam extended, to the west, up to Spain, and, to the east, up to Transoxiana-Sogdiana and the Sind region of India. In its outlying territories, the Arab Empire put in place numerous new cities, especially to the west.

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The Moorish Outpost At the period Islam started expanding, North Africa and Spain had, to a large extent, already been Christian lands for a few centuries. In 395, when the Roman Empire was split between the East and the West, and 237 years before the death of Muhammad, the most Christianized regions of the world were Crete, Cyprus, Anatolia, Armenia, the Nile delta, and Numidia (present-day Tunisia and the eastern part of Algeria). Less than a century after the beginning of the Hegira, Islam had overwhelmed the major part of Armenia, the Nile delta and Numidia; it had penetrated into the territories of Anatolia and Cyprus, and it had launched numerous offensives, in 669, 674, and 717, in the direction of Constantinople. Numidia was captured from the Byzantine Empire in 698, but its conquest had begun in 670 with the founding of Kairouan by the Umayyads. Kairouan was founded on the site of the Byzantine fortress of Kamouinia. Kairouan lies in the interior of modern Tunisia, on the Low Steppes, a semi-arid alluvial plain southeast of the Central Tell. The strategic interest of Kairouan came from the fact that it was located between the mountains situated to the northwest and the Sebkha salted expanses separating the mountains from the Mediterranean Sea. The Arab invaders chose the site because it was far enough from the coast where the Byzantines dominated and close enough to the mountains to curb the Berber tribes of the region. The choice made by the Arab invaders was clever, and the rest of present-day Tunisia was conquered in 698. As for Kairouan, it became the prestigious capital of the Aghlabids, a major theological center of Islam and one of its holy cities. West of Numidia, Islam had to face not the Byzantine Empire, but instead partially Christianized Berber kingdoms. Those kingdoms had outlived the invasion of the Vandals who had come through Spain and were ultimately vanquished by the Byzantines in 533. The Arabs occupied present-day Algeria in 700 and conquered Berber Morocco in 708. The Arab conquest gave a new life to the urbanization of that region, which had been rather urbanized at the time of the Romans and of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana, whose capital was Tingis (Tangier), but whose urban system had almost collapsed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It is estimated that about half the present cities of the Maghrib have been founded by the Arabs, while the corresponding proportion in the Near East is just 10%. Since the Arab conquest, Morocco has had four capitals: in the order, Fes, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat. Fes is the oldest Muslim city of Morocco. It was founded in 789 on both sides of the Sebu River, which runs towards the Atlantic Ocean, at the crossroads of two caravan routes, one going from

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the Mediterranean Sea to the Tafilalet region of the Sahara Desert, and the other going from Rabat on the Atlantic to Algiers and Central Maghrib. Fes was the capital of Morocco for about 500 years, much longer than Marrakech. Very early Fes attained fame as a commercial place, a religious center, and an intellectual city. It contained the Qarawiyin Mosque, the oldest in North Africa and the most prestigious in Morocco. The Qarawiyin Mosque’s university (called “Medersa”) was founded by a rich and pious woman in 857, long before any European university. Since the 10th century, the library of the university has been most famous. The Qarawiyin Medersa and the al-Azhar Medersa of Cairo were the two most prestigious universities of the Moslem world. Fes was the largest Moroccan city around 1200. Its population, at that time, was of 200,000 inhabitants. It is clear that the Arab conquest spared Maghrib the decline the rest of the former Western Roman Empire experienced at the same period. The conquest of Spain by the Arabs10 between 711 and 714 was made from Morocco through the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Guadalete River and the Guadalquivir, which is one of the three most important rivers of the Iberian Peninsula, along with the Tagus (Lisbon’s river) and the Ebro (the river of Zaragoza). The Guadalquivir River runs towards the Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar and Morocco. At the arrival of the Arabs, its two main cities, Seville (downstream) and Córdoba (upstream), were important Christian cities. It can be said that Seville was never founded. In fact, its location on the Guadalquivir River and the richness of its soil are such that, even in the Paleolithic period, long before the appearance of the first cities, Seville’s area was populated. About 1000 BC, a city called Tartessus already existed at Seville’s location. It lived from trade, agriculture, stock raising and mining (copper, gold and silver). Tartessus was succeeded by an Iberian city called Hispalis. Iberians, like the Basques and the Etruscans, were not IndoEuropeans. They could have originated from Africa and be Afrasian cousins of the Berbers. Then came from Gaul the Indo-European Celts who merged with the Iberians to form the Celtiberians. Around 60 BC, Caesar conquered Hispalis, which became Seville. Thereafter came the Vandals who gave their name to Andalusia (or Vandalusia). The Arab conquest of Seville caused first a decrease in its population, but, after a while, the city went through a strong growth, its population passing from 40,000 to about 150,000 inhabitants between 900 and 1200.

10.

The Visigoth forces were routed by the Arabs in 711 in a battle on the Guadalete River, which runs towards Cádiz. Córdoba and Malaga fell in 711, Sevilla in 712, and Valencia, Gerona, Zaragoza, and Lugo in 714. Barcino (Barcelona) fell in 713, but was regained by the Christians in 801.

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Founded by the Phoenicians, occupied by the Carthaginians around 230 BC, conquered by the Romans in 152 BC, invaded by the Vandals in AD 476, taken by the Byzantines in 554, integrated into the Visigoth kingdom11 in 572, and captured by the Umayyads in 711, Córdoba had an even more happy destiny than Seville under Islam. As the latter, it lay at a very good location, in a plain particularly fertile and favorable to the cultivation of cereals and olives. Chased from Damascus and from the heart of Islam by the Abbasids, the Umayyads found refuge in Córdoba, and they made it a powerful emirate in 756. In 929, they even dared to set it up as a caliphate that competed with that of Baghdad. In the year 1000, Córdoba had a population of 450,000 inhabitants. It was the largest city of Europe after Constantinople, Seville being the third one with only 100,000 inhabitants. Córdoba was the city of Averroës, who was born in 1126 and died at Marrakech in 1198. Islam never occupied the entire territory of the Iberian Peninsula. To the north, the Basque Country and the kingdom of Asturias, founded in the mountains by Pelago and Visigoth refugees, held out the Umayyads, the Arabs who occupied the larger part of the peninsula, in 717. Thereafter, their successors went from one retreat to another till the ultimate withdrawal from Grenada in 1492. Despite that, the Moslem period of the history of the Iberian Peninsula was radiant. Around 1000, the Moslem Spain was richer, more refined, more developed, and more urbanized than Christian Europe. It is estimated that, at that time, it counted for between thirty and forty percent of the whole European population living in cities of 20,000 inhabitants or more, while its population represented just between nineteen and twentyfive percent of the population of Europe out of Russia. If we consider the cities with 2,000 inhabitants and more, the urbanization rate of Moslem Spain was around fifteen to seventeen percent, when the corresponding rate for Europe out of Russia was just eleven to thirteen percent. To the 150,000 inhabitants of Córdoba and the 100,000 inhabitants of Seville, Christian Europe could then only oppose the 50,000 inhabitants of Venice and the 20,000 or 25,000 inhabitants of Paris and London. These data and the fact that Córdoba was set up as a caliphate rivaling that of Baghdad can wrongly suggest that the Moorish urbexplosion covering both Morocco and Moslem Spain was in a position to aspire to become the heart of the Arab economy-world. In 1000, the population of Baghdad was declining. It was getting further and further from one million inhabitants, and was rather around 200,000 inhabitants. So Córdoba was for a moment the largest Moslem city of the world. But that did not last because Cairo was 11.

The Roman Corduba had been the capital of the Baetia province. Under the Visigoths, it became Kordhoba and the religious center of the Christian Visigoth kingdom (Toledo was the political capital of the Visigoth kingdom).

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rising, and it overtook Córdoba around 1150. Geography limited the aspirations of Córdoba. In order to triumph, it would have to extend its domination to Gaul. Not only it did not, but it almost never stopped retreating after the victory of Pelago over the Moslems in 718. Worse, in 1031, Córdoba’s caliphate disappeared as a consequence of a civil war, and disunity prevailed among the various Moslem “taifas” (principalities) of Spain. Córdoba was only a particularly shining gem of one of the most illustrious peripheral urbexplosions of history. Geography precluded its being more than that. That urbexplosion spread to the north, but it did also to the south. Marrakech gave its name to Morocco, but it has never been as populated as Fes or Córdoba, despite that it reached 150,000 inhabitants at its peak. Nevertheless, it became famous as the capital of two important Berber dynasties that reigned over both Morocco and Spain: the Almoravids and the Almohads. It is from Marrakech that the Almoravids launched their conquest of Morocco. The main university of Marrakech, the Ben Yussef Medersa, was at some point (17th–18th centuries) the most prestigious Koranic university of Maghrib. Marrakech lies at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, not far from the Sahara, in the center of the fertile Haouz Plain, south of the Tensift River that runs towards the Atlantic, and at the crossroads of two important caravan routes: the Salt Road that went from Agadir on the Atlantic and Marrakech down to Timbuktu in Southern Sahara through the salt marshes of Teghaza, at the border of present-day Mauritania and Algeria, and of Taoudenni in present Northern Mali, and the Gold Road where transited in the direction of the Mediterranean Sea the gold from ancient Ghana (in present-day Mauritania), Begho (at the border of present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast), Bambouk (close to the Senegal River), Bourem (on the Niger River), and Lobi (on the Volta River). Caravans were not transporting only salt and gold. From the south also came ambergris, gum arabic, oryx skins used for making shields, leopard and fennec skins, as well as slaves, while, from the north, arrived luxury goods, jewels, arms, fabrics, kitchen utensils, pottery, clothes, knifes, and mirrors.12 Only one of the four successive capitals of Moslem Morocco was a port: Rabat, the present capital of Morocco, located at the mouth of the Bou Regreg River (or Oued) on the Atlantic Coast. Rabat was founded in 1150 as a military base for the expeditions to Andalusia. However, before the advent of Islam, Morocco had had another maritime capital: the Atlantic port of Tingris, today Tangier, capital of the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana. One of the most famous sons of Tangier was Ibn Battutah, who lived between 1304 and 1377 and explored the world of his time from Morocco to China via 12.

Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours (Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2001), 73. See also: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Histoire des villes d’Afrique noire, des origines à la colonisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).

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Egypt, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, Asia Minor, Crimea, Arabia, India, Ceylon, Sumatra, the Sahara, and the region of Timbuktu. In all, he traveled about 120,000 kilometers, that is, three times the Earth’s circumference. Had his limitless curiosity led him to the west instead of the east, since the Atlantic currents that run along the Moroccan coast lead to the Caribbean Sea, he could have discovered America more than a century before Christopher Columbus. That continent would then have been Islamized.

South of the Sahara Thanks to the camel, Islam extended its influence south of the Sahara, which became a kind of sandy sea crossed by innumerable caravan routes. The southern “ports” of the interior sea were named Gao, Gober, Djenné, Kano, Kazargamu, Timbuktu, and Zaria. Those cities developed between the southern limit of camel transportation and the northern limit of the zone infested with the tsetse fly, which transmits sleeping sickness in humans and a similar disease called nagana in domestic animals. Timbuktu is located about twenty kilometers north of the Niger River, where it had a port called Kabara. Two important caravan routes converged on Timbuktu: one coming from Agadir in Morocco, the other from present-day Algeria. The main products transiting on those routes were salt from Taoudenni, clothes, cereals, and horses from the north, as well as gold from Begho and slaves originating from the south. At Timbuktu, met three of the five great racial groups of Africa: the Afrasians, the Nilo-Saharians, and the Nigero-Congolese. Among the Afrasians were the Moors, the Kabyles, and the Touaregs, who share together a common Berber origin, and the Arabs of Semitic origin. The Nilo-Saharians were represented by the Fulani. The Nigero-Congolese were the majority in Timbuktu, and they were represented by the Bambara and their cousins. The fourth racial group of Africa was not present at Timbuktu; it included the Pygmies of Equatorial Africa and the Hottentots-Khoisans from Sub-Equatorial Africa. Finally, in Madagascar, a fifth racial group existed, besides of the Bantu of Nigero-Congolese origin: the Austronesians originating from Indonesia called the Merina (also named Hova). The study of the diffusion of urbanization in Africa reveals a spatial regularity which transcends the distribution of those racial groups. All indicates that urbanization spread through Africa from the Great Corridor, from north to south, and from east to west. Along the Nile axis, it diffused from the delta towards the region of Thebes, then towards the kingdom of Kush (in Nubia, in present-day northern Sudan) and the kingdom of Aksum in Abyssinia-Ethiopia. From east to west, urbanization also started from Egypt, and, thanks most of the time to the Phoenicians, and, later, the Greeks, it

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reached Libya, Numidia, and the rest of Maghrib. In West Africa, the oldest signs of urbanization originate from the Songhai civilization, which probably built cities a little before this era, and whose capital was Djenné (in present-day Mali). More to the west, the kingdom of Ghana, “the land of gold” situated in the southeastern part of present-day Mauritania, probably urbanized around 500 or 600; its capital was the city of Kumbi. Two regions located right to the south of the kingdom of Ghana were, with another region situated in Sudan, the greatest providers of gold of all Africa, which, very early, fed the Trans-Saharan trade. To the south of those regions, traces of urbanization are also found, but there, the main diffusion phenomenon was related not to urbanization, but to the migrations of the Bantu population, which, contrary to urbanization, went from west to east. Among the main cradles of humankind, we have mentioned up to here the cradle of the Indo-Europeans, a region probably located to the north of Caucasus, the cradle of the Finns and Hungarians situated in the Ural region, and the cradle of the Mongoloid populations in the Altai region. There is a fourth important cradle, located in Africa, more precisely in presentday Sudan, probably in the greater area of Khartoum, from which originate both the Afrasians, also called Afro-Asians, and the Nilo-Saharans. Afrasians divided into two major families: the North-Eritreans, who gave birth to the ancient Egyptians, the Semites, and the Berbers, and the South-Eritreans, who gave birth to the Chadians who migrated towards Lake Chad, and the Kushites who settled in the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and the Ethiopian Massif. It seems that the region of origin of the Afrasians was located, around 15,000 BC, between the mountains of the Red Sea and the Ethiopian Plateau, in an area situated south of Khartoum, in Sudan.13 As for the region of origin of the Nilo-Saharans, it is likely to have been also located, around 12,000 BC, in the central region of present-day Sudan. The Nilo-Saharan and Kushite stockbreeders scattered from Sudan and the Ethiopian Massif towards the west (Fulani and Kanuri) and the south (Tutsi and Masai). Distinguishing between those breeders those whose origin is Nilo-Saharan and those whose origin is Kushite is not always easy. The Fulani and the Kanuri have clearly a Nilo-Saharan (or West-Nilotic) origin, while the Masai have a Kushite (or East-Nilotic) origin.14 But in the case of the Tutsi, things are much more complicated because they have adopted the Bantu language of their neighbors and, consequently, their linguistic origin

13. 14.

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 21, 115, and Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Rwanda, de la Préhistoire à nos jours (Paris : Bartillat, 1997).

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cannot be determined. Nilo-Saharan languages such as Acholi, Alur, Lango, Luo, Karamojong, Nandi, and Suk are spoken in Uganda, but essentially in the northern and eastern parts of that country, whereas, in southern and western Uganda, in Rwanda, in Burundi, and in eastern Congo, live Hima and Tutsi populations whose morphotypical characteristics are clearly Nilo-Saharan, but whose language is Bantu. In all likelihood, their origin is West-Nilotic, but they have been assimilated by the much more numerous surrounding Bantu populations. Finally, the fifth cradle, that of the Nigero-Congolese or Black WestAfricans, who constitute the vast majority of the Sub-Saharan population, is not precisely known. However, the region of origin of the Nigero-Congolese sub-group called the Bantu, who are mainly farmers, is situated in the region of the Benue River, a tributary of the Niger River, and of the Mount Cameroon Massif, at the present border of Nigeria and Cameroon. The expansion of the Bantu populations, which began around 3000 BC, constitutes one of the great phenomena of world’s history.15 The Bantu farmers from West Africa’s inland savanna progressively invaded most of the part of Sub-Saharan Africa located to the southeast of Niger River. On their way, they went from their original dry savanna to the wetter coastal forest of the Gulf of Guinea. They spread into the Congo Basin’s equatorial forest zone and, by soon after 1000 BC, they entered the more open and dry country of East Africa’s Rift Valley and Great Lakes. There they encountered a melting pot of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan farmers and herders growing millet and sorghum, and raising livestock in drier areas, along with the Pygmy hunter-gatherers of Equatorial Africa, the Hottentot breeders, and the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of Sub-Equatorial Africa (Hottentots and Khoisans belong to the same racial group). It must be noted that Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan breeders occupied East Africa at least 1,500 years before the Bantu farmers came from West Africa.16 Thanks to their wet-climate crops such as yams inherited from the West African zones they had crossed, the Bantu were able to farm in wet areas of East Africa unsuitable for all those previous occupants. The Bantu acquired millet and sorghum as well as new cattle from their neighbors. Moreover, they acquired from them breeding notions and, especially, the technique to use iron for making tools. The Bantu then passed directly from the Age of Stone to the Age of Iron without passing through the Age of Copper or the Age of Bronze (in Africa, only Egypt, Nubia-Kush, and West Sahara went 15.

16.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 392–401, and Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Rwanda, de la Préhistoire à nos jours, op. cit., 42–45. Bernard Lugan, Atlas historique de l’Afrique des origines à nos jours, op. cit., 41.

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through the Age of Copper and the Age of Bronze).17 By the last centuries BC the advancing Bantu had reached the East African coast. The Bantu invasion went further south. The southernmost Bantu people, the Xhosa, stopped at the Fish River, at the present border between Namibia and South Africa. Beyond that river, the climate became too seasonal and too cold for the crops the Bantu were used to. It seems that all the Bantu languages spoken in East, Central, and Austral Africa stem from Kinyarwanda and Kirundi spoken in Rwanda and Burundi.18 South of the Niger River, urbanization seems to have followed the advance of the population of the Bantu farmers. In present-day Nigeria, a very important urban system appeared at about the same time Islam was born: that of the Yoruba States. The best known of those states is the kingdom of Benin, whose most ancient city seems to have been Ife, which, by AD 850, was already a large city producing a substantial amount of iron and glass, and high-quality works of art. The city that ended up dominating the Yoruba urban system is the city of Benin, whose population reached about 65,000 people by 1500. More to the south, at the mouth of the Congo River, another Bantu urban system formed some centuries later, that of the kingdom of Congo, which was one of the most highly centralized and complex states in Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, the empire’s economy was monetary and the king of Congo had absolute control over the cowrie shell currency. The kingdom’s capital, M’banza Congo, had a population of some 50,000 when the Portuguese discovered the city of in 1484. Much more to the south, in the region of the Zambezi River, a Bantu kingdom was created around the end of the twelfth century, that of Monomotapa. That relatively urbanized kingdom became very rich thanks to the exploitation of exceptional gold mines. It is estimated that the kingdom of Monomotapa and the three kingdoms stemming from it, including the kingdom of Togwa, whose capital probably was the city of Great Zimbabwe, produced, between 1500 and 1850, as much gold as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia combined.19 The city of Great Zimbabwe was built between the 11th and the 15th centuries. At its acme, around 1400, its population reached some 25,000 people. The urbanization of Sub-Saharan Africa bears some particular characteristics. First, like that of the Andes, it was not associated with writing or the wheel. On the other hand, Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban buildings were rarely permanent. Great Zimbabwe and the city of Kumbi, the capital of the kingdom of Ghana, which were built in stones, constituted an exception. Finally, it seems 17. 18. 19.

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 45. Rob Summers, Zimbabwe : A Rhodesian Mystery (Johannesburg and New York: Nelson, 1963).

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that the various Sub-Saharan urban systems did not trade much with each other, even if international trade succeeded to reach them through the Sahara or the oceans. Very early, the kingdom of Congo and the Yoruba States established commercial relations with the Portuguese. However, those relations rapidly became unhealthy because they were almost exclusively focused on slave trade. It is estimated that, between 1500 and 1900, 18 million African slaves were sold: 11 million of them were shipped to the Western markets, the rest being sent to the markets of the Indian Ocean and the Arab countries. As for the kingdom of Monomotapa, its gold exports attracted Portuguese traders as early as 1500. They were not the first ones to be attracted by the gold of that region. Actually, porcelain from China and Persian pottery have been found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. It is possible, though not certain, that the commercial influence of Islam reached that region.

The Eastern Outposts To the east of the Arab economy-world, Islam, that Semitic religion, faced the Indo-European religious current, first under the form of MazdeanismZoroastrianism, then under the form of Buddhism and finally under the form of Hinduism. Isfahan was the largest Moslem city of Iran at that time, and it became the symbol of the triumph of Islam over Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, that is, Mazdeanism as reformed by Zarathushtra (also named Zoroaster) around 600 BC. Isfahan welcomed one of the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of Islam, Avicenna. A Persian, Avicenna was born in present-day Uzbekistan in 980. He spent the last years of his life in Isfahan where he died in 1037. In the evolution of urbexplosions and economy-worlds, it is normal for peripheries to attempt freeing themselves from the domination of the center. The Moslem economy-world was no exception to that rule. In Iran, this led to the emergence of distinct non-Arab dynasties, like the first great native dynasty that arose in Persia after the Arab conquest, the Samanids who acceded to power in 874. Moreover, Iran adopted Shiism, a minority form of Islam stemming from the tradition of Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad. While the Arabs and the Turks were mainly Sunni, the Persians became Shiite. Isfahan’s location is very central in Iran, about halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, and halfway between Shiraz to the south and Tehran to the north. Isfahan is an oasis situated at a relatively high altitude (1,590 meters above sea level) along the north bank of the Zayandeh River, which is a river that does not end at the sea but rather ends up vanishing in the Great Salt Desert (called Dashte Kavir Desert). At Isfahan, a bridge allowed travelers of the north-south route linking Tehran and Shiraz to cross the Zayandeh River. It must be noted that the Silk Road leading to Antioch

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passed through Samarkand and Tehran, whereas the Silk Road leading to Charax, Petra, and Alexandria passed through Qandahar and Shiraz. Thus, the strategic axis Tehran-Isfahan-Shiraz was connecting those two main Silk Roads. It is the Umayyad dynasty which opted for expanding Islam both to the northeast, towards the central axis of the Asian Corridor following the Silk Road, and to the east, following the central axis of the Great Corridor up to the Sind region of India. The first movement put Islam in contact with Buddhism, and led to taking control of Samarkand and its region, Transoxiana (or Sogdiana). Like Isfahan, Samarkand is built in an oasis, that of Zeravchan, to the south of the Peski Kyzylkum Desert. That oasis is crossed by a tributary of the Amo-Darya River, which takes its source in the Pamirs Massif of Tajikistan and flows to the Aral Sea. Samarkand is at least 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest cities in Central Asia.20 It probably started as the capital of the old kingdom of Sogdiana. The city was conquered by the Persians around 543 BC and by Alexander the Great in 329 BC. It constituted one of the most important crossroads of the Silk Road. Led to Samarkand the two most northern routes of the Silk Road in Northern China (the caravan summer Silk Road, also called route of the steppes, very much to the north, and the route of the northern part of the Tarim Basin located a little to the south of the first one), and the two branches of the Silk Road going respectively, to the east, towards Tehran and, to the south, towards Bactra, Kabul, and the Ganges River. The city of Samarkand, which was captured by Islam and the Arabs in AD 712, became later the capital of the Turko-Mongol Timur (also called Tamerlane) and the Second Mongol Empire. It constitutes one of the most fascinating points of the world since it was dominated alternately by the Persian, Greek, Greco-Persian, Greco-Buddhist, Buddhisto-Moslem (under the first Mongol Empire), Mongol, Turkish, Moslem, Russo-Moslem, and Sovieto-Moslem cultures. The movement of the Umayyads towards the northeast ended with the Moslem victory of Talas against the Chinese Empire and the capture of Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 751. The Moslem troops found it preferable to stop there. The thrust of the Umayyads towards the Asian Corridor also led, more to the south, to the seizure of Kabul and the Khyber Pass the Aryans, coming from present-day Iran, had used in 1750 BC to conquer India. Like Samarkand, Kabul was once controlled by the Greeks; Alexander the Great probably went there. A cultural difference between Samarkand and Kabul comes from the fact that, despite the large number of foreign influences 20.

Samarkand’s ancient history dates from before the first recorded mention in 329 BC when, known as Maracanda, it was captured by Alexander the Great.

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Samarkand has experienced, it never was submitted to a Hindu influence, whereas it seems that a Hindu temple has been discovered in Kabul, as well as two Buddhist monasteries. As for the second movement launched by the Umayyads, still more to the south, within the Great Corridor, it led, from 710 to 713, to the conquest of the whole right bank of the Indus River as well as of the Hindu Sind region. The long struggle between Islam and Hinduism started there. The AraboMoslem expansion did not go any further. The limits of the Arab Islam were Spain and Morocco to the west, and Transoxiana and Sind to the east. However, the Moslem expansion revived later in circumstances which almost inflicted on Christianity and Hinduism the fate reserved to MazdeanismZoroastrianism. That second phase was caused by the irresistible attraction exerted on the Altaic peoples by the Great Corridor. That attraction, which killed the Western Roman Empire, came close to have the same effect on Islam, but instead it gave it a new expansion.

s ISLAM RE-LAUNCHED BY THE TURKO-MONGOL INVASIONS After the disruption of the Eurasian Empire of Attila in 453, the defeat of the Hunas branch of the Ephthalite Huns (also called White Huns) by Yasodharman and the Gupta rulers in India in 530, and the reconstitution of a united China in 589, the Altaic tribes seemed for a while to have renounced conquering the Great and Asian corridors they had invaded from the fourth to the sixth centuries. However, the upholding of the wealth of the Constantinople urbexplosion, the rise of the Arab economy-world, and the economic development of India and of the Chinese Empire re-created after some time a strong tension between the centers of wealth accumulation and the peripheral nomadic tribes from the Mongolo-American Corridor. One man cleverly exploited the explosive potential of that situation: Genghis Khan. Elected Khan of the Mongols in 1196 and Supreme Khan of all the Mongol tribes in 1206, Genghis Khan built, between those dates and his death in 1227, an incredible empire, four times as large as the one built by Alexander the Great, extending from the China Sea to the Caspian Sea and Ural, and from Hindu Kush (Afghanistan) to Siberia. That immense empire, whose capital was Karakorum in Mongolia, was the product of the MongoloAmerican Corridor, whose Asian section corresponds to the “Steppe Corridor” passing, from east to west, by the “Door of Dzungaria” linking Kazakhstan and the Chinese Xinjiang province, and by the Kirghiz Steppe and the Chu River Basin. The Steppe Corridor actually constituted the spine of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire that his successors extended even more. The route followed by those successors of Genghis Khan coincides almost exactly with the central axis of the Mongolo-American Corridor.

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That course so favorable to the movements of hordes of horsemen also bore many morphological advantages when, seven centuries later, the era of railroads came, as illustrated by the Trans-Siberian. Three times in the history of Eurasia, the Mongolo-American Corridor based on nomadism and the terrestrial mobility attempted to supplant the Great Corridor, characterized by a settled way of life, wealth accumulation, and the fluvial and maritime mobility: a first time at the end of the fourth century with the Huns, who failed, but provoked the fall of the Western Roman Empire; a second time during the thirteenth century with the Mongols, who succeeded for some centuries to create and maintain an immense empire, and who were an indirect cause of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire; and a third time, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Mongolo-American Corridor took over the world leadership. In 1245, Genghis Khan’s successors established their domination over Russia and, in 1255, over Iran. In 1258, they destroyed Baghdad. Between 1211 and 1280, they conquered all of China. In 1294, at the death of Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and emperor of China, the Mongol territories dominated by Genghis Khan’s descendants included present-day China, Mongolia, the major part of Russia, Iran, Mesopotamia, and a part of Anatolia. They included the Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea and almost all of the Black Sea, and they were bordered by the China Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean Sea. While the empire of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire spread over 4,800 kilometers from east to west, the Mongol Empire did over twice as much, over 9,600 kilometers. That empire controlled almost all the Silk Road, which was unprecedented and never happened again. From 1260 to 1368, the Pax mongolica allowed the terrestrial trade between Orient and Occident to reach its peak. At that period, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, reigned over Iran and Iraq, while another Mongol dynasty, the Yuans, ruled over China. Islam had then to face its greatest threat. It lost Iran, Baghdad, Mesopotamia, and a large part of Anatolia. The Mongols were even at the door of Arabia. That setback had been preceded by a considerable weakening of the power of the Arabs over the Moslem economy-world. Many non-Arab dynasties had replaced the Arab ones. In Morocco and Spain, the Berber Almoravids had replaced the Arab Fatimids in 1069, then the Berber Almohads and Marinids had succeeded them. In Tunisia, the Berber Zirids had replaced the Arab Fatimids in 972, and then the Berber Hafsids had replaced the Berbero-Moroccan Almohads in 1236. In Iran, the Iranian Samanids of Indo-European origin had partly replaced the Arab Abbassids in 874, and then, between 977 and 983, the Iranian Buyids-Buwayhids of Indo-European origin drove from power both the Iranian Samanids and the Arab Abbassids. Moreover, to the northeast of Iran, three Moslem Turkish kingdoms had been

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constituted: the kingdom of the Ghaznavids, founded in 962 in the presentday northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan and Afghanistan, that of the Qarakhanids, founded at the same epoch in Transoxiana (present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), and that of the Seljuq Turks. Between 1035 and 1040, the Seljuqs chased the Ghaznavids from Khorasan; then, between 1038 and 1063, they took control of the rest of Iran before capturing Baghdad in 1055 and, later, Asia Minor. However, when the time of the Mongol invasions came, the Seljuqs were left only with the Rum Sultanate, in Anatolia. In Afghanistan, they had been supplanted by the Afghan dynasty of the Ghurids (also called Rhurids) of Indo-European origin. In 1192, when the Afghan Ghurid Muhammad Ghuri, sultan of Ghazna, defeated the Hindu Rajputs at the battles of Taraori, the Afghan Ghurids were the ones who introduced Islam up to the Ganges, in the hearth of India. Later, in 1206, Aybak, a slave of the Ghurids become general, founded the Sultanate of Delhi. In 1290, the sultanate passed under the control of the Turkish dynasty of the Khaljis, which made it the first power of India, a power that reached its acme under the Mughal dynasty. In 1320, to the Turkish Khaljis succeeded the Turkish Tughluq who reigned till 1413. It is, to a large extent, the integration to the Moslem world of the Altaic tribes, and, secondarily, of Afghan tribes that saved Islam and relaunched it. The Turks were cousins of Genghis Khan’s Mongols. They had converted to Islam when they were hired as mercenaries by the Abbassids and, later, the Samanids of Iran. When the Mongols invaded their dominions, of course the Turks and especially the Seljuq Turks opposed them, but at the end they accepted to become their vassals. After a while, Genghis Khan’s descendants divided in two groups. Those who inherited China and Tibet became Confucians, Taoists or Buddhists, while those who received khanates or principalities located to the west of China and Tibet did as their Turkish cousins had done: they converted to Islam, often under the influence of their Turkish cousins. This is how, instead of retreating, the Moslem influence extended to new territories such as Russia, where Islam had not yet penetrated. Other Altaics followed the example of the Seljuq Turks and the Mongols: among them, the Turkmens, the Tatars, the Uzbeks, and the Ottoman Turks. Between 1370 and 1405, the Turkic-Mongol Timur Lenk, also named Tamerlane, created the Second Mongol Empire whose capital was Samarkand. Less vast than the First Mongol Empire, it nonetheless included Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Upper Indus Valley, as well as Transoxiana. It fell to the Turkish dynasty of the Mughals, and, more precisely, to Babar, descendant of Timur Lenk (who had destroyed Delhi in 1398–1399) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother, and to his descendants Akbar and Aurangzeb to bring to its climax the Moslem control of the whole Indian section of the Great Corridor. They did it from 1526, thanks to the battle of

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Panipat won by Babar against the Afghan dynasty of the Lodis, which had taken control of the Delhi Sultanate in 1451. In the aftermath of that battle, Babar captured Delhi, Agra and the whole Sultanate of Delhi, whose control over all northern India he reestablished (see Map 10).

Ind

una

Yam

us

Lahore

Delhi Agra

Chambal

Gang

es

Surat

Krishna

Vijayanagar

220 km

Map 10 The Great Ebb West in the Indian Section of the Great Corridor

A large number of cities bear witness to the progression of Islam towards the east owing to the rallying to Islam of numerous Altaic tribes. Of course, there are Samarkand and Kabul, but there is also, in the Upper Indus Valley, Lahore, with its long Buddhist past, which became Moslem in 1152,

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following its conquest by the Turkish dynasty of the Ghaznavids. More to the east, Delhi, captured by Islam as early as 1192, is the very symbol of that Moslem thrust. Located on the Yamuna River, the main tributary of the Ganges, in the middle of the rich Hindustan Plain, Delhi lay on the Indian Silk Road, which linked Changan-Xi’an, the Chinese Straight Road, the Ganges Valley, the Yamuna Valley, the Indian city of Mathura, the Upper Indus Basin and the city of Taxila (in present-day Pakistan) (see Map 5). Because of its strategic situation on that road, Delhi was the main soldered joint between the Great and Asian corridors (see Maps 5 and 8). That being said, the Sultanate’s trade followed mainly the Great Corridor towards Mesopotamia and Persia, where Delhi exported sugar, textiles from Bengal, shawls from Kashmir, and carpets from Lahore. The historical links between Persia and India are symbolized by the Taj Mahal, that Indian masterpiece of Persian style built by a Mughal emperor of Turkish origin. The Taj Mahal is located in Agra, which was the capital of the Delhi Sultanate from 1526 to 1638. To the southwest of Delhi and Agra lies Ahmadabad, east of the mouth of the Indus River, on the Sabarmati River, which flows in the plain of Gujarat before reaching the Gulf of Khambhat and the Arabian Sea. The Sabarmati River stems from the Aravalli Range, which also gives birth, to the northeast, to the Banas River, which runs towards the Chambal River, which leads to the Yamuna and the Ganges rivers flowing towards the Bay of Bengal. Controlling Ahmadabad on the Sabarmati, and Delhi and Agra on the Yamuna was tantamount to controlling one of the most natural and strategic fluvial and terrestrial links between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Ahmadabad, which was a Hindu city, was captured by the Moslem Mughals in 1298 and integrated into the Delhi Sultanate. More to the south, Surat, which also belongs to the state of Gujarat, is located on the Tapi River that, like the Sabarmati, leads to the Gulf of Khambhat. Surat, which was integrated into the Sultanate of Delhi in 1306, is a natural port, and, from about 1600 to 1664, it was the richest city of the Mughal Empire, thanks to its commercial activities and to its production of cotton and silk. Its population was then about 125,000 inhabitants. Around 1650, Agra, Delhi, and Ahmadabad had 400,000 inhabitants each and even more. That was the epoch of the Golden Age of the Mughal Empire, a Golden Age that began in 1556 with the reign of Sultan Akbar and terminated in 1707 with the end of the reign of Sultan Aurangzeb. During that period, it is estimated that the per capita income of the Indians was superior to that of the French during Louis XIV’s reign. India was then probably the richest country on Earth. After having benefited to Constantinople, and then to Baghdad, the Great Ebb was making the fortune of the Delhi urbexplosion. For the first time in history, a topodynamic movement initiated in the section of the Great Corridor situated to the west of the Persian Gulf had continued

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towards the east beyond the Gulf. That happened, as we shall see, at a time when, to the west of the Gulf, the Great Ebb had already been replaced by a new westward movement launched by the discovery of America. The eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb went on up to China, and later Japan. During the seventeenth century, the pendulum clearly was in India. It is estimated that the population of India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh) was superior to that of China till about 1750. Around AD 50, according to Maddison, the population of India was 70 million, and that of China was only 40 million; in 1750, the Indian population had reached 153 million and the Chinese one 138 million. It must be said that the area of arable land in China represents only 56.6% of the area of arable land in India. Fifty percent of India’s territory is favorable to agriculture; the corresponding proportion in China is only ten percent.21 Contrary to what happened in Persia with Mazdeanism-Zoroastrianism, the coming of Islam to India did not toll the knell of Hinduism. In the same way that, around 1750 BC, at the time of the Aryan invasions, the Deccan, in southern India, had been the refuge of the Dravidians fleeing the invaders, in front of the Moslem invasion, Hinduism strategically withdrew to the south in the hope of being able to counterattack some day. The penetration of Islam followed the Asian Corridor towards the south. It reached the Krishna River, which stems from the Ghats Mountains that dominate the Malabar Coast and runs towards the Bay of Bengal. The Sultanate of the Bahmanids was established on the left bank of the river. In 1335, the Delhi Sultanate had even succeeded to extend its influence to the south of the Krishna River and, more, of the Kaviri River, leaving to Hinduism only the Tamil extreme south and the Malabar Coast. Like the Spanish Reconquista, the Hindu counterattack lasted for centuries. It was first based on the Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar, founded in 1366 to the south of the Krishna River, but also on the Rajput Confederation and the Hindu states of Orissa to the east and of the Tamil Pandya dynasty to the south. The empire of Vijayanagar was defeated in 1565 by the Muslim Sultanate of Bijapur that had formed to the north of Vijayanagar and that included Bombay and Goa. Later, the resistance to Islam was ensured, from 1646, by the formation of the Hindu Maratha Confederation, which, in 1674, constituted a state in the western part of Deccan. Around 1500, the city of Vijayanagar, whose name means the “city of victory,” had about 500,000 inhabitants, and it was probably the second largest city of the world after Peking-Beijing (Paris, the largest European city of that time, still had only between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants). If we except

21.

Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris : OECD, 1998), 20, 28.

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the Harappa civilization, which seems to have had almost no impact on the urbanization of modern India, the urbanization of the Indian sub-continent was late. Till AD 1000, India had very few cities. The fact that Vijayanagar reached half a million inhabitants in 1500 shows to what extent the Great Ebb was associated in India to a strong thrust of urbanization. Vijayanagar was defeated and disappeared with its empire in 1565. It was then razed to the ground. Today, its ruins are found in a simple village named Hampi in the Karnataka State. If Islam drove Hinduism into a corner, it also tightened the noose round a Christian Europe that was pinned to the west by the invasion of Spain in 711–714, to the southeast by the intrusion, in 1354, of the Ottoman Turks, and, to the east, by the invasion, in 1245, of Russia by the Mongols later converted to Islam. Actually, the blossoming of Islam linked to the Altaic invaders attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor also introduced Russia into the world dominated by the Moslem powers. That period of the Russian history is symbolized by the city of SaraiBerke, the capital of the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde, also known as the kingdom of Qipchak or Kipchak (see Map 9). Sarai-Berke was founded about 1260 to replace Sarai-Batu, created in 1254, which had briefly replaced Itil as the capital of the Golden Horde founded in 1251 by the Mongol chief Batu Khan, son of Genghis Khan’s son Jutchti and nephew of Genghis Khan’s third son, the Great Khan Ogadai who, with Batu Khan, established the rule of the Mongols over Russia from 1245. Sarai-Berke occupied a very strategic location on the Volga River in the area where the Don River, which leads to the Black Sea, gets very close to the Volga, which runs towards the Caspian Sea. Today, Tsaritsyne, long known as Stalingrad and later Volgograd, is its real heir due to its great proximity. Four main commercial routes originated from Sarai-Berke: the first, the Road of the Steppes (or Silk Summer Caravan Road) coming from Samarkand and Bukhara (Uzbekistan) along the Volga; the second one also along the Volga, towards Kazan and Moscow; the third, the road from the south coming from Baghdad, Tabriz, and Tbilisi through the Daria Pass, also called the Iron Doors; and, finally, the road of the west leading through the Don River to Tana (Azov) on the Black Sea and, through the Dnieper River, to Kiev, Russia’s cradle. At their climax, under the reign of Khan Öz Beg, Sarai-Berke and the Golden Horde had extensive relations with Genoa and Venice who controlled the main ports of the Black Sea and Crimea, which belonged to the Golden Horde. Around 1350, the population of Sarai-Berke reached 120,000 inhabitants. Sarai-Berke was then the fourth largest European city after Paris (220,000 inhabitants), Constantinople (200,000 persons), and Granada (150,000 inhabitants).

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s THE NON-MILITARY PROGRESSION OF ISLAM IN THE ASIAN CORRIDOR Between the first and second Mongol Empires, from the thirteenth century, Islam infiltrated the Asian Corridor in a rather pacific way, and, owing to the Great Ebb, advanced towards the northeast by the continental Silk Road, as Buddhism had done before (see Map 11). Thus, it penetrated into China in the province of Xinjiang where still exists today an important Moslem population in the mist of which is found the Turkish people of the Uighurs that, after having been successively Manichaean, Buddhist, and Nestorian Christian, converted to Islam from the fourteenth century. Islam also entered, by the Great Corridor and the Indian Silk Road (see Map 11), into the Chinese province of Yunnan, passing through present-day Bangladesh. The famous eunuch navigator Zheng He, whose expeditions towards the west have been mentioned, came from a rich Moslem family of the Yunnan Province, which joins Burma-Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. Thanks to the Arab merchants, Islam also progressed to the south, by the maritime Silk Road, towards Indonesia, which thus became the greatest Moslem country of the world. That progression skipped an important step that is worth mentioning, that of Sri Lanka, the only part of the Indian world where Buddhism survived and remained dominant. Gautama, named Buddha, or the Enlighted, founded Buddhism in the region of Varanasi-Benares on the Ganges around 500 BC. For centuries, that religion flourished in India. However, conflicts with Hinduism emerged, and the struggle between the two religions stemming from the current of the Indo-European Vedas became so bitter that, around AD 700, Hinduism practically succeeded to eliminate Buddhism from the Indian sub-continent. Ceylon, presently Sri Lanka, which occupies a very strategic position on the maritime Silk Road, was an exception. Today, seventy percent of its population are Buddhist, while that percentage is inferior to one percent in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Sri Lanka preserved Buddhism when Hinduism pursued it; it kept it when the Moslem wave passed, and it remained faithful to it when, for 441 years, the country was submitted to Christian powers, Portugal, the Dutch United-Provinces, and then Great Britain. Islam did not find a favorable ground in Sri Lanka, but it took root more to the east in the Asian Corridor, in the Malay Peninsula, which was exposed, to a large extent, to the same influences as Sri Lanka, that is, successively, to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and later to European influences linked to the successive presence of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. Everything indicates that the development of the Malay Peninsula was mainly influenced by a topodynamic movement coming from the west within the Asian Corridor. That movement became more pronounced with the Great Ebb and the arrival of Arabo-Moslem influences, and, later, from 1511, of European influences.

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Samarkand Huang He

Lahore g Yan

Indus

Hangzhou

tze

Ga

ng

es

Calcutta

Xi Jian

Zayton g

Macao

Panaji-Goa Manila

Colombo Malacca

370

Jakarta

km

The Grand Canal of China Great Wall of China

Map 11 The Great Ebb in the Asian Corridor

From about AD 700, the Malacca region belonged to the Buddhist Indo-Malay Srivijaya Empire, ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, whose center was located on Sumatra Island. Around 1200, it passed under the domination of the Indonesian kingdom of Singhasari and later, around 1290, under the rule of the mainly Indonesian Hindu kingdom of Majapahit. Around 1403, Prince Parameswara from Sumatra Island founded the city and the kingdom of Malacca, which became, around 1430, the most important commercial center of Southeast Asia. Parameswara favored the Islamization of the region by converting, probably under the influence of the Indonesian Moslems from Sumatra Island.

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The maritime Silk Road passed by the Strait of Malacca; it constituted the shortest maritime route between China and India, as well as between Europe and the Far East. Chinese merchants have been present in the Strait of Malacca as soon as during the ninth century of this era, if not well before. In 1600, they still dominated the maritime trade in that Strait, though the presence of Indian traders had always been strong there, and that of the Arab merchants had been constant since at least the eighth century. The Portuguese, who, with Vasco de Gama, had opened up the maritime route between Europe and India, were the first Europeans to try taking control of the Strait of Malacca. As soon as in 1511, with Albuquerque, they took possession of the site of Malacca. The most ancient and stronger influences on the Malay Peninsula came from the west, even if China was closer to it than India. Today, about one third of the population of Malaysia is of Chinese origin. Despite that, almost all the religions of Malaysia come from the west. Islam, which is the religion of the majority, Hinduism, and Christianity come from the west, and the “Lesser Vehicle” Buddhism (also called Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism) found in Malaysia is the same as in Sri Lanka, and it comes directly from India without having gone through China (where prevail the Tibetan or “Greater Vehicle” Buddhism, also called the Mahayana Buddhism).22 Only Taoism comes from China, and its faithful represent a small minority in Malaysia. From a cultural point of view, the Indians have long been dominant: they introduced writing into Malaysia, and they also brought Hinduism and Buddhism at the beginning of this era. In Indonesia also, Hinduism and Buddhism preceded Islam. Those two religions probably arrived at Java in the fourth century of this era through the commercial exchanges between that region and India. For a long time, the western part of Indonesia was dominated by the Buddhist Srivijaya Empire, ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, which controlled trade. In the ninth century, even the Hindu kingdom of Mataram submitted to the Srivijaya Empire. It is around 1250 that Arab traders introduced Islam in northern Sumatra. From there, the Moslem religion progressively spread to the rest of Indonesia. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the commercial ports and the Moslem sultanates extended their hold over the whole Sumatra and Java Islands. Buddhism was practically eliminated, and Hinduism found its ultimate refuge in the island of Bali, to the east of Java.

22.

In the Lesser Vehicle tradition, salvation (nirvana) can only be achieved through becoming a monk, while, in the Greater Vehicle Buddhism, it can be reached by everyone, whether lay or monk.

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Islam even reached the Philippines, the only country, with Spain and Portugal, where Moslems did, freely or under constraint, convert en masse to another religion. That happened during the years that followed the creation, in 1564, of the Spanish colony of the Philippines, which made that country a region as Catholic as Indonesia is Moslem. It is during the sixteenth century that the eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb ceased to take the color of Islam to take that of the European influence. That began with the arrival of the Portuguese in Ceylon in 1505, then in India, at Goa, in 1510, and in Malacca, in 1511. A great historical figure marked that period: that of the Basque Jesuit saint Francis Xavier, the disciple of saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and himself a Basque. Between 1542 and his death, saint Francis Xavier founded missions at Goa in India, at Malacca in Malaysia, in the Moluccas Islands, in Japan, and in China. He died in China in 1552, being only 46 years old, and he was buried in Goa. The European influence was not limited only to the diffusion of Christianity. It took mainly the form of commercial and colonial conquests.23

s THE GREAT EBB IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE FAR EAST For a long time, the continental part of Southeast Asia has been called Indochina by the French. This expression is totally accurate to the extent that it clearly states that this region was submitted to the determining influences of both India and China. The populating of Indochina stemmed from China, as we already noted about the diffusion of the Chinese language from the north to the south. However, the cultural and economic development of that region was first marked by India, more than China. From that point of view, the topodynamic movements from west to east have, for a long time, prevailed over the north-south movements, as demonstrated by the evolution of urbanization (see Map 12). Burma or Myanmar, that no natural barrier separates from India, was settled very early, probably as early as Northern China, and urbanization also developed there at a very remote period. By the first century of our era a large city, Peikthano, existed which grew until the fourth century, when two other cities, Thayekhettaya and Halin, superceded it. Estimating the populations of these cities is uneasy. Their population density seems to have been rather low, but they were walled, which indicates a certain degree of sophistication. The main influence in Burma and in the whole Indochina, with the exception of what was to become, at a certain time, North Vietnam, was undoubtedly 23.

The first act of state-directed imperialism of modern European history may be the Portuguese marine attack of 1415 upon the fortified Moslem city of Ceuta (north of Morocco). That being said, European imperialism really developed after the discovery of America.

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that of India from the second century of this era. It seems that this was due to the fact that the Indian merchants who were in contact with the Western and Eastern Roman empires turned very early towards Indochina to find the spices, gold and precious woods demanded first by the Romans and the Byzantines, and later by the Arabs. Buddhism was established in Burma from the third century, and Indochina very decidedly entered India’s cultural and religious sphere of influence. In 825, the city of Pegu became the capital of the Buddhist kingdom of Mon and later, in 1387, that of the Buddhist kingdom of Pegu.

Huang H

e

Kyoto Osaka

g Yan

Ningbo

tze Xi Jiang

CantonGuangzhou

Pegu-Bago

Angkor

225 km

Map 12 The Great Ebb in Southeast Asia and the Far East

Tokyo Nara

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One of the most dazzling examples of the Indian influence in Indochina is probably the city of Angkor. Founded in the ninth century, it was the capital of the Khmer Empire of Cambodia. The temples of Angkor Thom, which date from the thirteenth century, are Buddhist. By contrast, the famous temple of Angkor Vat, built about 1140, at a time when Cambodia’s economy was developing rapidly, is a Hindu temple. It is estimated that, between 1000 and 1050, the number of Cambodian cities doubled.24 At its peak, between 1200 and 1300, the city of Angkor reached a population of 150,000 inhabitants. At the time of the founding of Angkor, the Indian influence in Indochina was already ancient. The first Cambodian kingdom, called Funan, was constituted during the first century at the instigation of Indian merchants and Hindu Brahmins recently arrived from India. That kingdom included present-day Cambodia, as well as parts of Thailand and the Malaysian Peninsula. It lasted till the seventh century. The only part of Indochina where China exerted a preponderant influence was North Vietnam, which it dominated approximately from 150 to 950. It is during the Chinese domination that the “Greater Vehicle” form of Buddhism established itself in Vietnam and Laos, as it was doing in Japan. After 950, Vietnam vigorously asserted its independence from China. The Great Ebb also touched China. In fact, it contributed to start a new chapter in the development of that country by conjuring up the influence of the Great Corridor. As has been noted, the Asian Corridor dominated the first part of the history of the development of China. The second part was marked by the emergence of the Great Corridor as an important actor of this development. The cities that best illustrate that evolution are Canton (called today Guangzhou), Zayton (present-day Quanzhou), Macau, and Ningbo. Canton-Guangzhou is the oldest port of China open to international trade. During the Eastern Han period (AD 23–220), the emperors decided to develop overseas trade and chose Canton-Guangzhou as their maritime port. During the Tang period, in 714, foreigners were allowed to trade in Canton-Guangzhou, which became the Chinese terminal of the maritime Silk Road. The Arabs and Persians were the first merchants to settle in the city. They were later joined by Vietnamese, Khmers, Malays, Indonesians, Indians, and Ceylanese who traded silk, tea, china, camphor, etc. Arabs traders settled on a permanent basis in the region of Canton-Guangzhou from 800 to 1000. Canton-Guangzhou’s population reached 200,000 around 850. During the Sung period, in 970, Canton-Guangzhou was endowed with a customs office, as was Zayton-Quanzhou one century later, in 1087. When, in 1127, the

24.

Hubert de Mestier du Bourg,. “La première moitié du XIe siècle au Cambodge: Suryavarman Ier, sa vie et quelques aspects des institutions à son époque,” Journal asiatique 258, 3–4 (1970): 281–314.

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Southern Sung dynasty took refuge at Hangzhou, it relied heavily on international trade and opened nine official ports to maritime commerce and foreign trade. However, Canton-Guangzhou and Zayton-Quanzhou were already quite ahead of their new port competitors. Canton-Guangzhou is located on the Xi Jiang (Pearl River) not too far from the mouth, Macau, and Hong Kong. It is interesting to note that international trade developed in China from southern Canton-Guangzhou at a time when the center of gravity of the Chinese economy and population was clearly to the north and the interior. In fact, the trajectory of the development of the Chinese international trade clearly followed the eastern trend within the Great Corridor: Canton-Guangzhou first, Zayton-Quanzhou (which for a while competed with Canton-Guangzhou as the main international port of China) second, and Shanghai third. Why is it that it all started with the Xi Jiang and Canton-Guangzhou? Maybe simply because the Xi Jiang is the first main river encountered by ships coming from the Strait of Malacca. One must not forget that, before the discovery of America, international trade between China and any other country, with the exceptions of Japan, Russia, and Korea, involved trips to the south and, most of the time, through the Strait of Malacca. The Xi Jiang was simply the closest and most convenient entrance to the Chinese Empire, and Canton-Guangzhou was the best and most secure maritime port on the Xi Jiang River, because it was located a little inside of the continent. When, between 1269 and 1295, under the reign of the Mongol Kublai Khan (the advent of the Mongol power during the thirteenth century is what allowed Europeans to travel up to China for the first time). When Marco Polo25 made his famous trip to the Orient, he followed precisely the Asian Corridor, entering China by the Continental Silk Road, which passes through Turkistan and Khotan-Hotan, and leaving China by the Maritime Silk Road. At that time, the main port of China was the port of Quanzhou, which Kublai Khan favored and which was known in Europe and Arab countries as Zayton. The word “satin” comes from Zayton, which was then the main port from which silk was exported. Arab merchants used to call the silk satin imported from Zayton “zaituni.” Zayton-Quanzhou was founded in AD 700, under the T’angs. During the two following centuries, it developed into a major seaport and a center of foreign trade, rivaling Canton and Hanoi, which was then a Chinese port. 25.

Marco Polo is the best-known Western explorer of thirteenth-century China, but he was not the only one. Before him, the Italian Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (1182–1253) was sent by Pope Innocent IV to meet the Great Khan, and the Flemish Franciscan Guillaume de Rubroek (1220–1293) was sent by Saint Louis, king of France, to Mongolia to meet the Great Khan in 1254.

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Between 742 and 11162, the population of Zayton-Quanzhou increased tenfold. Under Kublai Khan, it reached 500,000 inhabitants. Commercially, ZaytonQuanzhou supplanted Canton-Guangzhou. During the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, it was considered the largest port in the world. From the middle of the fifteenth century, Zayton-Quanzhou started to decline, when the Chinese emperors decided to withdraw from long-range trade and prohibit open-sea navigation, and when the attacks of the Japanese pirates put the Ming dynasty on the defensive. Moreover, the harbor began to silt up. In 1600, it was just a middle-size city. When China closed on itself, the port of Macau constituted one of the few links between China and the rest of the world. The rise of Islam had cut the traditional routes linking the Occident and the Orient; the discovery of a new maritime road to India by Vasco de Gama allowed the Portuguese to become the first Europeans to establish new direct commercial relations with India and the Far East. They began trading with China from 1517. In 1547, they obtained special trading privileges in the important port of Zayton-Quanzhou, and then, in 1557, the Chinese Emperor authorized Portugal to establish factories west of the mouth of the Xi Jiang at the site of Macau and to trade from there. Macau was the most important European trading post in China for three centuries until Hong Kong, which lies on the other side of the mouth of the river, took over. During the period of isolation of China, the port of Macau, which was open only to the Portuguese, was not China’s only port link with the outside. There was also the maritime port of Amoy, open to the trade with Spanish Philippines, the fluvial port of Kiakhta, open to the Russians, the port of Canton-Guangzhou, reserved from 1567 to the other Europeans, and that of Ningbo, open to the Japanese and Koreans.26 Ningbo is located at the junction of three rivers, the Ningbo Yao, Fenghua, and Yong rivers. From 1533 to 1545, Ningbo was a Portuguese trading post, even before the Portuguese settled in Macau. Around 1539, rich silver deposits were discovered in Japan at a time China needed this metal very much. But the relations between China and Japan were then so bad that China was even prohibiting Japanese ships to enter its ports. Thus, it is the Chinese pirates and Portuguese merchants who supplied China with Japanese silver through the port of Ningbo.27 The Japanese were also very protectionist, and they even closed their ports to all foreign ships from 1639 to 1854. The sole exception concerned the port of the Island of Deshima, which belonged to the Dutch since 1641. The Island of Deshima is located right in front of Nagasaki where saint Francis Xavier 26. 27.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 41. Ibid., 69.

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founded a mission in 1549, and where Jesuits were very successful in getting converts. Eventually, the number of Japanese Christians rose to about 300,000, which represents many more converts than the Jesuits made in Goa or in China. The Togukawa Shogun of the time, being aware of the Spanish takeover in the Philippines and wanting to avoid this in Japan, expelled the Jesuits and the Portuguese traders from Japan in 1639. Christianity was suppressed, and later contact with Europeans and other foreigners was restricted to the small Dutch trading settlement of Deshima. This is how the link between the ports of Ningbo and Deshima, which both lay on the central axis of the Great Corridor, became, from 1639 to 1854, the only link between China and Japan, and almost the only link between Japan and the rest of the world.

THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT EBB IN THE GREAT CORRIDOR It is interesting to attempt classifying according to their level of development the various regions of the Great Corridor at different epochs of the Great Ebb (see, among other references, Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris: OECD, 2001). The following table shows the evolution from the beginning of the Great Ebb, around AD 400, to 700, two centuries after the fall of Rome, to 1000, to 1600, and, finally, to 1900.

400

700

1000

1600

1900

Rank 1 (most developed)

Roman Empire

Byzantine Empire

Byzantine India and South Empire, Arab China world, and Persia

Western Europe

Rank 2

Persia

Arab world and Persia

India and South China

Western Europe

Japan

Rank 3

India and South China

India and South China

Western Europe

Eastern Europe, Arab world, and Persia

Ottoman Empire

Rank 4 (less developed)

Japan

Western Europe and Japan

Japan

Japan

Persia, India, and South China

This table distinguishes between South and North China since North China does not belong to the Great Corridor. North China was almost as developed as the Roman Empire in AD 400. The evolution described in the table can be explained basically by two topodynamic movements: the Great Ebb and the rebirth of the westward movement to the west of the Persian Gulf after the discovery of America. The topodynamic eastward movement associated with the Great Ebb is linked to the collapse of Western Europe and the rise, successively, of the Byzantine Empire, the Arab world, India and Southern China, and, finally, Japan. As for the ups and downs of Western Europe, they correspond to the collapse associated with the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Great Ebb, and then, after the discovery of America, to the rebirth of the westward movement.

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The movement pushing development towards the east, from China towards Japan, within the Great Corridor is attested and generally recognized. Japan and Korea have long been, culturally and economically, the wards of China in the same way that Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia have been the wards of India. Japan is an archipelago like Indonesia. Its topography, very contrasted climate, lack of natural resources, and volcanic character constitute a constant challenge. Even now, only twenty percent of the total area of Japan is really inhabited. Japan developed much later than China. There are no Paleolithic remains in Japan. At its origin Japan was inhabited by Ainus, which means “whites.” Ainus still exist, but they have been chased to the northern part of Japan by the invading Asians, coming from the continent or from the islands of the China and Philippine seas, that form the present population. It is just during the “Yayoi shiki” period, starting around 300 BC, that riziculture and the use of bronze and iron probably were introduced from China (bronze metallurgy arrived by the first millennium BC). Similarly, wheat and barley originating from Mesopotamia arrived in Japan through China. As late as the first century of this era, Japan’s subsistence economy was still in transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering, and from wooden to metal tools. The history of the Japanese Empire really starts with the founding in 120 BC of the Yamato Empire by Jimmu-Tenno. Militarily, this empire succeeded in expanding. It even dominated Korea from AD 363 to 662, despite that the Chinese influence in art, medicine, agriculture, religion and literature traditionally penetrated into Japan through Korea. Culturally, the Yamato Empire depended very much on China. During the fifth century, the Japanese adopted Chinese writing. Moreover, in 538 (or maybe earlier), “Greater Vehicle” Buddhism entered Japan from China and started challenging Shintoism, whose Grand Priest was the Emperor himself called“Mikado,” which means “the High Door.” From 593 to 628, the Empress Suiko and Prince Shotoku Taishi adopted Buddhism and started building Buddhist temples. Between 645 and 1192, the Yamato Empire established a bureaucracy and a state system directly inspired by China, but giving the Japanese aristocracy the prime position occupied by the mandarinate in China. During the Nara period (710–794), a reaction to the omnipresent Chinese influence emerged and led to a melting of Shintoism and Buddhism, and to the promotion of an original Japanese culture. Several times through history, Japan withdrew into itself. As mentioned earlier, this led to the almost complete shutting of the country to foreign trade from 1639 to 1854. Japan is separated from Korea by the Korea Strait with its two hundred kilometers of stormy seas, and the nearest point in China is 750 kilometers away. The isolation of Japan had certain positive aspects. For example, the two

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Mongol attempts to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281 were unsuccessful, and, when, during the fourteenth century, Eurasia was devastated by the bubonic plague (the Black Death), Japan was spared because travel into and out of Japan was very restricted, foreigners trading with Japan were more or less permanently quarantined in the port of Deshima, and there was no import of grain or other products likely to introduce pests. All that contributed to the fact that Japanese population growth was faster than that of Europe and China in the first millennium and a half of our era.28 The urbanization of Japan was late and rather slow at the beginning, even though large cities appeared early. The first true cities developed around 650–700. However, between 1580 and 1720, the urbanization of the Japanese society was exceptionally rapid. The successive imperial capitals of Japan were: Nara (first called Heijokyo), from 710 to 784; Nagaoka, from 784 to 794; Kyoto (first called Miyako), from 794 to 1868; Yoshino, from 1338 to 1573 (during that period, the Mikado has two capitals); and Tokyo (called Edo before 1868), from 1868 till today. Two capitals of the shoguns are worth mentioning: Kamakura, capital of the shogun from 1192 to 1333, and Edo, capital of the shogun from 1603 to 1867. The country’s first capital, Heijokyo, which became Nara, had a population of about 150,000 persons around 775, while, at the same period, in Western Europe, the largest city, Rome, only had about 50,000 inhabitants, and the second largest city, Paris, just 23,000. The second capital of Japan, Miyado, which became Kyoto, reached 100,000, and even 200,000 or 250,000 inhabitants as soon as the ninth century.29 Despite the presence of those large cities, Maddison estimates that, in 1500, less than 3 percent of Japanese lived in towns of 10,000 population or over.30 However, during the seventeenth century, Japan caught up, and, in 1800, that percentage passed to twelve percent. This is when a powerful Japanese urbexplosion emerged, and the city of Edo, become Tokyo, reached one million inhabitants and became as big as London around 1875.31

28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 267. Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 45–46. Angus Maddison, op. cit., 256. Gilbert Rozman underlines the quite exceptional character of the economic expansion, the demographic growth, and the observed urbanization of Japan between 1580 and 1720: see Gilbert Rozman, “East Asian Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: Comparisons with Europe,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 63–66.

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Japan has a long tradition of dissociation of the official and effective powers. The Mikado who played a religious role in the context of Shintoism rapidly became a symbolic figure with the rise to power of military families. From 1195 to 1868, the real power was in the hands of great families, and, particularly, the shogun (“general-in-chief”), who was a military chief that recognized the suzerainty of the Mikado, but actually controlled Japan.

THE GREAT FAMILIES OF FEUDAL JAPAN Among the great families that have exerted power “behind the throne” in Japan, the main ones were: • the Fujiwara family that bore the titles of regent (Sesshou in Japanese) and chancelor (Kanpaku in Japanese) from 967 to 1068; • the Taira family that played an eminent role till 1185; • the Minamoto family that bore the title of shogun from 1192 to 1219; • the Hôjô family that bore the hereditary title of Sikken from 1219 to 1333; • the Ashikaga family that bore the title of shogun from 1333 to 1573; • the Toyotomi family that bore the title of chancelor from 1582 to 1603; • and the famous Tokugawa family that bore the title of shogun from 1603 to 1868.

In the provinces (“ken”), the governors, called Daimyos (“Great names”), received their orders from the shoguns. Progressively, the 1500 Daimyos became hereditary princes. Their vassals were the famous samurais. The Japanese feudal system lasted until 1871, at the beginning of the Meiji era, when the Emperor assumed all the powers abandoned by the last shogun at the time of its abdication in 1868. The Tokugawa family was the last one to exert the functions of shogun. Its founder, Ieyasu Tokugawa, was originally the Daimyos of Edo (Tokyo). In 1600, at the battle of Sekigahara, he defeated the Toyotomi Shogun. In the years that followed he eliminated all his rivals, and in 1603 he became shogun and imposed Edo as the shogun capital of Japan. As such, Edo, the future Tokyo, came to supplant Kyoto around 1650. In 1700, the population of Edo was between 500,000 and one million inhabitants, while that of Kyoto did not exceed 450,000. When Shogun Hitotsubashi Keiti of the Tokugawa family had to resign and Emperor Mutsuhito had to exert all powers in 1868, the question of the capital was addressed. The emperor decided to move the imperial capital to Edo, which he renamed Tokyo to show everybody that the new capital belonged to him.

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Under the Tokugawas, the country was submitted to a powerful central power, which did not tolerate foreign influences and trade. Moreover, a ban existed on wheeled vehicles on Japanese roads and there was a virtual absence of bridges. These restrictions were imposed for security reasons, but they made journeys very costly and time-consuming. There were also restrictions on the size of boats, which inhibited coastal shipping, foreign trade, and naval preparedness. All this constituted obstacles to trade and urbanization. Despite that, the Western influence came to be felt first through the arrival of the Jesuits and, later, through the Dutch who settled in Deshima. Translations in Chinese of Western books by Matteo Ricci and other Jesuits living in Peking-Beijing constituted the first canals of transmission of the Western knowledge. In 1720 Shogun Yoshimune lifted the ban on European books.32 A good example of the early influence of Western technology in Japan relates to guns. Firearms reached Japan in 1543, when two Portuguese adventurers armed with harquebuses (primitive guns) arrived on a Chinese cargo ship. The Japanese were so impressed by the new weapon that they commenced indigenous gun production, greatly improved gun tech nology, and by 1600 owned more and better guns than any other country in the world. The samurai opposed the spreading of guns. After 1600, the samuraicontrolled government began restricting gun production until Japan was almost without functional guns again.33 From a geographical point of view, what strikes the most in Japan’s development is the fact that the part of the country which constitutes its historical hearth (the region of Nara, Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka), as well as its most modern part (the region of Tokyo) both turn their back on Korea, China, and Asia. They rather face the Pacific and even America. This results from geography, but also from Japan’s desire to escape from the destiny of its Asian neighbors. Around 1763, when the British Empire expanded rapidly and European colonialism became more aggressive, of all the Asian countries, Japan was the only one (with, to some extent, Thailand) to reveal itself capable to resist the assaults China, India, and Indochina were submitting to, and to which Indonesia and the Philippines already had yielded. The policy of complete isolation ensured the independence of Japan for a long period. However, there came a time when Japan had to realize that this could not last forever. That happened in 1853 and 1854, when the Americans sent Commodore Perry to instruct Japan to open their ports to foreign trade. The ultimatum was notified in 1853, and it was indicated that

32. 33.

Angus Maddison, op. cit., 257. Jared Diamond, op. cit., 257–258.

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the American fleet would come back one year later to impose that policy to Japan, if required. In 1854, under the pressure of the Americans whose fleet cruised in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo), the shogun from the Tokugawa family yielded and accepted to open two Japanese ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, to foreign trade. During the following years, the Japanese population, humiliated, reacted violently to the ever stronger presence of Westerners who came to bomb some ports of the country. In 1868, confronted to popular opposition and a revolt of the samurai, the last Tokugawa Shogun was forced to resign. The very function of shogun disappeared and the emperor had to take over all powers. Then began the Meiji period (1868–1912), which was to profoundly transform Japan. Made conscious of their backwardness compared to the West, the Japanese pledged to do everything to avoid being humiliated again. They launched a rapid Westernization, industrialized, developed their economy, reformed and equipped their army according to the Western model, built a modern fleet which, in 1905, revealed itself to be the greatest in the world, adopted a policy supporting a rising birth rate, and completely reversed the topodynamic movement coming from the west which had dominated the evolution of the country till then. They did this while launching a westward topodynamic movement which led Japan to successively conquer Korea, Manchuria, a large part of China, and, ultimately, Southeast Asia. This is how died the Great Ebb, which, from the decline of the Western Roman Empire till 1868, had lasted about 1,400 years. During that period, from the west to the east, succeeded one another at the head of the Great Corridor the urbexplosions of Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad, Delhi, Canton-Guangzhou, Zayton-Quanzhou, and, finally, Tokyo.

CHAPTER

6

Understanding Topodynamic Inertia

T

he long topodynamic evolution from Rome to Tokyo can be seen as an illustration of the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia. That concept we introduced in 1995 is altogether rich from a theoretical point of view, enlightening from an empirical point of view, and provocative in the eyes of those who see in it the evocation of an “invisible hand” guiding the evolution of the world economy.1 Hereby, it will be attempted to explain it by resorting to both historical examples and theoretical concepts. Hopefully, those explanations will demystify that concept by insisting on both the stability and reversibility it evokes, as well as its probabilistic rather than deterministic nature. In order to do so, an allusion will be made to the debate that concept has aroused. Processes of diffusion of development through space are as old as humankind. Since the beginning of archaeology, archaeologists and historians have drawn maps of the diffusion of various techniques such as pottery, bronze, iron, steel, agriculture, wheat cultivation, rice or milk production, fruit tree domestication, beer and wine production, paper making, printing, writing, wheel transportation, horse domestication, silk production, etc. Numerous examples of this have been given this far in this rediscovering of world history. Similarly, historians trace back the progression of VedaismBrahmanism-Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam. The diffusion of urbanization is also studied. All those processes are alluded to in this book. Only those who know nothing about development in Eurasia or America may be surprised by the fact that economic development illustrated by the spatial distribution of added values (production) also involves diffusion processes. The most eloquent example of this, which is relatively recent and quite documented, probably is that of the shift of the population and production centers of gravity in North America since 1790. 1.

Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, “Understanding Spatial Inertia: Centre of Gravity, Population Densities, the Weber Problem and Gravity Potential,” Journal of Regional Science 35, 1 (1995): 155–164.

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However, if explaining the diffusion of innovations by the concept of imitation or the diffusion of religions by the idea of proselytism appears rather easy, explaining that the economic power stemming from high levels of production can move from certain zones to others is more complex. On the other hand, while the regions of origin of the techniques or religions lose nothing, on the contrary, with the diffusion of the techniques and religions they generated, in the field of economic development, the regions of origin usually end up being supplanted by the regions they developed: Constantinople ended up supplanting Rome; Baghdad supplanting Damascus; Nankin-Nanjing and Hangzhou supplanting Changan-Xi’an ; and, later, London supplanting Venice, and New York supplanting London. Moreover, the diffusion of economic development is marked by the polarization trends that preclude the economic development from diffusing homogeneously in all directions. In fact, economic development somewhat jumps from one pole to another. It reproduces like banana trees, through roots that give birth to new trees, or like iris plants, through stems capable of producing the shoot and root systems of a new plant. The diffusion of economic development through roots can be assimilated to a diffusion based on the simple extraction of resources: the colonization of Congo in the nineteenth century would be a good example of this. The diffusion of economic development through stems could be seen as a diffusion oriented towards the development of markets: in that case, one could think to the colonization of India by the British. Drawing examples of diffusion of development from the history of colonialism is uneasy and somewhat ill-advised. Such examples are given as a caricature. In fact, one of the most unsettling and specific aspects of the diffusion of economic development relates to the fact that, contrary to colonialism, it acts beyond political strategies. That diffusion compels decision-makers and even succeeds to thwart their original plans, as in the cases of the freeing of the United States with respect to Great Britain and, even better, the continuation of the southwestward movement of the population and production centers of gravity of the United States following the Secession War and the victory of the Yankee Northeast in 1865. The movements observed in the spatial evolution of economic development reveal the existence of a true topodynamic inertia, which can be fed by the processes of innovation diffusion without being limited to those processes, which are profoundly different. That inertia has been observed since the very beginning of urbanization. The specialists of economic history often allude to it, but, most of the time, they do not bother to understand and explain it. They describe the shift of economic activities and population towards the southwest in North America, the movement of the economic center of the European economy from Constantinople to the north of Italy and then towards the north of Europe, the spreading of industrialization from Japan to Korea

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and then Manchuria, etc. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia remains mysterious. Let us attempt to penetrate that mystery in its geographical as well as space-economic dimensions.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND AGRICULTURE The first reflex in front of the phenomenon of the shift of the center of economic activity through history consists in trying to find a physical explanation linked to modifications of the environment. The first hypothesis that comes to mind relates to the ecological impact of agriculture. The transition from gathering to agriculture involved eliminating on a given territory a very large number of vegetal species growing naturally to the benefit of an extremely limited number of cultivated species. That led to deforestation, the destruction of a large part of existing ecosystems, and also, very often, the exhaustion of soils due to insufficient fertilization. Developing agriculture without exhausting the soil is extremely difficult, even with modern farming techniques, and that has been, for millennia, almost impossible in many regions of the world. To deforestation often succeeded weeding (due to over-grazing), erosion, and soil deterioration. Desertification and ecological catastrophes resulted from that. It must be remembered that, among the main cradles of the world agriculture, many examples exist of territories that were fertile in the past, which are arid today. The first cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, is today a quasi-desert zone. The Sahel, which is one of the regions where agriculture developed the earliest without any exterior influence, is today, to a large extent, a desert. The Sahara, which is the very symbol of a desert, was, a long time ago, between about 9000 and 4000 BC, a cultivated area. Similarly, the center of Mexico that was, during the pre-Columbian period, an important agricultural zone is, today, rather little favorable to agriculture. Finally, Haiti, which has been during the eighteenth century the richest plantation area of the Americas, is today almost a bare land. Obviously, a zone that experiences a desertification process can hardly stay for a long time a dominating space from an economic point of view. Sooner or later, more recent zones that are not yet over-exploited supplant it. Those zones are often the “children” of the older zone that is declining. This constitutes a case of succession through time and space of dominating economic poles that can be easily explained. Another similar example, which is less dramatic, consists in the case of the diffusion of agriculture in new zones that are especially favorable. Agriculture did not develop at the origin in the regions of the world that are considered today as the most productive, on the contrary. Thus, California,

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the pampas of Argentina, the Canadian Prairies, the Cape region in South Africa, the southwestern and southeastern regions of Australia have been cultivated rather lately, and they are now much more productive than the regions that gave birth to agriculture. The fact that economic power progressively quit the old agricultural zones to the benefit of such new ones is no surprise.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND INDUSTRIALIZATION There are phenomena of industrial succession that resemble those that have been just described concerning agriculture. Many modern examples can be given of that. For instance, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the old industrial zones of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow succeeded the new industrial zones of the regions of London, Paris, the Ruhr Valley, Toulouse, and Barcelona. During the twentieth century, in Belgium, to the old industrial zones of the Walloon country succeeded those of the Flemish region. At about the same period, to the zones of the old industrial heart of the United States (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, etc.) succeeded the new zones of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. Even in the Far East, to the old industrial zones of Japan succeed those of South Korea, Taiwan, South Manchuria (Shenyang, Anshan), Peking-Beijing (with Baotou and Tianjin), Canton-Guangzhou, Shanghai (with the new development zone of Pudong), Wuhan, Nanking-Nanjing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, and the new Chinese “special enterprise zones” (SEZ) like the port of Amoy-Xiamen facing Taiwan, the island of Hainan close to Shanghai, Shenzhen near Hong Kong, Zhuhai near Macau, and Shantou northeast of Hong Kong. Those movements can be explained in various manners. The first explanation relates to the successive stages of industrialization, which bore different location requirements. At the beginning of industrialization, the availability of accessible coal or the existence of falls constituted determining location factors. Thereafter, those factors have been replaced by others more linked to market accessibility or manpower quality. The changes in the location constraints thus generated activity displacements. However, a second explanation can be formulated, which is related to a possible industrial over-exploitation (similar to the agricultural overexploitation). Historically, industries have caused damage to the environment, and produced contaminated soils, toxic air, polluted water, insalubrious worker’s housing zones, social conflicts, less dynamic communities, and urban fabrics that are altogether inadequate, too dense, little attractive, dirty, lacking green spaces, and crime-generating. Such environments have little appeal for

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new industrial investments, which leads to a progressive de-industrialization of the old zones to the benefit of new industrial areas that are cleaner, more technologically efficient, and more pleasant.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND EVOLUTION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES In the field of political sciences, some authors have elaborated a thesis which can help to understand the social and political aspect of topodynamic inertia.2 According to that thesis, the demographic growth linked to the settling process and the development of agriculture generated scarcity conditions, among others, in the matter of agricultural land availability. At the beginning, it is possible to find to the problems caused by that scarcity a consensus and egalitarian solution based on a collective management of the available resources and on a policy of exponential subdivision of the scarce resources. However, with the growth continuing, the exponential growth gets less and less feasible, and the egalitarian consensus becomes more and more difficult to preserve. An exogenous or endogenous perturbation is then sufficient to shatter the egalitarian situation, and lead to the instauration of non-egalitarian solutions favoring a minority to the detriment of other groups. The socioeconomic tensions stemming from the scarcity of resources are then translated into sociopolitical tensions. Those tensions can lead to a civil war and the break-up of the society under tension. One way to avoid this is to transform the internal tensions into expansion forces, which can result in the conquest of new territories, colonization movements, or population migrations out of the society of origin. Those expansion movements favor an increase of the inequalities in that society, those inequalities being described by the famous Pareto function describing the income distribution among the members of a given society. The Pareto function is a fractal function of extreme inequality. When many societies live side by side under conditions of extreme inequality, wars are inevitable and the domination of some societies over the others results. All the involved societies then become vulnerable, even those that succeeded to establish their domination over the others. In fact, the more societies dominate, the more they experience extreme inequality trends. Those trends end up undermining, weakening, and, ultimately, leading to collapse the dominating societies. Let us note that the three preceding explanations respectively related to agriculture, industry, and inequalities help to understand how a succession process can exist. However, they hardly explain the existence of topodynamic 2.

See, among others, Manus I. Midlarsky, Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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movements marked by very clear geographical orientations when in fact the concept of topodynamic inertia refers above all to the systematic and deep character of such trends through space.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AND CUMULATIVE PROCESS OF LOCATION CHOICES A first step in the theoretical understanding of topodynamic inertia consists in explaining how certain locations come to attract an increasing number of activities. At the origin, the concepts of inertia and polarization overlap to some extent. The fact that a location appears to be optimal for an increasing number of activities can be seen as both a polarization and an inertia phenomenon, the choices of the past orienting and determining to some extent the choices of the future. The cumulative process of successive locations has a character which is clearly probabilistic and not deterministic. The more a location attracts new activities, the more it is likely to attract some more; however, nothing compels any new activity to settle there. It is not because, at the beginning of a series of successive choices of new locations, a given location appears favored and attracts a high proportion of the new activities, that this same location will automatically continue to dominate all along the process. A rival location may well have been neglected at the beginning of the process and, later, supplant its competitor. The topodynamic inertia plays a role at various levels: it intervenes at the primary level of the appearance of polarization; it plays also a role at the level of the polarization of the poles, when topodynamic trends can be spotted within urbexplosions; and finally, it acts in the succession of the urbexplosions themselves. A long time ago, Gunnar Myrdal stressed the importance of cumulative causation in economic development processes.3 Topodynamic inertia is a major example of cumulative causation.

s THE INTERACTION BETWEEN POTENTIALITY AND REALITY, A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA Tellier and Vertefeuille have proposed a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of topodynamic inertia, which is based on the interaction between reality and potentiality, that is, between the reality of the accumulation of the optimal locations at certain points and the spatial distribution of the virtual optimal locations of the future.4 Modifying the scheme of

3. 4.

Gunnar Karl Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Duckworth, 1957). Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, op. cit.

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the effective locations modifies the virtual scheme of the likely future optimal locations, that virtual scheme being at the origin of the scheme of the future effective locations. Tellier and Vertefeuille have illustrated that theoretical explanation by means of three mathematical concepts: the concepts of center of gravity, of the comprehensive Weberian optimum, and of point of maximum gravity potential.5 The concept of center of gravity is purely descriptive. It is used to synthesize in a single point the whole observed spatial distribution of given activities. For instance, the center of gravity of the jobs existing on NAFTA’s territory (Canada, United States, Mexico) corresponds to the point of the North-American continent where would stay in equilibrium a weightless map of North America on which, in each center of employment, a needle would be stuck whose weight would be proportional to the number of jobs found the corresponding center of employment. The center of gravity of an observed distribution describes reality, not potentiality. By contrast, the concepts of comprehensive Weberian optimum and of point of maximum gravity potential correspond to potentiality, that is, to optima that may orient future location decisions. The comprehensive Weberian optimum corresponds to the optimum of a Weber problem where, for example, each built-up area would exert an attractive force proportional to the number of jobs it includes (a Weber problem is defined with respect to a space where it is possible to go as a crow flies from any point to any other point at the same transportation cost in all directions; it consists in finding the optimal location of a firm that is attracted by various attraction points to which it has an interest to be as close as possible while taking into account the different attractive forces exerted by each attraction point). In the context of the above North American example, the point of maximum gravity potential is the one where a future enterprise would maximize the probability that all the existing enterprises of NAFTA would buy from it in the case where the probability for an enterprise to buy from the new enterprise would be proportional to its own number of jobs, and inversely proportional to a function of the distance between that enterprise and the new enterprise (that function of the distance corresponding to a mathematically estimated gravity model). In more intuitive terms, the point of maximum gravity potential is the point where the potential clientele of the future enterprise is maximal, if that enterprise is likely to deal with all the existing enterprises in proportion to their number of jobs and according to the deterrence effect of distance (the farther a possible client is, the less likely the new enterprise is to deal with him).

5.

Ibid.

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Those three concepts are generally independent from one another from a mathematical point of view.6 That being said, cases can be found where mathematical links exist between them.7

s A DETERMINISTIC CASE OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA It is possible to demonstrate that, in what will be called here the “New York case,” a real shift of the center of gravity in a given direction inevitably induces a shift in the same direction of the comprehensive Weberian optimum and of the point of maximum gravity potential, which are both virtual. The New York case involves a convex Euclidean isotropic space clearly delimited (which will be called here “the continent”), and a process of penetration of the continent from a single point (New York) situated at the limit of the space (on the coast). It is then assumed that the movement of penetration of the continent by the population and economic activities from a single point is strictly radial in the sense that each attraction point moves in a systematic way as a crow flies from New York to the interior of the continent following one of the possible directions, without ever moving backwards (the penetration process occurs in all possible directions from New York). In the New York case, the center of gravity moves towards the interior of the continent in a direction that depends on the form of the continent, and the two virtual optima (the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential) follow the movement of the center of gravity without, however, coinciding with the latter or coinciding with each other. It is important to stress that the mathematical link between the three points is deterministic, not probabilistic, although the three mathematical concepts remain independent from each other. Despite the numerous assumptions that are associated with the New York case, this very precise theoretical case presents some interest from an empirical point of view. Historically, many cases of economic penetration of continents resemble very much the New York case. The penetration of the North American continent north of the Rio Grande followed a relatively radial pattern originating from a very limited number of points located on the coast, not too far from one another (Quebec City, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia). In the southern part of South America, the penetration originated mainly from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. In Africa, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town, and Cairo have played similar roles during the nineteenth century, each in its part of the continent. 6. 7.

Luc-Normand Tellier and Martin Pinsonnault, “Further Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Reply,” Journal of Regional Science 38, 3 (1998): 513–534. Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, op. cit.

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The New York case illustrates how a link can develop between the center of gravity and a virtual situation described by the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential. That link can generate a phenomenon of topodynamic inertia since an initial shift of real locations causes a movement of the center of gravity, which is systematically associated with an induced shift of virtual optima, and this induced shift favors in turn the making of location decisions that tend to prolong the initial movement of the real locations. It must be noted that, in the process, the centrality of New York is progressively challenged as the center of gravity moves towards the interior of the continent and away from New York. The evolution of the system is then such that New York is likely to progressively be marginalized to the benefit of competing poles located either in the interior (like Chicago) or even at the other extremity of the continent (like Los Angeles, for example). As can be seen, despite its restrictive nature, the New York case is particularly rich in terms of understanding and intuition. The more general case where the attraction points do not move in a radial way from a single point located at the limit of the continent also bears some regularities provided that, instead of reasoning in deterministic terms, the question is tackled in probabilistic terms. Generally, if the center of gravity moves in one direction, the comprehensive Weberian optimum and the point of maximum gravity potential are likely to move in the same direction with a maximum likelihood. Thus phenomena of topodynamic inertia are likely to develop regularly at various levels, from the micro level of urban fabrics to the macro level of continents. The circular interdependence between reality and potentiality is omnipresent in the universe of locations, and it is appropriate to conceive topodynamic inertia as a phenomenon that is inherent to all location processes, rather than something awkward resulting from particular situations.

s THE ROLE OF TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA IN METROPOLITAN AND CITY DEVELOPMENT Topodynamic inertia is active at the level of cities taken individually in the centripetal processes of assertion of the downtown domination as well as the centrifugal processes of urban sprawl. The variations of land values with respect to the distance from the city center are very good indices of the topodynamic movements towards the center or the suburbs. Urban growth phenomena, suburbanization, urban sprawl, the forming of “doughnut holes,” the appearance of edge cities, and the marginalization of peripheral small towns made satellites of the large centers constitute illustrations of the existence of space-economic currents, which favor certain urban zones to the detriment of others.

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The main characteristic of those currents relates to the inertia, to the fact that once launched they tend to prolong themselves through time and space, for a period and over a distance whose lengths vary. Of course, at the beginning, specific space-economic conditions cause their appearance, but soon the interaction between reality and potentiality that characterizes topodynamic inertia intervenes and the new investments are oriented towards the zones where rising land values have been observed, and this generates the self-producing process of topodynamic inertia. Of course, such movements are not unlimited. Their end is even, most of the time, embedded in the processes that generate them, which is often the rule in the cases of topodynamic inertia. Thus, the downtown domination comes up in the end against the doughnut-holes phenomenon or, at least, the stabilization of downtown’s densities. Urban sprawl ultimately favors the forming of edge cities. The doughnut-holes phenomena can in their turn be followed by a downtown renaissance, as edge cities can integrate more closely to the central area after having freed themselves from it for a while. Those there-and-back movements are basically the result of topodynamic inertia, in the same way that pendulum movements stem from physical inertia.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA IN URBEXPLOSION DEVELOPMENT Urbexplosions constitute urban systems evolving through time and space. They are fed by a centripetal movement, which favors the emergence of their center, and by a centrifugal movement, which tends to spread the domination of this center over an ever vaster territory. In their declining period, urbexplosions are retreating: the territory over which their domination extends shrinks to the benefit of competing urbexplosions, and their center weakens. Thus both the centripetal and centrifugal movements are slowed down. In the end, the urbexplosion can even die. Its urban system loses then all autonomy and it is integrated into a rival urbexplosion’s own urban system. Topodynamic inertia is active at all levels of the urbexplosive process. It marks the centripetal movement, the centrifugal one, the expansion, the contraction, and even the possible integration into the new urbexplosion. The same interaction between reality and potentiality that is seen at the level of metropolitan and city development is also seen at the scale of the urban systems. However, the case of urbexplosions is particularly interesting inasmuch topodynamic inertia is at the origin of the urbexplosions’ succession process. In fact, the centrifugal movement is what explains that, in the periphery of an urbexplosion, a new pole can develop that emerges and, thanks to the distance, separates from the mother urbexplosion, freeing itself in the end from the center it even comes to compete. That new pole

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then starts to exert a domination over the urban system that surrounds it thanks to the centripetal movement which appears around the new pole. An urbexplosive embryo then develops around the pole, and a child urbexplosion is born that generates a centrifugal movement which clashes with the centrifugal movement of the mother urbexplosion and eventually undermines it. Such an evolution does not correspond anymore to a pendulum movement. It rather relates to a process of spatiotemporal succession of urbexplosions, such a process being mainly characterized by topodynamic inertia. It must be noted that the succession process is not irreversible. An urbexplosion that has declined may come back and dominate once again. This has happened through history, although the center of the reviving urbexplosion is often different from the one the formerly declining urbexplosion had. Thus, the Babylonian urbexplosion went through a renaissance under the form of the Baghdad urbexplosion, and the Roman one, under the form of Venice and Genoa’s urbexplosion. By contrast, Constantinople’s urbexplosion experienced a second life under the form of Istanbul’s, which had the same center.

s TOPODYNAMIC INERTIA AT THE WORLD LEVEL Topodynamic inertia plays a role even at the world level. The populations, the productions, and the wealth accumulation evolve through space in a coherent manner following clearly identifiable spatiotemporal movements that are marked by inertia phenomena. Historians identify them without, however, trying to understand them most of the time. The movement that went, during Antiquity, from Mesopotamia to Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome is well known. The movement going from the Loess Plateau in northern China towards the Yangtze River Valley is less known in the Western world, although it is eminently important. The movement that happened during and after the Renaissance from northern Italy towards the Low Countries and England has been studied in detail by Braudel. The transfer of power from Europe to North America during the twentieth century also occurred progressively, following a process clearly marked by topodynamic inertia. Finally, still more recently, the development wave that developed in the Far East from Japan followed an undisputable spatial logic. There are many other similar examples. It is easier to demonstrate the importance of the concept of topodynamic inertia by referring to the world economic evolution than by presenting mathematical arguments. The best indicators of space-economic movements are certainly the investment flows. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to estimate. The shifts of production are easier to size up, but often various difficulties exist in the standardization

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of relevant production data stemming from heterogeneous sources. As for the population movements, they are generally better documented. However, since humankind has moved away from mere subsistence conditions, population densities constitute less and less worthwhile indicators of development. In spite of the various statistical obstacles, the identification of the great world topodynamic movements remains relatively easy, and the most stunning thing about them is their remarkable spatiotemporal stability, that is, their inertia, which is observed altogether in the processes of diffusion, succession, penetration, and polarization, as well as marginalization.

s REVERSIBILITY OF TOPODYNAMIC MOVEMENTS In the same way that the inertia which characterizes the evolution of urbexplosions contains the seeds of the succession of the urbexplosions at the world level, the topodynamic inertia which characterizes certain movements can give rise to bifurcations and even pendulum returns. The world topodynamic movements are reversible, although an inversion of such movements remains exceptional. Inertia is no fatality; rather, it is the mark of a trend. The inversions of topodynamic movements are generally caused by very real constraints. Thus, the westward movement from Mesopotamia collided with a huge obstacle: the Atlantic Ocean, which, before the discovery of America, led nowhere and constituted a kind of dead end. Conversely, the resumption of the same westward movement after the discovery of America is explained by the fact that the Atlantic obstacle had been removed. Later, in Europe, the eastward movement inside of the Mongolo-American Corridor that favored, from the eighteenth century, the development of Prussia and Russia, was inverted during the twentieth century because of the creation of the Iron Curtain, which interrupted the historical relations with Western Europe that sustained that movement.

CHAPTER

7

The Great Ebb: Europe’s Fight for Survival

T

he Great Ebb was caused by the collapse of Western Europe, but that part of the world got up again. Strangely enough, a factor which powerfully contributed to re-launch Western Europe was the progressive decline of the Eastern Roman Empire, assailed by Islam and others. The Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire in 610 when Emperor Heraclius I ascended the throne, adopted the title of “Basileus,” and made Greek the official language of the empire. The long decline of the empire lasted a millennium, from 476 to 1453, date of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans. The weakening of the Byzantine Empire and the loss of the Holy Land led the Occident to launch the Crusades and to directly confront the Moslem threat. From that clash resulted a new Western dynamism that led to the discovery of America. That fight of Christian Europe for survival is also a part of the Great Ebb. It is, to some extent, its reverse side.

s THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE The main battleground where the survival of Christianity was played was the Byzantine Empire where, right in the Great Corridor, was concentrated the largest part of the wealth of Christianity. It must not be forgotten that the first beneficiary of the inversion of the westward movement that had benefited Rome so much was Constantinople, whose very birth marked the beginning of the eastward movement. Between 330, when Constantinople became one of the two capitals of the Roman Empire, and 636, when Islam appeared to be a true rival, the Eastern Empire presented itself as the only heir of the old Roman Empire, and as the refuge of the greatness of that empire. In 476, the population of Constantinople was around 450,000 inhabitants. After having experienced a long decline following the fall of Rome and the Western Roman Empire, the city of Constantinople resumed its growth from about 750, when its population was just 250,000 inhabitants. Around 1050, the city reached

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its peak with half a million inhabitants (which is only half the population of Rome at its peak), and then a new period of decline succeeded. The city had just 200,000 inhabitants in 1204 when the Frankish Crusaders sacked it, and only 40,000 to 50,000 when the Ottomans captured it in 1453. However, Constantinople was just a part of the empire. Around 550, the Byzantine Empire was much more urbanized than the Western Europe dominated by the Germans. Its rate of urbanization was probably around ten to thirteen percent while the corresponding rate in Western Europe was about five to eight percent. However, urbanization receded within the Eastern Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire, as the Slavs, the Arabs, the Latin Crusaders, and the Turks progressively disrupted the empire through simple penetration (with the Slavs from about 530) or military conquests (with the Arabs from 636, the Latin Crusaders from 1204, and the Ottoman Turks from 1362). In fact, the swelling of Constantinople’s population from about 750 came probably as much, and maybe more, from the fact that a lot of people chased from their region by Byzantium’s enemies took refuge in Constantinople than from the fact that the city was developing. At the climax of the Eastern Empire, Constantinople was heading a powerful urbexplosion, which, after that of Rome and before that of Baghdad, dominated the western part of the Great Corridor from 360 to 850 approximately. The city ruled its urban system, of which it was the imperial and administrative capital, the main commercial port, the religious center, and the industrial metropolis. It concentrated a complex, highly bureaucratized, and thus heavily manned administration that meticulously governed the whole empire. For about three centuries (roughly 360–650) it was the largest city in the world (losing that title to the benefit of Changan-Xi’an), and still figured among the two or three largest for a further six centuries (until about 1250).1 Under that beacon city, other cities played an important role as long as they were not conquered by the Arabs or the Ottomans: Thessaloniki, Antioch, Ephesus, Adrianople, Edessa, and Jerusalem (see Map 9). These cities had populations ranging from 20,000 to 50,000. The Eastern Roman Empire reached its climax when Emperor Justinian (who reigned from 527 to 565) succeeded in somewhat reconstituting the Old Roman Empire by chasing the Vandals out of Africa, and by retaking Italy from the Ostrogoths and a part of Spain from the Visigoths. He did this while stopping the Sasanian Persians who were threatening his empire to the east. It is Justinian who built the most famous church of St. Sophia from 532 to 537. The first challenge he had to face was the penetration in Illyria (wich was his own region of origin) of Slavic populations attracted by the prosperity of the Great Corridor and the Byzantine urbexplosion. With 1.

Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 366–367.

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respect to the newcomers, the empire adopted a policy of integration. Thus the Slavs who settled on the Dalmatian coast and closer to Italy converted to Christianity and adopted the Latin liturgy from 550. They are today’s Croats. Their Serbian brothers, who had settled more to the east, closer to Constantinople, converted later, around 850, and adopted the Greek liturgy. As long as the Byzantine Empire remained strong, the Slavs the empire had welcome and, to a large extent, assimilated did not constitute a threat. Only when the empire weakened did the Croatian and Serbian states form, in 925 for Croatia and about 1180 for Serbia. Those states were sometimes at war with Byzantium, sometimes at peace, sometimes submitted, sometimes in rebellion. Their relations with the Byzantine Empire depended a lot on the arrival of new actors also attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor: the Bulgars, who were Turks and therefore Altaics like the Huns, and the Mongols, while the Slavs were Indo-Europeans. From 679, the Bulgars militarily invaded the Byzantine Empire and came to progressively occupy Thrace and the part of Europe situated to the north of traditional Greece, that is, a territory covering a part of present-day Bulgaria, Macedonia-Skopje, Albania, and the major part of present-day Serbia. This represented a serious problem for the Byzantine Empire for two reasons: first, because, contrary to the Slavs, the Bulgars arrived as bellicose conquerors, and second, because they were Islamized. As soon as 681, the defeated Byzantines had to yield some territory and recognize the Bulgarian state. Repeatedly, the Bulgars threatened Constantinople, which, at the same time, had to fight against the Arabs to the south. In 865, the Bulgarian leaders converted to Greek Christianity in order to get closer to the Slavic Christianized populations they dominated, but that did not calm their ardor. From 893 to 1018, the powerful Bulgarian Empire waged war on Byzantium with some peaceful periods. The Bulgarian tsar Peter even got married to a daughter of the emperor of Constantinople as a sign of alliance. In 1014, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II “Bulgaroctonus” defeated the Bulgars and blinded 15,000 prisoners before sending them back to the Bulgarian tsar Samuel. A few days later, Samuel died. In 1018, all of Bulgaria was submitted to Byzantium. It would be an error to perceive the Bulgarian Empire as a barbarian state without sophistication. Its proximity to the hearth of Constantinople’s urbexplosion made it a developed territory. The first Bulgarian Empire had Pliska and then Preslav as capital. The capital of the second Bulgarian Empire was Tarnovo. Around 950, Preslav was the capital and had about 60,000 inhabitants. It was then the largest non-Muslim city of Europe after Constantinople. Bulgaria must have been, along with Italy, the most urbanized region of Christian Europe outside of the Byzantine Empire. At some point, it even included Adrianople. That important city re-founded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, devolved to the Eastern Roman Empire in 395, conquered by the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1204, and re-conquered

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by the Byzantines in 1205, was attributed to the Bulgars by Byzantium in 1218 when the second Bulgarian Empire was created under Tsar John III Asen II. Adrianople was re-captured by the Byzantines around 1345 before being conquered by the Ottomans in 1355. While the Byzantine Empire had to tackle the problems created by the Slavs and Bulgars to the north, the southern flank of the empire faced still more serious assaults. The Slavs had penetrated the empire less than a century before and the Bulgar Turks had not yet arrived when the Byzantines had to confront the Arabs for the first time. That happened in 636, only four years after the death of Muhammad, at the battle of the Yarmuk River, to the east of the Sea of Galilee. The Byzantines were defeated and had to give up to the Moslem Arabs Palestine (with Jerusalem), Syria (with Damascus) and Antioch), and Egypt (with Alexandria). In 669, 674, and 717, the Arabs attempted to directly capture Constantinople, but they failed. Between the Byzantines and the Arabs, a long modus vivendi was then established that allowed the former to preserve a part of their empire and the latter to benefit from their ascendancy inside of a large part of the Great Corridor to enrich themselves, which made them less bellicose. The arrival of the Seljuq Turks, attracted like their Bulgar cousins by the Great Corridor, threw that modus vivendi back into question from 1040. In their ferocious race towards the central axis of the Great Corridor, the Seljuqs faced and defeated successively their brothers the Ghaznavid Turks of Iran, the Iranian dynasty of the Buyids-Buwayhids of Indo-European origin, the Semitic Arabs, and then the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes in 1071. They carried on with their conquests into Anatolia, where Islam had not yet penetrated. Around 1094, the Seljuqs came to control Transoxiana, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and almost all of Anatolia up to the Strait of Bosporus, in front of Constantinople. This is when, after six hundred years of marginality, the Western world came out from its torpor and decided to react. That happened on November 27, 1095 at Clermont in France, where a council of the Catholic Church, recently separated from the Orthodox Church (in 1054), was taking place. The one who, that day, sounded the reveille of western Christianity was the French Pope Urban II, born at Châtillon-sur-Marne under the name of Eudes de Lagery. That pope launched the very first of the eight Crusades that were to occur from 1096 to 1270 with the objective to liberate the Holy Land “from the yoke of the infidels.”2

2.

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1951).

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The Crusades can be seen as attempts to reverse the eastward movement to the benefit of Christian Europe. From a topodynamic point of view, there are essentially six types of migrations-invasions. The first type involves the conquest by a rich center situated in a topodynamic corridor of territories belonging to a poor or less-developed periphery located outside the corridor. The conquest of America by the Europeans (before the emergence of the American Corridor) and the creation of European colonies in Africa are examples of that. The second type of migrations-invasions involves movements towards the center of a topodynamic corridor from less-developed peripheral territories situated outside the corridor. The examples of this are innumerable: let us think about the Aryan invasions of India, the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the Semitic and Arab invasions of the Babylonian urbexplosion, the Slavic migrations towards the Byzantine Empire, the Turkish and Bulgar invasions of the same empire, the Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongol invasions of the Chinese Empire, or the Viking invasions of Neustria-Normandy. The third type involves, within a given topodynamic corridor, migrations-invasions from an emerging urbexplosion towards a declining urbexplosion, as in the cases of the Arab conquest of Spain or the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Romans. The fourth type concerns, within a given topodynamic corridor, migrations-invasions from a developed urbexplosion towards an emerging urbexplosion, as in the case of the conquest of England by the Normans become Frenchmen. The fifth type corresponds, within a given topodynamic corridor, to migrations-invasions from a declining urbexplosion towards an emerging urbexplosion in order to stop or even reverse a topodynamic movement that favors an emerging urbexplosion at the expense of a declining urbexplosion. To that category belong the Crusades, as well as the Spanish Reconquista or the conquest of the Arab Sicily by the Normans between 1061 and 1091. Finally, the sixth type refers to the migrations-invasions whose origin and destination are not located in a topodynamic corridor. Those are often (but not exclusively) guided by survival strategies in the context of subsistence economies rather than the search for conquest or enrichment. Thus, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Fulani stockbreeders moved from the east to the west at about the same time the Bantu farmers moved from the west to the east. Out of the eight Crusades, only one, the first, succeeded, and it led to the founding of the first four Latin states of the Levant: the County of Edessa, created in 1098, the Principality of Antioch, also founded in 1098, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded by Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne in 1099, and the County of Tripoli, that lasted from 1109 to 1289. Those Latin states were in fact Frankish states dominated by the French aristocracy of the time, namely the Houses of Boulogne, Rethel,

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Toulouse, Lusignan, Saint-Omer, Hauteville, Poitiers, Courtenay, Anjou, Champagne, Brienne, Châtillon, etc. The most important and symbolic conquest was that of Jerusalem, which had been captured from the Byzantines by the Moslems in 638 and was recaptured by the Crusaders, under the command of Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse, Tancred of Hauteville, and Godfrey of Bouillon, on July 15, 1099. Jerusalem remained a Christian city from 1099 to 1187, when it was overridden by the illustrious Saladin, who was a Kurd and, consequently, of Indo-European origin, then from 1229 to 1239, and, finally, from 1243 to 1244. The County of Edessa fell in 1144, the Principality of Antioch in 1268 (captured by the Mamluks of Egypt), the County of Tripoli in 1289, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291. Two other Christian states were created in the region and had a longer existence: the Latino-Byzantine Kingdom of Cyprus, which existed from 1192 to 1489, and the Latino-Armenian Kingdom of Small Armenia, which lasted from 1198 to 1375. To those states resulting from victories over the Moslems must be added four Latin states constituted at the expense of the Byzantine Empire : the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Kingdom of Thessaloniki, the Duchy of Athens, and the Principality of Morea, the three latter being vassal states of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The last four states resulted from the Fourth Crusade, which lasted from 1202 to 1204 and played a major role in the revival of Western Europe and the westward movement. Led by Boniface of Montferrat, that Crusade, which was officially intended to hit the Moslem power in Egypt, was rerouted towards Constantinople by the Venetians who financed the expedition. The Crusaders even dared to attack the Byzantine capital, capture it, and sack it from April 12 to 15, 1204. That conquest disrupted the Byzantine Empire. Its center became the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which lasted from 1204 to 1261, first under the House of Flanders, then under the Capetian House of Courtenay. The king of Thessaloniki, the duke of Athens, and the prince of Morea were the vassals of the Latin emperor. Three Byzantine states surrounded that center: to the east, the Empire of Trebizond, attributed to the Comnenus family, and the Empire of Nicaea, ruled by the Lascaris family (and, from 1222, the Ducas family); and, to the west, the Despotate of Epirus, granted to the Ducas family. Behind all those aristocratic families, three merchant states pulled the strings: Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. If the French lords assumed the titles, the merchants from Northern Italy saw to it that the disruption of the Byzantine Empire benefited them the most. The city of Amalfi, close to Naples, had opened the way. As soon as about 920, it had been the first Western state to

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establish regular commercial contacts with the Byzantine Empire.3 That was so beneficial that, between 920 and 1000, with its about 75,000 inhabitants, Amalfi was the largest Italian city. Unfortunately, its conquest by the Normans of Sicily in 1091, on the eve of the Crusades, put an end to its privileged relations with Byzantium, and the city declined rapidly. Venice was the one that followed the example of Amalfi with the most ambition and success. Thanks to the Crusades, Venice collected islands and port cities in the Aegean and Adriatic seas in order to create a true commercial empire (see Map 13). Genoa, called the Republic of St. Georges, also followed in Amalfi’s footsteps and competed with Venice. En 1261, the Genoese concluded an alliance with the Byzantine Empire of Nicaea and succeeded to establish trading posts at two terminals of the Silk Road on the Black Sea: Kaffa, in Crimea, and Tana, on the Don River, which runs towards the Black Sea. They had previously made alliance with the city of Pisa in order to chase the Arabs from the western part of the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, Genoa succeeded to lay hands on Corsica and Sardinia. From 1204 to 1453, date of the fall of Constantinople, Venice, Genoa and Pisa did all they could to get the maximum profit from the agony of the Byzantine Empire. Rarely in history have the states of an emerging urbexplosion so openly and ruthlessly stripped a rival urbexplosion. And all this was done while delivering inspired sermons about solidarity among Christians and the need to assist the Byzantines. On July 25, 1261, thanks to a surprise attack, the Byzantine Empire of Nicaea succeeded, with the support of the Genoese, to capture the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The Latins kept, in Greece, the Duchy of Athens and the Principality of Achaea (which was a relic of the Principality of Morea). At that time, with its 200,000 inhabitants, Constantinople remained the largest Christian city, far ahead of Paris, which had only 120,000. However, the new, partially reunited Byzantine Empire was weak. If Genoa supported it, Venice opposed it. Moreover, the dissensions among the Greeks were numerous, and the Latins, the Venetians, the Serbs as well as the Bulgars took care to exploit them. A civil war erupted between 1341 and 1347, and new actors entered who changed everything. In 1344–1345, Byzantium requested the aid of the Ottoman Turks against the Serbs. The Ottomans, like the Seljuq Turks, have an Altaic origin. Around 1200, they had been repulsed by the Mongol invasions and had taken refuge in Anatolia, where they had obtained the protection of their Seljuq cousins who used them to harass the Byzantine Empire. In 1302, at the death of the last Seljuq sultan, the Ottomans had asserted their independence.

3.

Michel Balard, “Amalfi et Byzance (Xe–XIIe siècle),” Centre de recherche d’histoire et de civilisation de Byzance, Travaux et Mémoires 6 (1976): 85–95.

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And now Byzantium called them for help against the Christian Serbs. The Ottomans jumped at that unique opportunity and got a foothold in Europe, at Gallipoli, to the southwest of Constantinople, in 1354. From that moment, little by little, the Ottomans strangled Constantinople by progressively surrounding it. In 1362, they captured Adrianople, which they renamed Edirne and made their capital. In 1389, at the famous Kosovo battle, they beat the Serbs. Then they occupied Bulgaria. When, on May 29, 1453, they took the city of Constantinople,4 the Byzantine Empire had already boiled down to that sole city. Despite that, that day was one of the saddest of the whole history of Christianity, even though, for Constantinople and its urbexplosion, the peace brought by the Ottomans allowed for a major relaunching. Thus, the population of the city, become capital of the Ottoman Empire (and, later, from 1923, Istanbul), went from 60,000 in 1453 to 600,000 around 1550 and one million around 1900. In the years that followed the capture of Constantinople, the Ottomans extended even more their domination over southeastern Europe. Around 1500, their empire covered a territory larger than present-day Turkey which included a large part of the Balkans. At its climax, around 1550, it covered present-day Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, a part of Croatia, Albania, MacedoniaSkopje, Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Crimea, Georgia, Armenia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, a part of Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. The period of decline began on October 7, 1571, at the time of the naval battle of Lepanto where, thanks to Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles the Fifth, Spain defeated the Ottomans. However, the empire continued to pose a threat. Thus it came close to capture Vienna at various occasions, the last one being in 1683. The Ottoman Empire disappeared in 1922, 351 years after the battle of Lepanto. From a topodynamic point of view, the fall of Constantinople drove Christianity into a corner. It cut it from the Black Sea and, consequently, from the Silk Road. Right before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the access to the Silk Road was already impossible through Alexandria, Gaza, Damascus and Tyre, and Antioch. After 1453, only two accesses were left, both through the Black Sea: the first through Trebizond, located on the southern coast of the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea, the second through Kaffa (present-day Feodossia) or Tana (present-day Azov), both located in the northern region of the Black Sea. Trebizond fell to the Ottomans in 1461, as well as Kaffa and Tana in 1475. Thereafter, Christian Europe was cut off from the Spice Road, consequently from India, Yemen, and Somalia, but also from the Silk Road, 4.

The Turks overwhelmed Constantinople thanks to a monster cannon capable of firing projectiles exceeding 800 pounds in weight. That cannon had been previously offered to Constantinople by its makers, but rejected as too expensive.

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hence from China. The Occident had no choice but to look for a new route through the Atlantic, either towards the west and the unknown, or towards the south along the African coast. Meanwhile, as long as such routes were not discovered, a city-state played a strategic role as a link between the Christian Occident and the Moslem Orient: the Republic of Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik in Croatia). That city, which depended on the Venetian Empire from 1204 and the time of the Fourth Crusade to 1358, succeeded to re-establish its relative independence and security from the fifteenth century by paying tribute to the Ottoman Empire, that had taken control of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Neutral, Catholic, traditionally linked to Italy, and vassal of the Ottomans, Ragusa made use of all connections, and emerged as an intermediary between Christianity and the Moslem world. Its fleet became during the sixteenth century the main Mediterranean fleet for heavy transportation, besides and level with Genoa and Venice, its former master. A maritime power, Ragusa succeeded also to develop its terrestrial exchanges, particularly with Belgrade, the regions of the Danube, and Istanbul.5

s RUSSIA The most important front in the struggle between Christianity and Islam was unquestionably the one whose stake was the control of Constantinople’s urbexplosion. That battle had just been lost for Christianity with the fall of the city. However, two more peripheral fronts existed where Christianity gained ground instead of losing it: Russia and Spain. The origin of Russia resembles that of France or post-William-the-Conqueror England. France is the fruit of a double crossbreeding: a crossbreeding of the Germanic Franks with the GalloRoman culture and Christianity, which produced the French aristocracy, and the crossbreeding of the French aristocracy with the essentially Celtic Gallic population. Similarly, post-William-the-Conqueror England is the fruit of the double crossbreeding of the Vikings with the French culture and Christianity, which produced the Normans, and of the Norman aristocracy with the people who lived in England before the conquest by William the Conqueror, that is, an essentially Indo-European population made of Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, etc. As for Russia, it is the fruit of the crossing of the Vikings from Sweden, named both Rus and Varegs, with the Byzantine culture and Christianity, which produced the Russian aristocracy, and the crossing of the Russian aristocracy with the Slavic and Finnish populations living in present-day Ukraine 5.

Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel : La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1923–1947) (Athens: Institut de recherches néohelléniques/F.N.R.S., 1999), 92.

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and western Russia. Rus meant “redhead people” and Vareg means in Old Norse “people carrying merchandise.” The word Russia comes from Rus (in French, a red-hair Russian woman is said une Russe rousse). The origin and the destiny of Russia is profoundly marked by the Great and Asian corridors. Russia is the world’s vastest country and, till the re-emergence, around 1825, of the Mongolo-American Corridor, it was crossed by no powerful topodynamic economic current (under the Mongol Empire, the Mongolo-American Corridor played a major role militarily, but much less economically). The whole history of Russia seems to have had the sole objective of covering to the maximum the space of Eurasia situated to the north of the Great and Asian corridors. Throughout their history, the Russians systematically tried to bring their borders closer to the central axes of those two corridors. To the northeast, those borders got as close as 400 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor, at the point where Russia is only separated from Alaska by the Bering Strait. More to the south, they reached Vladivostok and the Kuril Islands (that separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean), which lie at about 700 kilometers from the central axis of the Great Corridor. To the southwest, the borders of Russia got as close as about 400 kilometers from the central axis of the Asian Corridor in the region where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan touch each other. To the west, the closest point of the Russian border to the central axis of the Great Corridor lies on the Black Sea at the border of Georgia, and it is about 1,000 kilometers from that central axis. Even the USSR did not reach the central axis of one or the other corridors, though Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan are very close to the central axis of the Asian Corridor (however, without ever touching it). On the other hand, it must be noticed that, when the Russian borders got close to one or the other central axes of the two corridors, it was at points situated far from those corridors’ major urbexplosions. The very birth of Russia stems from the topodynamic currents that were generated by those two corridors. At the origin, the territory presently occupied by Ukraine and western Russia was populated by the IndoEuropean Slavs probably coming from the region situated right to the north of the Caucasus, as well as the Finnish coming from the Ural region. During the seventh and eighth centuries, new Altaic invasions in the direction of the Great Corridor crossed the region. After the Bulgar Turks who had arrived from 679, now their cousins, the Khazar Turks, entered the region of the Volga, Don, and Dnieper rivers as well as Crimea, and they imposed their domination upon the Slavic populations living there. Like the Bulgars, who had become Orthodox Christians, the court of the empire created by the Khazars converted, but, strangely enough, it opted, around 740, for Judaism, while Christianity and Islam were much more present in the surrounding areas.

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The vast region situated right to the north of the territory of the Bulgars and the Khazars attempted to protect itself from its powerful neighbors. The Finnish and Slavs from the region of the future city of Novgorod (located to the south of present-day St. Petersburg) called on the help of the Varegs from Birka in Sweden, who were remarkable sailors, dangerous warriors, but also good merchants. The Varegs rushed up, founded the city of Novgorod around 860, and made their chief Rurik (who died in 879) the prince of the Novgorod region in 862. From there, they extended little by little their domination over northern Russia. Rapidly, the Varegs were as attracted by the wealth of the Great Corridor as had been the Bulgars, the Khazars, and others before them. In 860, two of Rurik’s companions, Askold and Dir, decided to invade the Byzantine Empire through a route they had explored in 858. That route was later called “the road from the Varegs to the Greeks.” They reached Constantinople, but were defeated. The “road from the Varegs to the Greeks” starts from the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, follows the Neva River, passes by Lake Ladoga, follows the Volkhov River, crosses Lake Ilmen, and takes the Lovat River. It then forks to the Volga and leaves the basin of the Baltic Sea to reach the Caspian Sea Basin. After following the Volga on a short distance, it leaves the Caspian Sea Basin to enter the Black Sea Basin. It then takes the Dnieper River down to the Black Sea and Constantinople. On that mainly maritime and fluvial route, one location particularly interested the Varegs: the junction of the Desna and Dnieper rivers, the latter running from Smolensk, to the south of Novgorod, towards the Black Sea. At that point located halfway between Novgorod and Constantinople, they chose to found a new city, Kiev, and to make it their capital in 882, under Oleg the Wise (879–912), who united under his rule the territories of Novgorod and Kiev. The site of Kiev6 presented the advantage over the site of Novgorod of being closer to Constantinople, which continued to fascinate the Varegs, while being far enough from that city to be shielded from the Byzantines’ attacks. This is how Kiev became the first capital of Russia. In 944, Oleg’s successor, Igor (who can be the son either of Oleg or Rurik), took “the road from the Varegs to the Greeks” and, like Askold and Dir, tried to conquer Constantinople. Like them, he failed, but, instead of persisting in the project, he was clever enough to negotiate a form of association with the Byzantines. A trade treaty was signed, and Igor accepted to open

6.

Kiev is located on the western, right bank of the Dnieper, where a high-ground gorodishche (’burg’) of the eighth century controlled a major river crossing.

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the kingdom of Kiev to the Christian missionaries sent by Byzantium. Igor died in 945 and twelve years later, his widow, Olga, converted to Orthodox Christianity. It was the beginning of the conversion of Russia. In 988, the Grand Prince of Kiev, Vladimir I Sviatoslavitch the Great, married Ann, the sister of the terrible Byzantine Emperor Basil II “Bulgaroctonus.” As a consequence of his marriage, Vladimir converted. Later, the Orthodox Church canonized him. Vladimir is one of the patron saints of Russia. Thanks to him, Kiev became a religious center, the seat of a metropolitan bishop. Between 1000 and 1025, the population of Kiev reached about 45,000 inhabitants. With Constantinople, Ratisbon and Venice, it was one of the four largest Christian cities of Europe (the great cities of Córdoba, Seville and Palermo were then Moslem). Vladimir’s son, Iaroslav Vladimirovitch the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev, succeeded to unite Russia, to extend the Russian territory to the Baltic Sea and to transform Kiev into the artistic and religious center of Russia. In 1044, his daughter, Ann of Kiev, married the French King Henry I and became Queen of France. During the same period, the Normans, those Viking cousins of the Varegs, were conquering southern Italy (in 1059), Sicily (from 1061 to 1072), and England (in 1066). Unfortunately, this Golden Age did not last. The Russian princes started to oppose each other and the unity of Russia vanished. Around 1054, Kiev was reduced to the rank of simple city of the principality of Galicia, whose capital was Halicz (in Polish, or Galitch in Russian). When, from 1054, the Kipchak Turks (called Polovtsy by the Russians and Kumans by the Byzantines), attracted like the other Altaics by the Great Corridor and the Byzantine Empire, invaded the region between Kiev and the Black Sea, Galicia received an important influx of refugees, which favored its development. Unfortunately, after the Kipchaks came the Mongols, who destroyed Kiev in 1240. They were commanded by Batu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and nephew of Ogadai, the Great Khan who reigned at Karakorum, in Mongolia. By 1240 Batu Khan had conquered all of Russia, and by 1241 he also held Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the Danube Valley under his control. In December 1241 Ogadai died and Batu stopped his invasion of Europe in order to participate in the choice of Ogadai’s successor. After his return, Batu Khan established, in 1245, the Mongol suzerainty over Russia, and founded the Khanate of the Golden Horde in 1251. The Islamized Turks rapidly became more numerous than the Mongols (also called Tatars or Tartars) in the Khanate, the Turkish language replaced Mongol, and Islam became the Khanate’s religion, although the Orthodox Church survived inside of

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the vassal Russian states. Around 1350, dissentions shook the cohesion of the Golden Horde, and then Timur (Tamerlane) devastated the Khanate, which had also, in 1480, to suffer the assaults of the Tatars of Crimea. The disunity between the Altaics gave the Russians the possibility to shake off their yoke thanks to the grand princes of Moscow and Vladimir, who had taken over from the grand princes of Kiev, especially from 1326, when the metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church had decided to move from Kiev to Moscow. That decision was caused by the pressure exerted on the State of Kiev by the expansion of Lithuania under the Grand Duke Gediminas (Gedymin in Polish), who reigned from 1316 to 1341, and his successors. That expansion was such that Kiev was conquered by Lithuania in 1362, and, at its peak, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania covered the major part of the basin of the Dnieper and extended its territory up to the borders of the Grand Principality of Moscow. Lithuania having converted to Catholicism and allied with Catholic Poland in 1386, the grand princes of Moscow and Vladimir became the defenders of the Orthodox Church and preferred to associate themselves with the Mongols of the Golden Horde in order to resist the Lithuanians, the Poles, and the Teutonic Knights, who were all Catholics. In gratitude for their fidelity, the Golden Horde conferred, in 1328, on Ivan I the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and Vladimir. The cities of Moscow and Vladimir were part of the same principality, and, around 1250, Moscow replaced Vladimir as its capital. Less exposed than Kiev, Moscow also presented the advantage of being situated at a crossroads between the “road from the Varegs to the Greeks,” the route of the Volga and the route of the Don River.7 Another advantage of Moscow’s location came from the fact that, while being part of the Volga Basin, it was very close to the Don and Dnieper basins. Moscow is located on the Moskva River, a tributary of the Oka River that is itself a tributary of the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. Upstream, the Oka River gets very close to the source of the Don River, which runs towards the Sea of Azov (an outgrowth of the Black Sea). To the north of Moscow, going upsteam the Volga, the Volga route joins the “road from the Varegs to the Greeks” and, through it, the Baltic and Black seas. Moreover, the Moscow region was far enough from Sarai and the hearth of the Golden Horde to eventually allow its princes to defy with success the suzerainty of the Golden Horde.

7.

The earliest known reference to Moscow is of 1147. That year, the city was founded by Yuri Dolgoruki, Prince of Suzdal, on a prominent ridge alongside and commanding the Moskva River, on the left bank of the river on high ground some 40 meters above the river, in the angle formed by the main stream and a tributary, the Neglinnaia. The advantages of Moscow’s location are also described in Chapter 11 and Map 21, p. 456.

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That opportunity came with the decline of the Golden Horde. In 1380, the Mongol Khanate of the White Horde, located more to the east, succeeded to take control of the Golden Horde. Taking advantage of that confrontation between Mongols, the Russians under the command of Dmitry Ivanovich, Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir, dared raise their head and rebelled. They even won the battle of Kulikovo Pole against the Mongols in 1380, but, two years later, the Golden Horde forced the Russians to once again recognize its suzerainty. Then, once more, new Turkic-Mongol invaders attracted by the Great Corridor came from the east: the troops of Timur. In 1395, Timur destroyed Sarai-Berke and sacked Sarai-Batu. After his passing, discord prevailed between the Turks, the Bulgars from the Volga, the Tatars from Crimea, and the Mongols of the region. In 1480, the Tatars from Crimea destroyed what was left of Sarai-Batu. That same year, Grand Prince Ivan III freed Moscow from the Mongol suzerainty. In 1472 Ivan III had married Zoe-Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XII Paleologus. Previously, Ivan III, who was from the Rurik branch of the princes of Moscow, had married Maria of Tver, from the Rurik branch of the princes of Tver. The Rurik princes of Tver had been designated on four occasions by the Mongol khans of the Golden Horde as grand princes of Vladimir. The Mongol khans of the Golden Horde were using the rivalry between the princes of Tver and the princes of Moscow, from the same Rurik dynasty, to consolidate their power over that part of Russia. At certain times, they favored the Tvers and designated them as grand princes of Vladimir; at other times, they favored the princes of Moscow. In order to put a definitive end to this power play, in 1485, Ivan III attacked his former brother-in-law Michael III, who was Prince of Tver since 1461, and forced him to flee. Ivan III then annexed Tver to the Principality of Vladimir and Moscow. That action greatly contributed to the rise of a Russian Empire centered on Moscow, which then reached a population of about 100,000. The son of Ivan III and Zoe-Sophia Paleologus, Vasily III, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow, considered himself to be the heir of both the Rurik dynasty and the emperors of Constantinople. He and his descendants dreamed of making Moscow the “third Rome” by taking over from Constantinople the Ottomans had taken in 1453. After the accession of the Grand Principality of Moscow to sovereignty, the Golden Horde divided in four parts: Orthodox Russia, and the three Moslem Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and the Crimea. The son of Vasily III, Ivan IV the Terrible, who was the first to take the title of “tsar” in remembrance of the Byzantine “caesars,” conquered Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556. As for Crimea, it was annexed by Russia just in 1783, a long time after Siberia had been conquered, from 1581 to 1643, when Russia reached the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific Ocean.

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s THE SPANISH RECONQUISTA If the Christian Russians endured the Mongol and Moslem domination for 235 years (from 1245 to 1480), the presence of Islam in Spain lasted much longer, that is, 781 years (from 711 to 1492). The reconquest of Spain by Christianity, the Reconquista, lasted almost as long, from 717, date of the founding of the kingdom of Asturias by Pelago and Visigoth refugees, till the conquest of Granada in 1492. Patiently, Christianity maintained its pressure on the Moslems, eroded gradually their territory, and came to expulse them completely.8 From a topodynamic point of view, the Russian and Spanish cases profoundly differ. The back-and-forth movements of Christianity in Russia were, above all, caused by the successive waves of the Altaic invasions in direction of the Great Corridor and, particularly, the Byzantine Empire, the greatest lure of all. In the Spanish case, from the defeat of Poitiers in 732, the invasions coming from the south in direction of the Great Corridor had ceased. The Reconquista was mainly caused by the progressive weakening of the Arab power inside of Islam. As already underlined, from 874 in Persia and 972 in the Maghrib, the Arab dynasties gave way to Iranian, Berber, and Afghan dynasties. And then those dynasties gave way, in turn, to Altaic dynasties: Turkic or Mongol. To those changes of dynasties were associated the Great Ebb eastward movement towards India, China, and Indonesia, as well as the corresponding eastward shift of the Islam center of gravity. The Spanish outgrowth of Islam became increasingly marginal, and Christianity could recapture the lost ground. Islam’s retreat movement started from the Basque country and the Kingdom of Asturias, which the Arabs never conquered. From 711 to 1035, the Kingdom of Asturias gave birth, from west to east, to the kingdom of Leon and Castile, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon, and the Earldom of Barcelona. The whole north of Spain was recaptured, including the cities of Santiago de Compostela (in 739), Barcelona9 (in 801), León (in 850), Coimbra (in 878), Burgos (in 884), and Porto (in 997). Between 1035 and 1086, the center of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, was recuperated with the cities of Braga (in 1040), Segovia (in 1079), Guadalajara (in 1085), and Toledo (in 1085). Then the Christian

8.

9.

It must be pointed out that the great period of the Reconquista began with the taking of Toledo in 1085 and ended with the capture of Murcia in 1266. That period and the Norman conquest of Sicily corresponded with the epoch of the Crusades. Barcelona was called Barcino under the Roman Empire.

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Kingdom of Portugal was added.10 The kingdom of León and Castile split and gave birth to the Kingdom of León and the Kingdom of Castile, and the Earldom of Barcelona became the Kingdom of Catalonia. In 1086, the Almoravids from Morocco flew to the assistance of the Moslems from Spain, and succeeded, in October, to slow down the progression of the Christian troops. Despite that, Avila was recaptured in 1088, Saragossa11 in 1118, Soria in 1119, Lisbon12 in 1147, and Evora in 1166. Later, the Reconquista resumed thanks to the Christian victory of Las Navas de Tolosa, on July 16, 1212. From 1212 to 1300, the whole south fell except for the Moslem Kingdom of Granada. Thus, the Christians recaptured the cities of Mérida (in 1228), Badajoz (in 1229), Córdoba (in 1236), Valencia (in 1238), Murcia (in 1243), Cartagena13 (in 1243), Murcia (in 1243), Seville (in 1248), Cádiz (in 1262), and Tarifa (in 1292). From 1232, the Kingdom of Granada remained the only Moslem state of the Iberian Peninsula. Granada replaced Córdoba as the largest city of the Iberian Peninsula, after the reconquest of Córdoba in 1236.14 Around 1300, its population reached 150,000 inhabitants. It was then one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1400, its population had dropped to 100,000 in habitants. By 1519, after its capture by the Christians, its population had fallen to 70,000 inhabitants. The most glorious period of Granada’s history corresponds to the reign of the Nasrids, who ruled the Kingdom of Granada from 1238 to 1492. In order to maintain their power, the Nasrids had to waver between submission to the Christian Kingdom of Castile and dependence on their Marinid kinsmen of Fes (in Morocco). The first Nasrid ruler was a tributary vassal of the king of Castile, but, later, from 1272 to 1340, his successors opted for the Marinids’ suzerainty. In 1479, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were reunited thanks to the accession to the throne of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon who had married in 1469. The two last sovereigns of the Nasrid dynasty were 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

It must be noted that the origin of Portugal goes back to Emperor Augustus, who divided the Iberian Peninsula into three Roman provinces: Tarraconensis (northern Spain with Tarraco, present-day Tarragona, as capital), Baetica (Andalusia with Corduba as capital), and Lusitania (with Emerita Augusta, which is now Mérida, as capital). Lusitania later became Portugal. Saragossa was called Caesaraugusta under the Roman Empire. Lisbon was founded by the Phoenicians, and later occupied by the Carthaginians, before coming under Roman domination in 207 BC. Lisbon was called Felicitas Julia under the Roman Empire. Before the fall of Rome, Lisbon was taken in 419 by the Visigoths. From 714 to 1147, the city was occupied by the Moors. Cartagena was called Carthago Nova under the Roman Empire. Granada originated as Elibyrge, a Celtic settlement, occupying the high ground of the later Albayzín, across the valley of the Darro River. The Romans and Visigoths knew it as Illiberis, an obscure unimportant settlement.

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Muhammad XII the Brave and Muhammad XI, called Boabdil, who reigned before Muhammad XII, in 1482 and 1483, and also after him, from 1486 to 1492. Those two sovereigns refused to pay tribute to Castile. In retaliation, Castile attacked the Kingdom of Granada in 1491 and captured it on January 2, 1492. Few months later, that is, a few months before the discovery of America that occurred in October 1492, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, under the pressures of the Great Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada,15 expelled the 170,000 Jews who did not accept conversion to Christianity while the Muslims continued to benefit from religious freedom. The expelled Sephardic Jews found refuge in the Muslim countries, in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and also in various Christian countries. Many Spanish cities suffered from the expulsion of their Jewish craftsmen and some trade sectors have never recovered. The religious freedom granted to the Moslems soon was questioned, and the Spanish kings organized forced conversions. The new converted were called the Moriscos. In 1499 and 1500, the Moslem Moors rebelled and, like the Jews before them, they were forced to choose between conversion and exile. Half a million of them, including the most skilled agriculturalists and artificers of the country, chose to leave. Those who converted continued to constitute a separate group. In 1609, despite their being officially Christians, the Moriscos were expelled in their turn. If the Reconquista considerably limited the religious freedom and even came to eliminate it, it also had very negative impacts on urbanization. The major part of the great cities of Moslem Spain experienced a pronounced economic and demographic decline after their capture by the Christians. That evolution can be compared to the effects of the fall of the Western Roman Empire on urbanization. What happened in Spain with the Reconquista was also observed in Sicily, where Islam was present from 827 to 1091, in Sardinia, where it was present intermittently from 711 to 1016, in Malta, where it was present from 870 to 1250, and even in the present territory of France (which was not French at the time, though), where the Saracens (as the Franks called the Moslems then) occupied the region of Narbonne, from 719 to 759, and then the region of La Garde-Freinet, to the northwest of Saint-Tropez in the Var department, between 890 and 973. La Garde-Freinet was the place where the penetration of Islam got the closest to the central axis of the Great Corridor in Western Europe. The Saracens were chased from there, after 83 years, by William I of Provence and Ghibelline (Gibelin) of Grimaldi.

15.

The Spanish Inquisition had been set up in 1478. On February 6, 1481, the first auto da fe was staged in the main plaza at Seville. In eight years, between 1481 and 1489, the Seville tribunal alone burnt more than 700 heretics.

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In those regions, a city particularly distinguished itself during the Moslem period: Palermo in Sicily. Palermo was conquered by the Arabs in 831 and it remained Moslem till 1072. Around 1060, it reached 150,000 persons, which made it the largest city of present-day Italy and one of the largest cities in Europe with Christian Constantinople, which had about half a million inhabitants, and the Moslem Córdoba, with about 450,000 in habitants, and Seville, which was about as big as Palermo. At that time, Palermo was a port whose trade with North Africa flourished, and a rich and magnificent city surrounded with a particularly well-exploited agricultural hinterland. As in the case of Granada and Córdoba, the Christian reconquest of Palermo was followed by such a population decline that, in 1300, its population was only 40,000 inhabitants.

s THE RESURRECTION OF THE WEST EUROPEAN URBEXPLOSION In spite of their considerable urban and economic backwardness, Christian Europe and, more precisely, the part of Western Europe located in the Great Corridor came to slowly rise up during the period of the Great Ebb. A new West European urbexplosion emerged, which had not Rome anymore as its epicenter, but rather numerous cities from Northern Italy: Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence, and Pisa, all those cities belonging to the Great Corridor, as Rome had before. The gestation period of that new urbexplosion was very long, the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire having resulted in the quasi-disappearance of the existing urbanization as well as the disruption of the political unity of Western Europe. The Catholic Church was basically the only true link between the romanized Western Europe and the barbarian one as well as between the multiple states or quasi-states that had replaced the Western Roman Empire. That being said, it must be stressed that the Church of Rome did not easily convert the new Germanic leaders. The main obstacle it had to confront was Arianism, whose name comes from Arius, that priest of Alexandria who, at the beginning of the fourth century, had negated the divine nature of Christ while continuing his apostolate. The main Germanic tribes that had chosen to convert to Christianity had adopted the Arianism preached by Ulfilas, that Arian bishop who, between 350 and 383, hence before the fall of Rome, had been active in the Danube region, to the north of Constantinople, and evangelized the Goths. Ulfilas invented the gothic alphabet and wrote the earliest translation of the Bible into a Germanic language called Gothic. The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards, among others, converted to Arianism. The Franks were the first Germans to officially convert to Roman Christianity. Their king, Clovis (whose name later became Louis, which is the name of so many kings of France), was baptized by saint Remi, bishop

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of Reims, around 498. That baptism marked a turning point in the history of Western Europe. It sealed the alliance between the Church of Rome, the Franks, and the Christianized Gallo-Roman population of ancient Gaul. During the following years, the Franks took a determining ascendancy over all the other Germans settled in the former Western Roman Empire, including the Burgundians (who, under Sigismond, around 520, were the first to abjure Arianism to convert to Catholicism), Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Alamanni, Suebi, Vandals, or Lombards. Little by little, Arianism retreated, and it disappeared when its last followers, the Lombards, joined Catholicism around 700. The Celts from the British Islands played an important role in the conversion of the Germans to Catholicism. Christianity penetrated into the British Islands in three successive waves. The Christianization of the Celts started with the founding of abbeys in Celtic lands. One of those first Celtic abbeys, named Candida Casa, was situated at Whithorn in Scotland and was founded by saint Ninian around 397. Another one was located at Llangarvan in Wales. During the second wave, saint Patrick evangelized Celtic Ireland. Patrick was born in England around 385; he was made prisoner by pirates and taken to Ireland. Freed, he took refuge at Auxerre in Burgundy where he became priest and, later, was consecrated bishop by saint Germanus of Auxerre in 432. He then went back to Ireland and converted that island between 433 and 461, the year he died. That gave birth to a second wave of diffusion of Christianity starting from Ireland and leading to the creation of a network of abbeys in Northumbria, in northern England, and in Scotland, thanks to saint Columba who founded the abbey of Iona Island off Scotland. The third wave led to the creation of an “English” Church (that is, of the German Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and not anymore of the Celts). The Christianization of the “English” south of England goes back to saint Augustine of Canterbury who, probably born in Rome, converted, around 597, the Kingdom of Kent, which was the very first “English” kingdom to convert to Christianity. Progressively, the English Church integrated the older Celtic churches. However, the wave of evangelization launched from the Celtic lands passing through the AngloSaxon lands continued and reached the continent. It contributed, through the English saint Boniface, to convert the Germanic populations to Catholicism. The Old Saxony was the last region of present-day Germany to convert, which it did just during the eighth century. In 481–482, when Clovis acceded to the throne, the kingdom of the Salian Franks had Tournai (Belgium) as capital. It stretched over a territory about as large as present-day Austria, which included present-day Belgium, a part of northern France, and a large part of the Netherlands and the German Nordrhein-Westfalen Lander. From a geographical point of view, that territory was highly strategic. It was crossed by the Rhine, the Meuse-Maas, the Moselle,

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and the Scheldt, those three last rivers being in close relations with the Seine, the Saône, and the Rhône, while the Rhine was in close relations with the Danube. The expansion of the Franks followed to a large extent those fluvial links. Under Clovis, the capital of the Franks moved from Tournai, on the Scheldt, to Soissons, on the Aisne River, which is a tributary of the Oise, which runs to the Seine, and, later to Paris, on the Seine. Soissons and Paris16 were part of the kingdom of the Roman Syagrius before Clovis conquered that kingdom in 486, ten years after the fall of Rome. The kingdom of Syagrius was the last territory of Western Europe under the control of the Romans. Three centuries after Clovis, in 814, at the death of Charles the Great, Clovis’ heir at the head of the Franks, the territory submitted to them essentially covered present-day France, Germany, Italy, Navarre, Catalonia, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Austria. After Clovis, the Franks had various capitals: Paris, Soissons, Orléans, Reims, Sens, Laon, Metz, Chalon, Tournai, and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), the capital of Charles the Great. The expansion of the Frankish Empire was favored by the weakening of the Mediterranean Europe caused by the invasion of Islam. Muslim control of the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea extended to continual piracy along its northern shores. Trade was completely disrupted. As Pirenne observed, for the first time Europe was forced to live by its own resources. “As a result the Frankish Empire, which had so far been playing only a minor role in the history of Europe, was to become the arbiter of Europe’s destinies … Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.”17 It must be noted that the central axis of the Great Corridor touched the kingdom Clovis had inherited and divided the territory Charles the Great dominated at his death in two equal parts. The Great Corridor axis that had been the spine of the Roman Empire was also the spine of Charles the Great’s Empire. Charles the Great’s son, Louis the Pious, preserved his father’s heritage till his death in 840. Unfortunately, that death marked the end of the attempt to reconstitute the old Western Roman Empire under the direction of the Franks. That attempt had been backed by the Church of Rome in 800, when Pope Leo III had consecrated Charles the Great emperor and placed him at the head of the new Empire of Occident. Although politically and militarily dominated by the Franks, that empire was, to a large extent, an extension of the Church 16.

17.

Paris is located at a point where the Seine can be crossed thanks to the Ile de la Cité. During the Roman period, the original Gallic inhabitants occupied the Ile de la Cité while the Romans themselves preferred the left bank, later called “Quartier latin.” Henri Pirenne, Mediaeval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

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of Rome, which constituted the first and foremost institution of Western Europe. The Church was the holder of the spiritual power, which transcended the temporal power, and the true depositary of the Western civilization. When he chose to split his empire between his sons, Louis the Pious compromised for a very long time the unity of Western Europe, and gave birth to European feudalism, according to which the fiefs and territories were the personal belongings of their lords who could dispose of them as they pleased. The decision of Louis the Pious and feudalism originate from the Frankish laws (which included the famous “Salic law”), whose philosophy opposed the old Roman conception according to which Rome and the Empire had precedence over the person of the emperors, and the emperors over the “vicars” of Rome who administered the various “dioceses” of the Roman Empire. The power which went from top to bottom in the Roman Empire had to be built again from bottom to top in the context of the European feudalism through the logic of the relations between vassals and suzerains. From the Carolingian Empire, feudalism spread to Brittany and Pomerania (future Prussia), but also to England at the Norman conquest of 1066, as well as to Sicily and Southern Italy during the Norman conquests of the eleventh century. Later, it even reached Northern Italy, Bohemia, and Moravia.18 The first dividing up of the empire between the three first sons of Louis (Lothair, Pepin, and Louis the German) was defined in 817, during the life of Louis the Pious. However, at his death, that division was not relevant anymore since Pepin had died and Louis the Pious had had, in 823, a son from a second marriage, Charles the Bald. The Verdun Treaty was negotiated and signed in 843. According to it, the empire was split into three parts following the logic of the Great Corridor. The central part crossed by the central axis of the Great Corridor was attributed to the eldest son, Lothair, who received the title of Roman Emperor. The Kingdom of Lothair, named Lotharingia, encompassed the parts of Italy Charles the Great had conquered, including the March of Friul and Lombardy, as well as Provence, Burgundy, Lorraine, and the whole Frankish region Clovis had inherited (including present-day Belgium and the Netherlands). The Kingdom of Lotharingia was crossed by the Meuse-Maas, the Rhine, the Rhône, and the Po, which constitute the spinal column of the Great Corridor in Europe. The second surviving son, Louis the German, received the Francia orientalis located to the east of the central axis, while the youngest son, Charles the Bald, inherited Francia occidentalis situated to the west. 18.

The disintegration of the Carolingian Empire and the spreading of feudalism were favored by the continual Scandinavian invasions (Vikings, Norsemen, Danes) from the north, but also by the invasions of the Magyars and the Slavs from the east, and the Saracens from the south. For instance, the Scandinavians first invaded England in 793 and France around 800.

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Influenced by the attractive forces traditionally generated by the Great Corridor, throughout the centuries and the millennium that followed, the two Franciae, the French and the German, tried to take control of the kingdom of Lotharingia. Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands were perpetual stakes in the Franco-German struggle, while Switzerland succeeded to establish itself as a neutral zone between the two powers, which came to take control of certain zones of Lothair’s kingdom. France came to capture Provence, Burgundy, Alsace, and Lorraine, while Germany took Nordrhein-Westfalen, those zones passing, from time to time, from one entity to the other. It is in that context that the new West European urbexplosion was born. Consistent with Braudel’s scheme, its central core was dominated by merchant cities. That core developed in Northern Italy, and its dominating cities were, at the beginning, Venice and Milan, to which Genoa and Florence added afterwards. Venice supplanted Amalfi and occupied the first rank of the Italian cities around 1000. It had then about 60,000 inhabitants. Milan caught up Venice around 1300, each city having at that time 100,000 people. Between 1300 and 1500, Milan forestalled Venice a little, but, in 1500, both cities came back to equality with 100,000 inhabitants each. Around that central core, a semi-periphery developed, which included territorial states, each one dominated by a single large city. In Southern Italy, the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (sometimes unified, sometimes separated in two distinct kingdoms) increasingly played the role of a territorial state after having been a merchant pole at the time of Amalfi. That kingdom was dominated by the city of Naples, local heir of Amalfi, which forestalled Milan and Venice at the head of the Italian cities around 1400. The population of Naples reached close to 150,000 in 1500 and about 275,000 in 1600. In Francia occidentalis, which had become France, the city of Paris rose, reaching about 220,000 inhabitants in 1350, which made it the largest city of Christian Western Europe. More to the north, England also asserted itself as a territorial state, above all after the Norman conquest of 1066, and London stood out.19 But, in 1500, it still had only 50,000 inhabitants. Finally, to the east, in what was to become Germany, the city of Ratisbon rose to the rank of main city of Central Europe. Its population passed from about 23,000 in 800 to 40,000 in 1000.

19.

After the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain in AD 409, Londinium-London declined. Alfred the Great, king of Wessex from 871 to 878 and, later, king of Britain from 878 to 899, repaired the defenses and consolidated London as a fortified town. At that time, the capital of Britain was Winchester. London succeeded Winchester as the British capital early in the eleventh century, when the kings moved their residence from Winchester to Westminster. It must be added that York, the capital of the former kingdom of Northumbria, was seen as the capital of the north.

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In sum, to the radical regression of urbanization that had followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire succeeded, from about 900,20 a phase of reurbanization centered on the pole of Northern Italy dominated by Venice and Milan.21 However, from 1100, a rival of that pole appeared more to the north in the Great Corridor, between the Seine and Rhine rivers, in the region of Flanders and Brabant. The emergence of that new pole lay within a topodynamic inertia context where a northwestward movement within the Great Corridor favored the transfer of the merchant power successively from the ports of Amalfi and Bari, in Southern Italy, to Venice, Milan, and Genoa in Northern Italy, and then, later on, to Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in Northern Europe.22 The fact that Islam almost led to the closing of the Mediterranean Sea greatly contributed to that evolution, which was slow and followed the progressive transformation of the map of the gravity potentials in Europe, the successive poles of Amalfi-Naples, Northern Italy, and Northern Europe corresponding systematically to the zones with the highest gravity potentials.23 That topodynamic movement was accompanied by a slow and progressive rise of urbanization. It is just during the fifteenth century that the rate of urbanization of Christian Western Europe reached again the level it had under the Roman Empire, one thousand years before. It must be said, however, that certain technological improvements were carried out during the Middle Ages. In the field of agriculture, ploughs were improved; the triennial rotation of crops was adopted throughout practically the whole of Europe north of the Loire; the harnessing of horses by means of shoulder collars was improved; and the adoption of iron horseshoes was generalized. On the other hand, the introduction of windmills and water

20.

21.

22.

23.

The ninth century represented the nadir of the European urban evolution. Henri Pirenne described it as “the golden age of what we have called the closed domestic economy, and what we might call, with more exactitude, the economy of no markets.” Henri Pirenne, op. cit. Ralph Henry Carless Davis, A History of Mediaeval Europe: From Constantine to saint Louis (Harlow, Essex, and London: Longman, 1987); Henri Pirenne, op. cit.; Anthony Edwin James Morris, History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance (London: George Godwin, 1972); Howard Saalman, Mediaeval Cities (London: Studio Vista, and New York: George Braziller, 1968). That period and that movement were very well studied by Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and Capitalism and Material Life, 1400 –1800 (New York : Harper Torchbooks, 1974), as well as Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution. European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London: Methuen, 1981), and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985). See Jan de Vries, op. cit., 161–167.

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mills was generalized.24 The turning point of the awakening of the West may well have been the launching of the Crusades in 1096. The Crusades allowed Venice, Genoa, and Northern Italy to emerge as an urbexplosive core. They also accelerated the technological progress in Western Europe thanks to the introduction of new products like paper and gunpowder, but also by forcing the West to take up the challenge of Islam’s technological advance. And, by their very failure, the Crusades forced the West to explore the Atlantic Ocean so as to find a way to bypass the Moslem countries in order to re-establish links with India and China. However, if the Crusades accelerated the development of the Christian Western Europe, a major event slowed it down: the Black Death coming from the Silk Road that arrived, in 1346, at the port of Kaffa, controlled by the Genoans, on the Black Sea. That plague epidemic was conveyed by Genoan ships and penetrated Europe in September 1347 through the ports of Constantinople, Greece, Sicily, Venice, Genoa, and Marseille. Its trajectory followed the central axis of the Great Corridor, which shows the commercial importance of that route. Thus the plague reached Paris and London before spreading to Cádiz, Lisbon, Hamburg, Dantzig-Gdansk, and Stockholm. The Black Death was neither the first nor the last plague Europe experienced (the first one dated back to 542 under the reign of Justinian, and the last outbreak came in 1770), but it was the most devastating. From 1347 to 1352, the bubonic plague killed one-quarter of Europe’s population, with death tolls ranging up to seventy percent in some cities. Between 1347 and 1400, the population of Europe as a whole, which had grown at an average annual rate of 0.22% between 1000 and 1347, dropped by about thirty percent; it approximately fell from 79 million in 1340 to 56 million in 1400. It is estimated that the center of Italy lost two thirds of its population, while, in the Po Basin, Northern Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries, the population decreased by a proportion varying between one third and two thirds. Since cities, and especially commercial cities, as well as developed regions were more affected than the countryside, villages, or less-developed regions, economic development and urbanization went through a severe decline. Nevertheless, the population decrease eventually led to a new equilibrium between the population and the natural resources, which resulted in wage increases and a rise in the living standard. A new wave of innovations appeared in that context, in the fields of the conception and building of ships, navigation, geography, as well as artillery. In 1440, at Strasbourg, Gutenberg reinvented printing, and the second half of the fifteenth century saw the introduction of the first blast furnace. Meanwhile capitalism was born in Florence, and Italy launched Renaissance.

24.

Paul Bairoch, op. cit., 124–125.

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In order to perceive the complexity of the evolutions that marked Europe from 476 to 1400, it is useful to evoke the case of the various cities which illustrated that period. The city where the return towards the west of the topodynamic pendulum was first perceived is Amalfi, which opened the way to Venice and Genoa by being the first city of the former Western Roman Empire to reckon on the trade with Byzantium. The merchants of Amalfi were the first West Europeans to establish a permanent presence in Constantinople, probably as early as the first decades of the tenth century. However, contrary to Venice, Amalfi engaged in commercial distribution without developing any productive base of its own. Despite that, it experienced an important development from about 650 and became, around 1000, the main port and even the main city of Italy. The conquest of Amalfi by the Normans of Sicily in 1091 put an end to its commercial domination of Italy. It must be said that since the rise of Islam to the south and east of the Mediterranean Sea, maritime trade had become very dangerous. It is just from the twelfth century that long-distance trade, both by land and by sea, became an important factor in the economic and urban development of Western Europe. Amalfi contributed to improve the situation in that field. Amalfitans were very conscious of the precariousness of maritime trade. This is why they elaborated a remarkable code of maritime law called the Amalfitan Tables (Tavola Amalfitana), which was recognized in the Mediterranean until 1570. Moreover, Amalfitans worked to increase the security of navigation through innovations. According to a certain tradition first published in 1450, the magnetic compass, which greatly improved navigation, may have been invented at Amalfi independently of the Chinese. The earliest authentic information concerning the use of the compass comes from China (c. 1100), Western Europe (c. 1187), Arabia (c. 1220), and Scandinavia (c. 1300). It is not possible to state with any certainty where the first discovery occurred and whether knowledge of the use of the compass was transmitted from one area to another or whether it was the result of two or more independent inventions. It seems plausible that Amalfitans were at least responsible for the perfection of the magnetic compass. The strangest thing about the compass is that it was invented and first widely used while most people thought that the Earth was flat and, consequently, that it had no pole. In fact, the first detailed work on the magnetic compass written in 1269 by the French Pierre Pèlerin de Maricourt explained magnetic attractions by the influence of the “poles of heavens” without referring to the poles of the Earth. Maricourt’s document is considered as as an early foundation of the experimental method in science. Pèlerin de Maricourt was the master in Paris of the English Roger Bacon, who was the first one to notice that the Julian calendar was wrong and to reveal in 1248 the composition of gunpowder. Bacon pointed out the weaknesses of Ptolemy’s system, and he is considered, with Maricourt, as one of the fathers of experimental science.

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Amalfitans were present in the Holy Land even before the beginning of the Crusades. Around 950, they founded a hospital for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, which was then under the Arab domination of the Abbassids. Around 1100, right after the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, that hospital was at the origin of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, also known as Knights of Malta, which, through the years, reigned over Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta. Two other important orders were created in the context of the Crusades: the Order of the Templars, founded in 1119–1120, and the Teutonic Order, founded in 1190. Both became extremely wealthy and powerful. The Teutonic Order came to dominate the southern part of the Baltic Sea. As for the Order of the Templars, it came to be seen as a threat by the French King Philip IV the Fair who accused them of heresy and immorality, succeeded eventually in having Pope Clement V suppress the order in 1312, and had the grand master, Jacques of Molay, burned at the stake in 1314. Amalfi peaked around 1050, and Naples handed over. However, if the merchant city of Amalfi could have aspired to play the role of a city-state at the center of an urbexplosion, Naples never became anything more than the big city of a territorial state. The center of an urbexplosion was unlikely to develop to the south of Italy both because of the great proximity of Constantinople and the smallness of the available hinterland. If the Normans of Sicily and the House of Hauteville precipitated the end of the domination of Amalfi, they made the fortune of Naples, which they conquered around 1091. From that moment, the destinies of the Naples region and Sicily were, most of the time, linked under the dynasties of the Hauteville, Hohenstaufen, Anjou, Aragon, Habsburg, Bourbon, and Bourbon Two-Sicilies. In 1000, Amalfi, the largest city of Italy, had about 80,000 inhabitants, and Naples, around 30,000. Five hundred years later, Naples had 100,000 inhabitants, and Amalfi, only 3,000. Like Venice and Genoa, the port of Naples suffered from the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, but it suffered even more from the conquest of America, which led to its complete economic marginalization at a time when its population remained very large. The Rome of the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the Naples of the period that followed the discovery of America constitute two early and well-known examples of “overurbanization.” The Naples of that period is also a classical example of “prime city,” its demographic weight being out of proportion with the population and the wealth of its hinterland. From a topodynamic point of view, it can be explained by the fact that, if economic development “jumps” from the center of an urbexplosion to the center of another, the population migrations do not follow, since they do not jump. On the contrary, like alluvial deposits conveyed by waterways, they are carried by the topodynamic currents and settle on the way; so their adaptation to the spatial distribution of production is almost always behind the topodynamic

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evolution.25 This may explain why the populations lagged in Southern Italy while the economic development had jumped to the north, which caused the suburbanization of Naples, but also its “prime city” character since, in their slow migration to the triumphant urbexplosions, the populations pass first by the big local cities. This phenomenon is very common; it can be observed today, among other places, in the countries of the Sahel region in Africa. Rome had even less chances than Amalfi or Naples to become the center of the new European urbexplosion. First, its economic link with the Illyrian Salt Road and with Illyria (present-day Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) was much weaker since that region depended on Byzantium; second, Rome did not benefit anymore from the rent its status of capital of the Roman Empire had provided for centuries. The city was now the center of the states Pepin the Short, King of the Franks and Charles the Great’s father, and the Carolingians had given the Catholic Church in 756, states that the popes systematically expanded during the centuries that followed. Those Papal States were, so to say, stuck between the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily to the south, and the Carolingian Empire or its successor the Germanic Holy Roman Empire (founded in 962 by Otto I the Great, from the East Saxon House of Liudolfing), to the north. As the essential element of the unity of the Western world, the Catholic Church had favored the reconstitution of the Western Roman Empire under Charles the Great. However, conflicts between the spiritual primacy of the popes and the temporal primacy of the emperors came to develop and gave rise to the long struggle between the Guelfs, who were siding with the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who were sympathetic to the emperors of the House of Hohenstaufen. The conflict started in Germany, and opposed the House of Welf from Bavaria and Saxony, siding with the pope, to the Hohenstaufen imperial family. However, the conflict spread to Italy with Frederick I Barbarossa from the Hohenstaufen family, and it poisoned the Italian political life from 1215 till 1309, when the popes left Rome for Avignon, in present-day southern France. In Rome, the conflict took the form of the rivalry between two great families: the Ghibelline Colonnas, the Guelf Orsinis who gave the Church three popes (Celestin III, Nicholas III, and Benedict XIII). The tensions between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, as well as between the pope and the emperor, occasionally reached such an intensity that, in 1084, Emperor Henry IV invaded Rome, and the Norman allies of Pope Gregory VII set the city on fire.26 To those conflicts 25.

26.

This has been observed for the first time by Ernest G. Ravenstein when he formulated his famous laws of migration: “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48 (1885): 167–235, and 52 (1889): 241–301. That fire led to the most destructive of all the sackings of Rome. Pope saint Gregory VII left Rome with the Norman Robert Guiscard, who had saved him from Henry IV’s attack, and took refuge at Salerno, where he died in 1085.

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added those that opposed the emperor to the king of France, France being at that time the richest and most populated state of Europe. The election in 1305 of a pro-French pope led to the moving of papacy to Avignon in 1309. The popes stayed in Avignon from 1309 to 1376, and the Western Schism it provoked, which lasted from 1378 to 1417, with its long list of popes and anti-popes, almost killed the city of Rome. In 1417, the latter already amounted to a pile of crumbling ruins. The return of papacy to Rome and the end of the Western Schism with the election of Pope Martin V in 1417 led to a rebirth of the city, which, during the two following centuries, reached an artistic glory equal or superior to the one Imperial Rome had known.27 That being said, Rome, whose wealth essentially originated from the Church’s income, never threatened the economic and commercial ascendancy of Northern Italy cities. In 1500, Rome’s population was about 55,000 inhabitants, while Naples had 150,000 inhabitants, Milan and Venice, 100,000 each, and Genoa, 60,000. It must be noted that, in 1527, Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in a new episode of the struggle between the emperors and the popes. Strangely enough, the founding of Venice28 goes back to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Venice is one of the rare Italian or even West European cities that owe nothing to the Roman Empire. Its site made of islands and marshes never attracted the Romans, yet great experts in selecting city locations. The barbarian invasions were what forced the population of the region to find refuge in those inhospitable lands. Progressively, the runaways decided to settle on the islands. Out of fear, the twelve villages of the Venetian islands decided to form a federation in 466, 10 years before the fall of Rome. In 568, that federation, dominated at first by Ravenna and Constantinople, had to deal with the Lombard hordes that were invading Northern Italy. The local population elected a first doge (duke) in 687. In 811, in their turn, the Franks invaded the region that was under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire, whose rights over the Venice region were recognized and respected by the Carolingians. The benefits ensuing from the trade with the Orient and from the economic interdependence between Venice and Constantinople eventually led to the economic triumph of Venice in Western Christian Europe. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the Venetian Republic was the richest and most successful Italian city-state, ahead of Amalfi, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Pavia, and Verona. In 1143, the duchy became the Patrician Republic of Venice

27.

28.

In The Story of Rome (London: J. M. Dent & Co’s Mediæval Towns series, 1901), Norwood Young wrote: “if the strictly mediaeval history of Rome closes with Boniface VIII in 1303 and the period of desertion and decay comes to an end on the arrival of Martin V in 1420, the era of new life, of renaissance, begins with Nicholas V in 1447.” According to the official (and “legendary”) history of Venice, that city was founded on March 25, 421, at midday exactly.

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following the constitution by a group of ten patrician families of the Grand Council of Ten, which exerted power with the doge and the already existing legislative assembly. As Maddison 29 underlined it, the role of Venice was to reintegrate Western Europe into the Mediterranean commercial network and, above all, to develop commercial links between the Mediterranean economy and Northern Europe through the Po River, Milan, Lyon, and the Champagne fairs, not to mention the important terrestrial link between Venice, the Tarvisio Pass, and Vienna on the Danube. Venice exported grain and wine from Italy, wood and slaves from Dalmatia, and salt from its lagoons, and it imported silk and spices from the Orient. Moreover, the city of the doges dominated the eastwest and north-south exchanges by offering the goods of the West, woolen cloth, wood and raw materials coming from the Flanders, the Low Countries, Milan, Florence, and southern Germany, and by selling the products of the Orient, silk, brocades, fabric from Damascus, cotton, ivory, porcelain, and perfumes. Venice did not content itself with building a large merchant fleet and a powerful war navy, it also constituted a true empire made of trading concessions throughout the Byzantine Empire and trading posts located at the most strategic sites (Zara, Spalato, Ragusa, Durazzo, Corfu, Crete, Cyprus, Tana-Azov, Tyre, Sidon, etc.; see Map 13). Venice strongly contributed to the birth of European capitalism by developing banking, accountancy, foreign exchange, and credit markets, and by creating a solvent system of public finance. It favored innovations in the shipbuilding industry thanks to its Arsenal, and allowed for technological transfers from Asia and Egypt to the West in the fields of cane sugar production and processing, silk textiles, glassblowing, and jewellery. Its production of glass, spectacles, and books made it famous. It greatly encouraged the diffusion of Greek works in the West, and the University of Padua, very close to Venice, was one of the great intellectual centers of Europe.30 If Venice contributed to throw over the Alps, in the more northern part of the Great Corridor, the economic development of the Mediterranean area, its very success in that field eventually led to its marginalization when Northern Europe triumphed. According to Braudel, Venice dominated the European economy from approximately 1350 to 1510, Antwerp from 1510 till 1557, Genoa from 1557 to 1627, Amsterdam from 1627 to 1763, and finally London from 1763 till today. When the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, Venice found itself deprived from its main asset. First, it quickly negotiated with the Ottoman Turks the maintenance of its trading rights, but 29. 30.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris : OECD, 2001), 52. Ibid., 19.

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in 1479, the Ottomans closed their access to the Black Sea, and in 1517, they took over Mamluk Egypt and terminated most of the Venetian trade with Asia, especially in spices. However, it is the discovery of America and its effects on the development of Northern Europe, which definitely downgraded Venice.

Venice Genoa Marseille

Naples

Constantinople

Syracuse Tunis

Antioch

Tyre

Alexandria

160 km Sea routes dominated by Venice

Map 13 The Venetian Empire from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century

The great plain of Northern Italy Venice belongs to is dominated by the Po River and the city of Milan, which is located in that plain, between the Po and the Alps. Historically, Milan is the main terrestrial link between the Po and Rhine rivers. Milan is a strategic point of the Po-Rhine axis, a little like Dijon is a strategic point on the rival Rhone-Saône-Seine axis. Milan was founded by the Gauls (the Gallic Insubri) about 400 BC, and conquered in 222 BC by the Romans, who named it Mediolanum. The Romans saw at once its immense potential. They made it the crossroads of three major roads: the road to the south leading to the Po and to the Via Postumia linking Verona and Genoa; the road to the northwest leading to the Rhône, Aventicum (presentday Avenches, Switzerland) and the Rhine through the Valley of Aosta, the Simplon pass, and the Great St. Bernard Pass; and the road to the northeast leading to Regina Castra (Ratisbon) and the Danube through Lake Como and the St. Bernard Pass. Between 293 and 402, Milan was the capital of the prefecture of Italy. Milan became a part of Lombardy when the Lombards, a German tribe belonging to the Suebi group that came from Swabia, invaded

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the region in AD 568 and formed a kingdom. They conquered Milan in 569 and chose Pavia as their capital, but Milan became the great commercial city of that people that had a very keen commercial and financial sense. During the Middle Ages, the Lombards won a reputation as bankers and traders throughout Europe. In London, Lombard Street is famous for its banks. Its name comes from Lombard lenders established in the City in the thirteenth century. The two main commercial links were, undoubtedly, for Milan the one between the Po and the Rhine, but also the one between the Po and the Rhône, which lay at the heart of the Great Corridor. Till the Hundred Years’ War that opposed France to England from 1337 to 1453, for Milan as well as the whole Europe, the link with the Rhône had a much greater importance than the link with the Rhine. On the one hand, its access was easier; the connection between the Po and the Rhône passed then not by the Great St. Bernard Pass, as under the Roman Empire, but by Turin and the passes of Montgenèvre and Mont Cenis, directly towards Lyon, Dijon, Champagne, and the Flanders. On the other hand, most importantly, the Rhône runs towards the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the Rhine runs towards the North Sea. Since, generally, the heaviest products that have a low value per kilogram, like wood and metals, are transported from the periphery to the center, and the products with a high value per kilogram, in the opposite direction, as long as the core of the main European urbexplosion lay in the Mediterranean basin, the Rhône had a clear advantage over the Rhine simply because it ran in the right direction. However, this did not preclude the Rhine axis from prevailing when, because of wars or other inconveniencies, the Rhône axis was becoming hardly passable. In contrast, as soon as the economic domination passed from the north of Italy to the north of Europe, the Great Corridor axis moved slightly to the east, and the Rhine dominated, as it had started to do in the context of the Hundred Years’ War, which had made the French route too dangerous and unreliable.31 Even at that time, Milan succeeded to play its game well by establishing itself as a still more strategic link between the Po and the Rhine as it had been between the Po and the Rhône. This was done thanks to a better use of the St. Gotthard Pass, as will be seen. Strangely enough, the triumph of Northern Europe over Northern Italy and that of the Rhine over the Rhône were not necessarily bad news for Milan, since they allowed it to economically dominate Italy to an extent it had never reached at the time of the pre-eminence of the Rhône and Northern Italy. In fact, for the traffic coming from the Rhine, Milan is the natural entrance of Italy, which was not the case for the traffic coming from the Rhône. 31.

See Roger Brunet (ed.), Les Villes européennes (Paris: DATAR-Reclus, La Documentation française, 1989).

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Urban World History

Till the triumph of Northern Europe, the populations of Venice and Milan evolved about the same way. Milan was more populated than Venice from the fall of the Western Roman Empire till 800. Around 1050, Venice was about twice as large as Milan, but that did not last. Around 1300, the two populations were once again about equal. During the two following centuries, Milan was slightly more populated than Venice, but, in 1500, the two cities had once more the same population, about 100,000 inhabitants. Thereafter, Venice was increasingly marginalized, and Milan triumphed. Milan was known for its woolens, armaments, and silk industries, its traders, and Lombard financiers. The first important Italian port where the goods coming by the Rhône by ship could be discharged was Genoa, the great rival of Venice both in Italy and in the Byzantine Empire. The two cities had a lot of things in common. Both were city-states. Both had built commercial empires based on an alliance with the Byzantines. Both had an elected doge at their head. Both were patrician republics dominated by a limited number of great families. The great families of the “Republic of Saint-Georges,” as Genoa called itself, were the Dorias, the Fieschis, the Grimaldis (from which the Grimaldis of Monaco originate), and the Spinolas, as, in Venice, the great families were the Dandolos, the Tiepolos, the Foscaris, and the Franchettis, or, in Milan, the great families were the Della Torres, the Viscontis, the Sforzas, and the Borromeos. Genoa had a particularity: its four great families were excluded from the doge function, and the doge was elected for only two years. Two alliances marked the history of Genoa. The first one was concluded with Pisa, and it aimed at chasing the Arabs from the western Mediterranean Sea, in particular from Corsica and Sardinia. That alliance was fruitful, but, after a while, the two allies confronted each other, and, in 1284, Genoa triumphed over Pisa, and took away from it Corsica and Sardinia. The second alliance, made in 1261, involved Genoa and the Byzantine Empire of Nicea against Venice, and it allowed Genoa to establish trading posts in Kaffa, in Crimea, and in Tana, on the Don River by the Black Sea. In 1291, Genoa won a very important victory for the European economic history. It defeated the Moroccan fleet that controlled the Strait of Gibraltar, which allowed the European trade of the Mediterranean Sea to merge with that of the Atlantic. Venice benefited from that victory as much as Genoa itself. The two citystates confronted each other, and Venice temporarily vanquished in 1381. In 1407, Genoa created La Casa di San Giorgio, which was the very first public bank in European history. Genoa also launched Renaissance urbanism—the conscious arrangement of buildings into a predetermined form—by building

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the Via Nuova in 1470.32 Later, the city became the main banking center of Europe and dominated the European economy from approximately 1557 to 1627, according to Braudel. Genoa was the last city from Italy and the last