The Dork Ages

Kente cloth.

Sources on kente cloth, all of which appear to be cribbing off each other, point out that While Kente Cloth Developed During The Empire Of Ashanti, Africans Had Been Weaving For Thousands Of Years. So that’s my caveat here: Africans Had Been Weaving For Thousands Of Years, because Historically Africans Were Actually Pretty Clear On The Concept of “Technology” But Thanks For Asking, before someone invented a specific form of narrow-strip loom which allowed them to make ceremonial cloth of the type that’d later be known as “kente”. The oldest examples are from the 11th century in Mali, in the Bandiagara Escarpment, where the Tellem people built homes directly into the side of the cliff and then, because they hadn’t done enough wildly creative things that era, decided to stripweave until they all looked great.

By “they all,” I of course mean “royalty,” as kente was silk-only and property of great lords during its early development over in what would later be Ghana by the Akan people. The Akan people would become famous, out of our period, for deciding to weigh gold with intricate sculptures made out of brass that also had set, precise masses. When anyone complained about the fact that they were weighing gold dust with tiny statues of lizards, the Akan people presumably pointed out that they were the ones with all the gold. So it’s unsurprising that when they got their hands on stripweaving technology it slowly became more colorful, more varied, and much more democratically available. And, of course, gorgeous.

Socialism.

I’m kidding. Socialism, of course, did not begin in this period. Socialism is way the hell older than that and basically undatable, since it’s actually a pretty straightforward concept: “sure, we can share.” (Ditto capitalism: “No we can’t.) (My best friend the ex-economist/Russian historian is weeping openly at this assessment.) No, what we’re actually discussing today is:

Mazdak, 495-528.

Mazdak was a Zoroastrian priest, which was the last decision he made in his life that made any kind of political sense. See, Mazdak had these ideas, ideas for the purification of Zoroastrianism, and they begun with the dismantlement of the Zoroastrian clergy, which were, in his view, screwing things up for everyone. Ahura Mazda, who was good, had put wealth on the earth enough for everyone, but people, who were jerks, had unevenly distributed that wealth and then fought tooth and nail to keep their extra portions to themselves. Obviously the solution was to redistribute the wealth to each according to his needs, and from then on everyone could contribute to each other according to his means. (His being the key word — Mazdak was also into the redistribution of women and potentially slaves.) Then the whole world would be a human garden of paradise! PS meat is murder!

It will shock you to learn that the landholders and clergy of Persia were not hugely in favor of this plan. In honor of his vegetarianism, they started calling him “the devil who would not eat.” While all the peasant, mercantile, and artisan classes started discussing how best to erect giant Sassanid Realist statues of Mazdak in every marketplace, the nobility and the priests turned to the throne. “Thank God we live in an absolutist monarchy,” they said. “We were a little worried about it when your predecessors cut down on our power but it’ll come in handy riOH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” To which the king, a gentleman named Kavadh I, presumably answered, “Reading the book of Mazdak,” or possibly, “Institutionalizing all of Mazdak’s reforms for my empire! We are BFFs,” because they were. [Factual footnote.]

While Mazdak went and set up poorhouses, preached free love and nonviolence, and highly encouraged vegetarianism, Kavadh went and let him. The sources are, perhaps understandably, extremely biased against Mazdak, so it’s difficult to tell what he actually did. Did he encourage his cultists to rob granaries and private homes so that they could get their wealth back quicker? (Maybe!) Did he believe in consent? (Could be! It’s unclear!) Did Kavadh decide that he wanted to prove to Mazdak that he realllly believed in the redistribution of everything and gave Mazdak … his wife??? (No.) (Come on.)

Anyway, in 496 the nobles and priests kicked Kavadh out of office. Kavadh sadly went off to do his own thing for a few years while his younger brother (by all accounts a mostly confused young man who was not really sure what to do with this empire he had been given) didn’t put down anything. When Kavadh finally did come back, with a somewhat pointless supporting army, his brother gratefully returned the throne and everyone immediately went about pretending that none of that had ever happened. Kavadh was a popular, powerful king, Mazdak appears to have kept on keepin’ on, and everything was great until Mazdak took a moment to look at the future heirs and point out that Kavadh had two kids and the first one was much more charming.

Wrong answer.

The second son, Khosrau, had Mazdak and the vast majority of his supporters killed. It was a lot of supporters, possibly in the hundreds of thousands range; he appears to have done it in the most ironic method possible. Sources differ on whether the method was planting some three thousand Mazdaki head first in the ground so that Mazdak could see a REAL human garden, HA HA HA HA HA!!! before he was tortured to death, or whether Khosrau invited them all to dinner so that the devil who would not eat could have ONE LAST MEAL HA HA HA HA HA!!!! before he was tortured to death, or … whatever, but I think we can agree that Khosrau clearly thought it was hilarious.

Anyway, that was it for Mazdakism until the Abbasid Caliphate in the 800s, when Babak Khorram-Din revived this into the Khurramites. I might end up giving the Khurramites their own post later, actually; they’re a pretty great revolution. Lots of free love. Lots of Byzantine Emperors laughing alone with salad. No, for real, they actually laughed alone with salad. Watch this space.

Urban sprawl (Angkor), 800-1431.

Forgive me if I get a little starry-eyed over this one.

“Angkor” isn’t technically the right name. It’s more of a collective archaeological term for the collection of cities over time that rose up in this specific spot, the capitals of the Khmer Empire, culminating with Angkor Thom and its suburbs. But it does literally mean “city” and frankly I can think of no more appropriate term because Angkor isn’t just a city, it is the city; the largest pre-industrial city in the entire world. At 390 square miles, its closest competitor, the Mayan city of Tikal (also mostly in our period!) was a little more than a tenth of its size. It’s only about seventy square miles smaller than Los Angeles.

Angkor probably wasn’t particularly densely populated. It was a sprawl, connected by a very solid infrastructure of roads and canals. Building in stone was proscribed for the common populace, so the wooden houses which made up most of the city got eaten by the forest, but the sacred structures were made out of stone and they are gigantic and stunning and somewhat ridiculous. Angkor had a thousand temple complexes, a massive palace, and a few huge reservoirs which either provided water to the city and/or served as a literal representation of the mythological ocean surrounding the sacred Mount Meru. Let’s run that tape by again: Angkor was so big that when they were symbolically representing a sacred ocean, they could literally build some oceans inside it. “Oh, sure, and what did they do to represent the mountain?” you ask me. “Build a literal mountain?” Don’t be ridiculous! They just built the largest religious building in the history of the world: Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat was built by the king Suryavarman II, who once leapt from his war elephant to his opponent’s war elephant in order to stab him in the head, so you can see that we’re off to a good start here. You might have heard of it a bunch because it’s so beautiful that the Europeans who came across it were totally unwilling to believe it was from the Dark Ages, which probably should have indicated to them that the concept of the Dark Ages was pointless and terrible, but didn’t. “Yeah, but,” the colonialists said, “come on. It looks like someone took Athens, supersized it, and then covered it with some of the most gorgeous stonework ever made. You can’t tell me the Khmer did this. They live in a jungle!” thereby also proving that you can take the European to the huge, massive, stone evidence that where you’re from has absolutely fuck-all to do with your ability to centralize your culture but you can’t make him think.

Most of the information that we possess about Angkor’s daily life comes from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese visitor in 1295. Think of it this way: one reign after Marco Polo was in China swooning over Hangzhou’s fire department, Zhou was hanging out in Angkor getting busy with the architecture in the same tone of voice. According to him, state processions ended with the king standing on the back of an elephant holding a sword, Angkor’s trade was entirely run by women, and dogs and convicts were barred from entering the city. Want to Yelp the food options? Go ahead: “cucumbers, [kabocha] squash, leeks, eggplants, onion, mustard greens, watermelons, oranges, leeches [or lychee], pomegranates, lotus roots, bananas…pepper, sugar cane, aromatic herbs…black carps, conger eels, mammoth sea turtles, huge prawns, the bellies of alligators and every kind of shellfish.” Attending Angkor Fashion Week? You’d better be fabulous (everyone wore silk) but not too fabulous. “Only the ruler can dress in cloth with an all-over floral design. The important officials and princes can wear cloth with groups of bunched flowers. Ordinary mandarins are only allowed to wear cloth with two bunches of flowers.” Want some Chinese cultural imperialism? I knew you did. “Some eight to nine out of ten here die of dysentery. As with us, medicines are sold in the market, but they are very different from those in China, and I do not know any of them. There are also some sorts of sorcerers who practice their arts on the people. This is completely ridiculous.”

You can pick up a reasonably new English translation of Zhou Daguan’s A Record of Cambodia on Amazon. If you do, let me know, because I am planning to to travel to Angkor as soon as I get my time machine, and I want to make sure I counted the flowers right on my silk.

Tamar of Georgia, 1160-1213.

Tamar took the throne of Georgia on the death of her father, and the Church and court immediately had a conniption. She was the first queen regnant in Georgian history and frankly they were not down. “This is how it’s going to go,” they explained. “You’re going to marry this Russian prince we’ve picked up, and we’ll pick your advisors. Eventually you’ll have an heir and then we can ignore you.”

Tamar had already been ruling with her father for six years at this point, so her interest in dealing with this shit was apparently at an all time low. She smiled, conferred with her aunt, put down a democratic revolt, and demurely married the prince. For a whole two years. Then she announced that actually she chose not to remain married to a man she characterized as a drunken sodomite and invited him to please get the fuck out of Georgia, where she was, in point of fact, king.

After that it was pretty much sunshine and military victories for Tamar. With her new husband, a man who understood more clearly who was the ruler of actual Georgia here, she got busy taking over most of the neighboring countries and beating back the Seljuq Empire. As previously mentioned she had taken on the term king a while back, but now she was rocking the title “King of Kings and Queen of Queens” and floating the idea of maybe tacking saint on there somewhere.

Into this volatile political situation, with characteristic grace, dropped the Fourth Crusade. Even if the earlier Crusades had been models of heroic holy war (only if the word ‘holy’ is used to mean ‘pointless’) the Fourth would require us to define the word ‘holy’ as ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’ and ‘war’ as ‘JERUSALEM IS THAT WAY!’ Or at least that’s how the inhabitants of Constantinople defined it, when the Crusader nations swept in, looked around, and said “Nah, let’s just besiege this place, it’s closer.”

A few weeks in advance the previous ruling dynasty of Byzantium, a family of terrifyingly savvy political operators called the Komnenoi, observed the approach of the Crusader army on Constantinople and laughed maniacally. Then they approached Tamar, in whose father’s court they’d been raised when they were tiny refugee princes, and asked her if she felt like invading the Byzantine city of Trebizond. Tamar shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? They screwed us on tribute that one time. Do you guys want to be a puppet state or just one of our tributaries?”

Acting with dispatch and also imperial delight, Tamar and the Komnenoi established the Empire of Trebizond. Having by this point also put down her ex-husband’s rebellions, had a Golden Age of culture and feudalism at home in Georgia, become the only European nation whose pilgrims the Ayyubids wouldn’t keep out of Jerusalem, and given birth to a couple kids in her spare time, she died and was canonized. I like to think that she and Eleanor of Aquitaine are high-fiving in heaven.

Chichen Itza.

It’s difficult to find accurate information about Chichen Itza. Not because it’s hard to find, or because archaeologists don’t study it; good heavens, no, archaeologists study the crap out of it. It’s because an entire generation of spiritualists and their descendents took one look at the giant temples with serrated sides and squealed with delight. So it’s very easy to find webpages about how aliens helped the Maya build temples that channel the very power of the earth itself to create magical snake monsters; it’s less easy to find webpages that discuss how the Maya were nerds.

And they were undoubtedly nerds! That’s how you do good architecture, as we’ve been discussing with Persia, India, and China — you make a lot of people very, very excited about numbers, and to be very, very excited about numbers, you also have to be the kind of person who thinks that it is sooooo coooooool that you can map a random star for three hundred or three thousand years using your calculations. Which the Maya could do. Because the Maya were nerds. I don’t want to discount the religious significance of all of this — as far as we can tell, the surviving codices are equally religious and mathematical. But that’s the case for most of the science that got done everywhere in the world until spectacularly recently. Think, like, the last fifty years. The point is not their motivation; the point is that, for some deeply mysterious reason, people have been much more willing to believe that aliens landed in Mexico than that some engineers who lived and worked in Mexico before the arrival of Columbus were really, really smart.

So what Chichen Itza has: like, a million temples. It also has paved roads, a giant ballcourt, governmental buildings, optical and acoustic effects carefully designed to aid worship (particularly notable is the GIANT SHADOW SNAKE GOD). And, oh, yeah, since they rarely used metal for tools, this was all carved using quartz dust, emery, and jade.

What Chichen Itza doesn’t have: alien wizards.

Goldfish.

If you’re severely distracted by the limitless depth of nightmare in that goldfish’s eye, don’t worry: so was most of human civilization. Goldfish weren’t domesticated until the Tang Dynasty, after a natural mutation turned some carp gold and Tang court breeders decided that that was an awesome status symbol. The Song Dynasty, of course, followed this up with “Y’all can keep the orange ones, but if any peasant tries to take our gold fish, there will be decapitations for everyone.” Hence the charming orange goldfish that children take home in little plastic bags today.

History does not relate when the goldfish species made its terrible bargain with the dark gods.