Babur’s horizon

Babur hunting rhinoceros: painting from the Baburnama, manuscript at the National Museum, New Delhi, illustrated in AS Kothari, BF Chhapgar, editors, Treasures of Natural History, Mumbai, Bombay Natural History Society and OUP, 2005; Wikimedia Commons

We have met Babur in a post on Delhi. He was the prince of the moribund Timurid empire who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, left his domain in Farghana, which is now in eastern Uzbekistan, and invaded India, where he founded the Mughal dynasty. In this heady passage on, in effect, the beginning of globalisation, remember Sachs’s quotation from Adam Smith in the last post.

I have asked myself who was the most centrally placed and intelligent observer that I could think of among notable non-Westerners who were alive at the moment when a few ships’ companies of Western mariners embarked on the enterprise of unifying the world, and I have found my man in the Emperor Babur. Babur was a descendant, in the fifth generation, of Tamerlane, the Transoxanian conqueror who made the last attempt to unify the world by land operations from a continental centre. Within Babur’s lifetime – A.D. 1483-1530 – Columbus reached America by sea from Spain and da Gama India from Portugal. Babur started his career as prince of Farghana in the upper valley of the Jaxartes: a small country which had been the centre of the [Oikoumenê, given in Greek] since the second century B.C. Babur invaded India overland twenty-one years after da Gama had arrived there by sea. [...] Babur was a man-of-letters whose brilliant autobiography in his Turkish mother-tongue reveals a spirit of outstanding intelligence and perceptiveness.

What was Babur’s horizon? To the east of Farghana it included both India and China, and to the west it extended to Babur’s own distant kinsmen, the Ottoman Turks. Babur took lessons from the ’Osmanlis in military technique, and he admired them for their piety and prowess in extending the bounds of Islam. He refers to them as “the Ghazis of Rum”: the happy warriors who had succeeded, where the primitive Muslim Arabs had signally failed, in conquering for Islam the homeland of Eastern Orthodox Christendom. I could not recollect any mention of Western Christendom in Babur’s memoirs, and I have found none in the exhaustive geographical index of Mrs. Beveridge’s magnificent English translation. [Here they are in a translation of 1826.] Of course Babur was aware of the existence of the Franks [as Moslems called Christians], for he was a cultivated man and he knew his Islamic history. If he had had occasion to allude to them, he would probably have described them as ferocious but frustrated infidels living in a remote corner of the world at the extreme western tip of one of the many peninsulas of the Continent of Asia. About four hundred years before his time, he would have gone on to relate, these barbarians had made a demonic attempt to break out of their cramped and uninviting corner into the broader and richer domains of Rum and Dar-al-Islam. It had been a critical moment for the destinies of civilization, but the uncouth aggressors had been foiled by the genius of Saladin, and their military reverses had been capped by a crushing moral defeat when the Christians of Rum, faced with a choice between two alternative future masters, chose the side of the angels by opting for “the Prophet’s turban” in preference to “the Pope’s tiara,” and accepted the boon of an Ottoman Peace.

The arrival of Frankish ships in India in A.D. 1498, twenty-one years before Babur’s own first descent upon India in A.D. 1519, seems to have escaped Babur’s attention – unless his silence is to be explained not by ignorance of the event, but by a feeling that the wanderings of these water-gypsies were unworthy of a historian’s notice. So this allegedly intelligent Transoxanian man-of-letters and man-of-action was blind to the portent of the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa? He failed to perceive that these ocean-faring Franks had turned the flank of Islam and taken her in the rear? Yes, I believe Babur would have been utterly astonished if he had been told that the empire which he was founding in India was soon to pass from his descendants to Frankish successors. He had no inkling of the change that, was to come over the face of the world between his generation and ours. But this, I submit, is not a reflection on Babur’s intelligence; it is one more indication of the queerness of the major event in the history of the world in our time.

Since A.D. 1500 the map of the [Oikoumenê] has indeed been transformed out of all recognition. Down to that date it was composed of a belt of civilizations girdling the Old World from the Japanese Isles on the north-east to the British Isles on the north-west: Japan, China, Indo-China, Indonesia, India, Dar-al-Islam, the Orthodox Christendom of Rum, and another Christendom in the West. Though this belt sagged down, in the middle, from the North Temperate Zone to the Equator and thus ran through a fairly wide range of climates and physical environments, the social structure and cultural character of these societies was singularly uniform. Each of them consisted of a mass of peasants, living and working under much the same conditions as their forefathers on the morrow of the invention of agriculture some six to eight thousand years back, and a small minority of rulers enjoying a monopoly of power, surplus wealth, leisure, knowledge, and skill which in turn enhanced their power. There had been one or two earlier generations of civilizations of the same type in the Old World. In A.D. 1500 some of these were still remembered, while others (since brought to light by modern Western archaeologists) had been forgotten. There were two of the same type in existence at this date in the New World, unknown to those of the Old World and barely known even to each other. The living civilizations of the Old World were in touch with each other, though not so closely as to be, or feel themselves to be, members of a single society.

Their contact, such as it was, down to A.D. 1500, had been established and maintained along two different lines of communication. There was a maritime line which will be familiar to latter-day Westerners as the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company’s route to Kobe from Tilbury. In A.D. 1500, and indeed as recently as the time of a great-uncle of mine (a vivid memory of my childhood) who commanded one of the Honourable East India Company’s passenger sailing ships and retired from the sea before the cutting of the Suez Canal without ever having served on board a steamer, this waterway through a chain of inland seas was broken by a portage between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, with an alternative portage between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. In the Mediterranean and Japanese sections of this maritime route, traffic had frequently been lively, and, from about 120 B.C. onwards, an infectious wave of maritime enterprise, set in motion by Greek mariners from Alexandria who found their way to Ceylon, had travelled on eastwards through Indonesia till it had carried Polynesian canoes to Easter Island. Yet, adventurous and romantic as these pre-Western seafarers were, the water-route that they opened up never came to be of more than secondary importance as a line of communication between the civilizations. The main line was provided by the chain of steppes and deserts that cut across the belt of civilizations from the Sahara to Mongolia.

For human purposes, the Steppe was an inland sea which, in virtue of happening to be dry, was of higher conductivity for human intercourse than the salt-water sea ever was before the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian era. This waterless sea had its dry-shod ships and its quayless ports. The steppe-galleons were camels, the steppe-galleys horses, and the steppe-ports “caravan cities” – ports of call on oasis-islands and termini on the coasts where the sand-waves of “the Desert” broke upon “the Sown”: Petra and Palmyra, Damascus and Ur, Tamerlane’s Samarkand and the Chinese emporia at the gates of the Great Wall. Steppe-traversing horses, not ocean-traversing sailing ships, were the sovereign means of locomotion by which the separate civilizations of the world as it was before A.D. 1500 were linked together – to the slight extent to which they did maintain contact with each other.

In that world, as you see, Babur’s Farghana was the central point, and the Turks were, in Babur’s day, the central family of nations. A Turco-centric history of the world has been published in our lifetime by the latest in the series of the great Ottoman Turkish Westernizers, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk [I will try to add a link to this]. It was a brilliant device for restoring the morale of his fellow-countrymen, but it was a still more brilliant feat of genuine historical intuition; for, from the fourth century of the Christian era, when they pushed the last of their Indo-European-speaking predecessors off the Steppe, down to the seventeenth century [surely eighteenth would be closer], which witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman, the Safawi, and the Timurid Turkish dynasties [the Ottomans and Timurid Mughals were not finished even then, but Toynbee always dates declines early] in their respective domains of Rum, Iran, and India, the Turkish-speaking peoples really were the keystone of the Asiatic arch from which the pre-da Gaman belt of civilizations hung suspended. During those twelve hundred years, the overland link between the separate civilizations was commanded by Turkish steppe-power, and, from their central position in this pre-da Gaman world, the Turks rode out, conquering and to conquer, east and west and south and north: to Manchuria and Algeria, to the Ukraine and the Deccan.

But now we come to the great revolution: a technological revolution by which the West made its fortune, got the better of all the other living civilizations, and forcibly united them into a single society of literally world-wide range. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. This use of the Ocean, first by sailing ships and then by steamships, enabled the West to unify the whole inhabited and habitable world, including the Americas. Babur’s Farghana had been the central point of a world united by horse-traffic over the Steppe; but in Babur’s lifetime the centre of the world made a sudden big jump. From the heart of the Continent it jumped to its extreme western verge, and, after hovering round Seville and Lisbon, it settled for a time in Elizabeth’s England. In our own lifetime we have seen this volatile world-centre flit again from London to New York, but this shift to a still more eccentric position on the far side of the “herring pond” is a local movement, not comparable in magnitude to the jump, in Babur’s day, from the steppe-ports of Central Asia to the ocean-ports of the Atlantic. That huge jump was caused by a sudden revolution in the means of locomotion. The steppe-ports were put out of action when the ocean-going sailing-ship superseded the camel and the horse; and now that, under our eyes, the ocean-going steamship is being superseded by the aeroplane we may ask ourselves whether the centre of the world is not likely to jump again – and this time as sensationally as in the sixteenth century – under the impetus of a technological revolution that is at least as radical as the sixteenth-century substitution of da Gama’s caravel for Babur’s tipuchaq. I will recur to this possibility before I conclude. Meanwhile, before we roll up Babur’s overland map of the world and unfurl the maritime map that has held the field from Babur’s day to ours, let us call the roll of the separate civilizations among which the human race was partitioned down to Babur’s day and interrogate them briefly about their historical outlook.

[...] Every one of them was convinced that it was the only civilized society in the world, and that the rest of mankind were barbarians, untouchables, or infidels. In holding this view, it is evident that at least five out of the six pre-da Gaman civilizations must have been in error, and the sequel has shown that actually not one of them was right. All variants of a fallacy are no doubt equally untrue, but they may not all be equally preposterous, and it is instructive to run through these half-dozen rival and mutually incompatible versions of a common “Chosen People” myth in an ascending order of their defiance of common sense.

At which point we will leave him for now.

Civilization on Trial, OUP, 1948