CHAPTER 6
Ancient Empire

Spiritual leaders throughout the world knew that this time was coming—a time when all things feminine would be exploited, smashed, and destroyed, including all Mother Earth–based cultures, feminine-based spirituality, and women.… It is said that only when humans are open enough in the heart will there be the deep reconnection that allows a true sharing of the sacred and secret teachings.¹

Ilarion Merculief

The widely accepted myth that imperial hegemony brings peace, stability, and well-run public services is pretty much just that—a myth. It has happened: Rome had a succession of five relatively wise and benevolent emperors over a period of eighty-four years, but examples in history are so rare as to be considered mainly curious aberrations. Wise benevolence is rarely a quality of those who achieve and hold positions of absolute power. Empire creates its own violence in the suppression of dissent, its internal intrigues for power, and its incessant wars to extend its dominion.

Even as Empire invented the technologies to construct great works, it also invented the technologies to destroy them more quickly and completely. Even more troublesome is Empire’s propensity to impose a cultural context that suppresses the development to maturity of the human consciousness.

The enduring positive contributions to human betterment of five thousand years of Empire pale in significance against the contributions of pre-imperial societies and the technological advances brought forth as the democratic reforms of the twentieth century unleashed the creative potential of a substantial portion of the human population. In short, the benefits of Empire have been as overstated as its costs have been understated. Beneath Empire’s carefully constructed myth of beneficent progress lies a dark truth of five thousand years of diminished human progress.

Asia, Africa, and South and Central America all had their ancient empires. Each fell into ruin, leaving little trace. The focus of my concern is on the ancient empires of the Middle East and Mediterranean and the modern empires of western Europe and North America to which they gave way, for these are the empires that have shaped the modern human experience and brought the species to the brink of self-destruction.

The brief historical review that follows draws mostly from standard history texts and reference sources to highlight the realities of Empire that are commonly overshadowed by history’s untiring accounts of glorious battles, great kings, brave warriors, and imperial accomplishment.² It reviews the rise and fall of the first of the great ancient city-state empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as they offer iconic examples of the structure and dynamics of imperial culture, economies, and political institutions. It also briefly visits the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, which elitists of our time look to as a model for the United States. Finally, it turns to the subsequent descent into the feudalism and religious conflict of Europe’s Middle Ages, which our own future may repeat if we leave the choices at hand to those who look to the Roman Empire as their model of governance.

MESOPOTAMIA

In mid-fortieth century BCE the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys were organized into twelve walled city-states, each surrounded by the villages to which it offered protection and from which it extracted the food surpluses essential to its sustenance. Each city worshipped its own deity, whose temple was the city’s central structure.

Historians believe that initially the citizens of each of the twelve cities shared power more or less equitably and that women may have had the key roles in the affairs of the temples, which were centers of administrative and economic as well as religious power. To survive during hard times, free farmers placed themselves in debt to the temple, leading to a gradual transfer of land to the temples and ultimately the city-states. Over time, the temples came to own vast tracts of the best agricultural land and played a major role in both local and foreign trade—an early manifestation of the principle that in hard times the moneylenders win.

The region had fertile soil, and its rivers provided an abundant and reliable water supply. A lack of rainfall during the main growing season, 111however, made large-scale irrigation a necessity, which led to a further centralization of administration. A lack of basic natural resources, including stone, minerals, and even trees, made long-distance trade a necessity and created the need for an organized military to secure trade routes that linked rival cities competing for distant resources. The need to maintain both irrigation and an organized military created the need to increase tax collections from free farmers and local artisans while exposing them to competition from subsidized imports. These dynamics contributed to a gradual consolidation of power under powerful kings and a displacement of the feminine by the masculine.

Commerce and administration required written records, leading to the invention of cuneiform writing and the first schools —located in the temple precincts—in which prospective scribes were taught to read and write. This served both to centralize power and to give special advantage to those trained in this powerful technology.

A gradual evolution in religious beliefs regarding the nature and power of the gods mirrored changes in the defining relationships of the society itself. In the earlier period, when people lived in a more intimate relationship with nature, they worshipped goddesses that represented the natural forces of sun, rain, wind, and fertility. Ishtar, the goddess of nature, the elements, and sexual love, was chief among them. With the advance of urban civilization and the rule of male kings, male gods with more human qualities—including the capacity to do both good and evil—gained prominence. As earthly kings became more powerful, Mesopotamia’s gods took on political characteristics, and notions of an omnipotent god who ruled over all others came to the fore.³

As they consolidated their power, the kings of the rival city-states began to compete for dominance. The region was unified under a single king around 2800 BCE, but the competition for power continued, leaving the region divided and vulnerable to external conquerors. Over the centuries, succeeding imperial dynasties rose and fell. Some were the creations of foreign invaders and others of local revolts. The greatest of the rulers of this period set new standards for both grandeur and ruthless brutality as successive waves of invasion, revolt, and conquest built great cities, destroyed them, and rebuilt them again at an enormous cost in lives and resources.

The Assyrians, who had settled in the northernmost portion of Mesopotamia, consolidated their rule over the region in 1225 BCE with the defeat of Babylon. To prevent the emergence of a prosperous and 112educated class that might challenge the arbitrary power of the king, the Assyrians mandated that only foreigners could engage in commercial activity. They also imposed the complete subjugation of women. Wives were decreed the property of their husbands. Men were allowed to take several wives and given the sole power of divorce. Married women were permitted to appear in public only with their faces veiled.⁴ The suppression of the feminine was complete. We know little of the life of slaves in this period except that they existed, had no rights whatsoever, and were subject to cruel mutilation as punishment for minor offenses.⁵

The mythos of imperial splendor and accomplishment has a factual foundation. The Assyrians are properly celebrated for their exceptional engineering, artistic, intellectual, and botanical capacities and achieved grand works that are impressive even by contemporary standards. During the reign of Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) they built the city of Nineveh on the banks of the upper Tigris. Its great wall had a circumference of seven and a half miles and enclosed magnificent temples and a royal palace of seventy-one chambers. The area outside the wall featured orchards with rare trees and zoos with exotic animals brought from far lands. A great aqueduct brought fresh mountain water to the city from a distance of fifty miles. The city’s library was a repository of all the region’s learning and literature.

The legendary grandeur of these early imperial city-states was of brief duration and came at the price of an equally legendary brutality. What Empire built, Empire also destroyed. When in 689 BCE Sennacherib suppressed a revolt in rival Babylon, another city of fabled splendor, he boasted, “I made Babylon’s destruction more complete than that by a flood.”⁶

The frightful brutality of Assyria’s military campaigns was intended to instill abject terror in the hearts of its enemies, an early version of the military tactic of “shock and awe” implemented with bombs and rockets by the U.S. military in its 2003 invasion of these same ancient lands. By their own surviving records, the Assyrians skinned their enemies alive; impaled them on stakes; cut off ears, noses, and sex organs; and exhibited mutilated victims in cities that had not yet surrendered. The Assyrians accomplished their goal of instilling terror, but at the price of instilling an unrelenting hatred that led to a sustained and ultimately successful resistance.⁷ The mutilation of the innocents caused by modern weaponry is no less brutal and, as the aftermath of the U.S. shock 113and awe assault on Baghdad demonstrates, provokes the same response. How slow we are to learn!

For reasons of prestige, Sennacherib’s son rebuilt Babylon soon after his father had destroyed it. By 651 BCE Babylon had again become a center of revolt. Sennacherib’s grandson forced its surrender in 648 BCE, again destroying the city and slaughtering its citizens. In an echo of his grandfather, the grandson boasted that he cut their corpses into small pieces and fed them to dogs, pigs, and vultures. Again, terror fed hatred and resistance.⁸

Hated by all around them, the brutal Assyrian military rule lasted less than a century. The people of southern Mesopotamia formed an alliance with an Indo-European tribe that held power in Iran. In 612 BCE, the alliance captured and laid waste to Nineveh and slaughtered its inhabitants, ending the Assyrian Empire and giving rise to a new Babylonian Empire. This pattern of successive waves of creation and destruction of human and natural potential would define the era of Empire for thousands of years to come.

The positive accomplishments of Mesopotamian civilization included the construction of major irrigation works, the invention of the earliest forms of writing, wheeled transport, and the calendar. In later periods, the region made major contributions to mathematics and astronomy—plotting and predicting the movement of the stars and the planets.

However, the early imperial civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean failed to maintain their early advantage because, in the words of Jared Diamond,”they committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base” as they cleared their forests for timber and agriculture. A combination of overgrazing and loss of forest cover led to soil erosion and the silting up of river valleys. Dependence on irrigation to bring parched lands into production created a buildup of salts in the soil. Once its soil could no longer sustain large population concentrations, the region fell into a decline from which it has never recovered.⁹ It was an early local version of the ecological suicide the human species is now committing on a global scale for the same reason: failure to consider the long-term consequences of short-term gains.

The dominator power of Empire breeds a hubris of invincibility that carries the seeds of self-destruction. It invites corruption, the rebellion of subjugated peoples, and environmental devastation. We can only speculate on what the people of the early Mesopotamian civilization 114might have accomplished if they had avoided falling under the sway of Empire, acted as stewards of Earth, renounced violence against one another, and focused their considerable intellectual, architectural, and creative energies on building on, rather than periodically obliterating, the accomplishments of their neighbors and forebears. If we fail to negotiate the transition to Earth Community in our time, future generations of humans may ponder the question of why we too were so blind.

EGYPT

Prior to the imperial rule of the pharaohs, the goddess Isis, giver and protector of life, ruled supreme in the Nile Valley. Somewhere around 3000 BCE, Menes united the people of the valley and established his capital at Memphis, near modern Cairo. Some historians believe that the development of the writing system known as hieroglyphics made this unification possible and that the need for a free flow of commerce up and down the Nile made it essential.

For a period of some nine hundred years, Egypt lived in peace and prosperity under a unified state based more on cooperative need than on exploitation. For a time Isis continued to rule, women enjoyed high legal status and social freedom, property passed through the female line, and abundant fertile land isolated between two deserts insulated the state from competition with its neighbors. During the course of a succession of pharaohs, however, Osiris, the husband of the goddess Isis, rose to prominence along with Re, the great sun god. Eventually, the Egyptians came to believe that Re gave immortality to the state and that the pharaoh was his living representative.

The deification of the pharaoh and a growing concern for the afterlife accompanied an increasing narcissism among Egypt’s rulers and the dedication of a growing share of available wealth to constructing pretentious monuments of self-glorification, such as the Great Pyramids, to facilitate the comfortable passage of deceased rulers into the afterlife. The unified state was unable to survive a series of crop failures due to climatic disaster and, beginning about 2200 BCE, Egypt fell into a period of banditry, chaotic competition between rival local nobles, and invasions by desert tribes.

There followed a relatively more democratic period of two hundred years (1990–1786 BCE), commonly referred to as Egypt’s golden age, 115during which order was restored by an alliance of farmers, merchants, officials, and artisans. The alliance kept the nobles in check, supported public works like irrigation and drainage that benefited the entire population, and ushered in a period of comparative social justice, intellectual achievement, and prosperity. Some scholars refer to it as history’s first democratic kingdom.¹⁰

An invasion by the Hyksos of western Asia provoked a two-hundred-year rebellion that gave rise to a strong national unity, the creation of a strong military force, and the installation of a new series of powerful pharaohs. By the time the Hyksos rulers were overthrown, however, the Egyptian culture of pacifism and isolation had been displaced by the Hyksos culture of aggressive imperialism and military expansion. Egypt reached out to establish its rule over a domain that came to extend from the Euphrates to the southern reaches of the Nile.

With a diversion of manpower to military operations on the front lines, there was a significant increase in the demand for slaves to provide labor for the domestic economy, creating ever deeper social divisions and a corruption of the ruling classes. This was the setting in which the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews who lived in their midst. Think of it as an early version of the use of outsourcing and immigrant labor to depress domestic wages and force the working classes to an acceptance of military service as their major alternative to destitution.

Eventually the territory of the Egyptian Empire expanded beyond the ability of its rulers to manage. Constant revolts at the periphery, an inflow of wealth from conquered peoples, and a system of authority based solely on military power fueled corruption, weakened the national fiber, and left Egypt vulnerable to foreign invasion and rule. The Libyans invaded around 950 BCE, then the Nubians from the south, followed by the Assyrians, later by the Persians (525 BCE), and then the Greeks and Romans.

The corruption of the state that accompanied Egypt’s imperial expansion following its golden age carried over to the corruption of a priesthood increasingly consumed by its own greed. The ethical foundation of Egypt’s religion gave way to the commercialization of redemption in the afterlife, as magic charms sold by the religious establishment came to replace good deeds as the best guarantee of entrance into the kingdom of Re.¹¹

Centuries later, the sale of indulgences by a corrupt Roman Church to ensure passage to heaven would provoke the rebellion of a dissident 116priest named Martin Luther. Still later, Calvinists would carry to North America a belief that only faith and tithing, not works, assured passage to the heavenly kingdom.

The Egyptian Empire exemplifies Empire’s pattern of expropriating and squandering its resources and life energy to construct monuments to the vanity of brutal rulers, support wars of conquest, and support the luxurious lifestyles of vain and corrupt political and religious elites. The cultures and institutions of life and partnership gave way to the cultures and institutions of domination and death. The specifics differed, but once established these patterns remained strikingly consistent among the empires that followed.

After Mesopotamia and Egypt, the next of history’s great empires was initiated by Cyrus the Great of Persia (Iran), who came to power in 559 BCE and by the time of his death had conquered and consolidated into his empire much of the territory that is now Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey. In 529 BCE, his son Cambyses conquered all of Egypt and brought it under Persian rule.

Philip of Macedonia assumed the throne of a Greek-speaking territory north of Greece in 359 BCE and quickly built a professional army that conquered and consolidated its rule over the whole of Greece. When Philip was murdered, rule passed to his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, who put to death all potential rivals for the throne and went on to conquer and claim for Greece all the lands of the former Persian Empire.

Inspired by Alexander, an Indian adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya established the first Indian Empire in the late fourth century BCE, building a military force of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 9,000 elephants, and an army of spies supported by a land tax equal to one-fourth to one-half of the crops produced in the areas he controlled.¹² An earlier urban civilization grounded in warfare and imperial rule had emerged in China in the second millennium BCE. There is also evidence of imperial civilizations in parts of Africa (first millennium CE) and in the Americas (first to second millennium CE), although the archaeological evidence relating to their social structures remains sketchy.

ROME

For the advocates of Empire, the Roman Empire is the defining symbol of the glorious benefits and accomplishments of imperial rule. For 117advocates of Earth Community, it is a defining symbol of Empire’s oppressive, destructive, life-denying corruption.¹³ When contemporary U.S. elitists evoke admiring references to Roman rule, it is instructive to have clearly in mind the reality behind the myth.

The Republic

Founded in 753 BCE, Rome was ruled initially by kings whose primary responsibility was to maintain order and military efficiency at a time when the various city-states of the Italian peninsula were engaged in nearly constant warfare against one another. The early Romans were a proud and aggressive people, and their rapidly growing population created a hunger for land. Operating on a concept much like that underlying the Italian fascism of World War II, the state was paramount, and the duty of the individual was to serve it.

Around 500 BCE, the Roman Senate, a deliberative body of little power comprising representatives of the aristocracy, asserted itself to found the Roman Republic. The Senate claimed for itself control over public funds and the power to elect consuls, whose powers were much the same as those of the former kings but whom the Senate could depose.

The primary responsibility of a consul was to lead Rome’s armies in wars against neighboring cities. The Senate’s concern was to curb the most extreme abuses of arbitrary power, not to democratize power or secure the liberty of the individual.

The patricians ruled. The plebeians, small farmers, tradesmen, and even some wealthy families of recent foreign origin had no defined rights. Plebeians were required to serve in the military but excluded from holding office. In the absence of written laws, the patricians were free in judicial proceedings to interpret the rules to their own benefit.

Continuous war fed an increasingly martial spirit as Rome’s victories expanded the territory under its control. By 265 BCE, Rome had established its dominion over the entire Italian peninsula and turned its attention to contesting the control of Sicily by Carthage, a great maritime empire on the North African coast built on trade and the exploitation of North Africa’s resources. In 146 BCE, Rome launched an assault on Carthage. Following their victory, Roman soldiers went house to house slaughtering Carthaginian citizens, laid waste to this once magnificent city, sold fifty-five thousand survivors into slavery, and plowed salt into the soil to render it infertile and incapable of supporting 118human habitation. From there Rome went on to establish its dominion over all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including most of Europe and the Middle East.¹⁴

In the days of the early Republic, most Romans were farmers; few engaged in trade or crafts. Conscripted to fight unending wars, many farmers were unable to tend their fields, fell into debt, and lost their farmland to creditors who consolidated it into large estates worked by slaves acquired through conquest. Creditors also had the right to sell the hapless debtors into slavery as a means of recovering their funds—an especially odious form of war profiteering at the expense of the conscripted that brings to mind contemporary reports of creditors foreclosing on the assets of U.S. soldiers unable to pay their debts while fighting in Iraq.

By 150 BCE, slaves filled the republic’s countryside, and its cities teemed with unemployed farmers dependent on state welfare and struggling to get by as best they could. At the end of the second century BCE, Italy’s slave population numbered about a million, “making Rome one of the most slave-based economies known to history.”¹⁵ The resulting social pressures played out in the Senate’s demand for further conquests to acquire new land on which to settle Roman citizens who had been displaced from lands and employment by creditors and slaves.

In Rome, an increasing flow of wealth and slaves from conquered territories undermined traditional authority and discipline among members of the aristocracy. Privileged and pampered, Rome’s ruling elite embraced extravagantly self-indulgent and wildly hedonistic lifestyles and devoted their civic energies to avoiding taxes and assuring the exemption of their children from military service.

Intrigue in the struggle for power within the ranks of the nobles was commonplace and included assassinations, the wholesale slaughter of political opponents, and even battles between the armies of competing Roman generals. Major slave revolts at times threatened the security of the state. Six thousand captives from one slave revolt that lasted two years and overran much of southern Italy were left crucified along a 150-mile stretch of road from Capua to Rome. Thousands of spectators gathered in the Colosseum and other amphitheaters to be entertained by the human slaughter of gladiatorial contests and human sacrifice to wild animals. Over time, what had once been a republic of farmers became a complex and differentiated society racked by intrigue, brutality, 119and rebellion and deeply divided between the rich, who became fewer and wealthier, and the destitute poor, who became more numerous and desperate.

Myth of the Roman Peace

The Roman Empire is often celebrated for what is referred to as the Pax Romana, or the Roman peace—a period of more than two hundred years extending from the beginning of the rule of Augustus Caesar (27 BCE to 14 CE) to the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180. The British would later claim the Pax Romana as a model for their own empire, as would the neoconservative militarists who have held key foreign- and military-policy positions during the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and who openly advocated the imposition on the world of a Pax Americana. There was no naval battle during these two hundred years in the portion of the world ruled by Rome, but otherwise the Pax Romana was scarcely peaceful.

Augustus Caesar began his rule by sending out unsuccessful military expeditions to conquer Ethiopia and Arabia. He was more successful in conquering the territories of what are now Switzerland, Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany to the Elbe.¹⁶ Tiberius (14–37) ended his reign in a paranoid fit of random and ferocious torture and executions, including those of his own generals and members of the Senate. Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37–41), known more infamously as Caligula, was legendary for his cruelty, extravagance, debauchery, and despotism, and is generally considered to have been clinically insane. He executed his own military commanders and closest supporters and confiscated the estates of nobles to support his lavish lifestyle.

Emperor Claudius (41–54), who was the target of numerous rebellions and assassination attempts, added Britain to the Empire by invasion in 43, conquered additional territories in North Africa and Asia Minor, and for a time expelled Jews from Rome. Nero (54–68) was infamous for his personal debauchery, extravagance, persecution of Christians, and the execution of his mother and first wife. Similar patterns prevailed through the reigns of Vespasian (69–79), Titus (79–81), and Domitian (81–96).¹⁷ All of this and more occurred during the much celebrated Pax Romana. Overall, it is a curious idea of peace.

Only during the latter part of the Pax Romana, during the rule of 120what historians refer to as the “Five Good Emperors” (96 to 180), might the Roman Empire be considered by any reasonable standard a model of peace and good governance. Nerva (96–98), the first among the five, recognized the limitations of his own son and introduced the practice by which he and his successors chose and adopted a young man designated to be the successor emperor, rather than trust to the luck of heredity. Thus it was that through five administrations each emperor took it upon himself to select and groom as his successor one of the empire’s most worthy and talented men.

Nerva was followed by Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–38), Antoninus Pius (138–61), and Marcus Aurelius (161–80). Compared to those who went before them they were paragons of wisdom, virtue, sanity, and humble benevolence, responsible for many positive accomplishments in administration, infrastructure, justice, and the well-being of the poor. They also treated the Senate with a degree of respect. Each one, however, ruled as dictator. Rebellions, conquests, palace intrigues, and executions continued, but with diminished frequency and less gratuitous brutality. Expansion of the empire slowed, and greater attention was paid to good governance and the maintenance of relatively stable boundaries.

The line of appointed succession worked reasonably well until Marcus Aurelius failed to recognize that his natural son Commodus (180–92) was a vicious incompetent and named him successor. Commodus proved a throwback to Nero and Caligula, and his brutal rule, which ended when he was strangled in a palace coup, marked the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire. Hunger and disease became endemic. By 284, the empire was on the brink of ruin.¹⁸

For all its violence and excess, the Roman Empire did make positive contributions to human progress. To administer its vast territories, it developed modern systems of codified law and rule-based administrative systems. It pioneered high-speed transportation in service to commerce, agriculture, and military movement that served as models for those who followed. It also made important contributions to city planning and infrastructure—particularly with regard to plumbing, sewage disposal, dams, and aqueducts that set new standards for public sanitation.

Those who put forward the Roman Empire as a model for world peace and governance, however, are on weak ground. Its accomplishments came at a cost in lives, liberty, and corruption that is arguably unsurpassed in the human experience. Its more positive accomplishments 121were largely confined to the good luck of an eighty-four-year reign by five strong emperors of sound mind who offered a brief respite from hundreds of years of rule by the brutal and the deranged.

Historic Irony

One of history’s most ironic twists occurred during the period of Rome’s decline when Emperor Constantine (312–37) became a Christian, gave Christianity his official support, and built Christian churches throughout the empire. The empire whose soldiers had crucified a Hebrew prophet named Jesus as an enemy of the state thus embraced him as its own.

During his life, Jesus had renounced violence, preached unconditional love, sided with the poor and oppressed, and taught his followers to live by values antithetical to the way of Empire. By advocating a life of active nonparticipation in Empire’s corruption of the soul, he presented a practical moral challenge to Empire’s established secular and religious order.

Following his execution by order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of the province of Judea, Jesus’s disciples carried forward his message, and with time the numbers of Jesus’s followers grew, although prior to Constantine’s conversion they were never sufficiently numerous to present a serious threat to Roman authority. Subsequently, a corrupt Church of Rome would replace the corrupt institutions of Rome’s secular empire as the primary institutional force for European unification.

When Constantine embraced Jesus as his own, he redefined the meaning of Jesus’s life and teaching to claim for himself and the empire the moral authority of the prophet of justice, peace, and love. In the words of Christian writer Walter Wink:

Once Christianity became the religion of the empire… its success was linked to the success of the empire, and preservation of the empire became the decisive criterion for ethical behavior.… The church no longer saw the demonic as lodged in the empire, but in the empire’s enemies. Atonement became a highly individual transaction between the believer and God; society was assumed to be Christian, so the idea that the work of Christ entails the radical critique of society was largely abandoned.¹⁹ (italics in the original)

To this day Christianity remains divided between those who embrace Jesus’s teachings of love and forgiveness as the foundation of Christian morality and those who invoke the name of Jesus in the pursuit of righteous vengeance, imperial conquest, and authoritarian rule.

FEUDAL FIEFDOMS

By 700, the unified Roman Empire that had once encircled the Mediterranean Sea had been replaced by competing Byzantine, Islamic, and western Christian empires. Thus began what historians refer to as the Middle Ages, the period of European history between the Roman Empire and the rise of the modern European nation-state during which no individual ruler or nation was able to establish dominion over the whole.

Europe’s early Middle Ages (600–1050), sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, were days of classic feudalism. Power was fragmented among competing fiefdoms. The roads, water-supply systems, and other public infrastructure created by the Roman Empire, as well as its cultural life, went into decline. The Church of Rome, with its vast bureaucracy and influence over spiritual life, acted in shifting political alliances with secular rulers to provide the only unifying force among those European countries previously united under Rome’s secular rule.

Life during this period was harsh. Starvation and disease were commonplace. Intellectual and artistic achievements were undistinguished. There were repeated invasions by Vikings, Hungarians, and Muslims. By contrast, the period of Roman secular rule had been a time of comparative stability, security, and prosperity.

In the High Middle Ages (1050–1300) the harshness of life gradually eased. Improved agricultural methods and the use of water and animal power allowed for the support of a growing population, transformed Europe from a primarily agricultural to an increasingly urban civilization, and substantially improved living standards for the nobles. National monarchies began to assert their authority over competing fiefdoms, although they often found that the loyalty of their subjects to the authority of the Crown was subordinated to their loyalty to the authority of the Roman Church.

Corruption remained rampant within both the religious and political establishments as each vied for imperial power. This was the period of the largely disastrous Crusades, carried forth as uncoordinated 123initiatives by various princes and independent brigands in response to the call of the pope. Lacking either a secure political base or coherent leadership, the Crusades were largely a form of violent adventurism with no capacity to capture and incorporate new territory into an imperial structure.

The late Middle Ages (1300–1500) were a time of famine due to exhausted farmlands and bad weather, the pestilence of the Black Death, and protracted warfare among competing kings, princes, and petty nobles in search of dominion, independence, and personal enrichment from the spoils of war. Death rates soared and fortunes were in constant flux. This period, however, also marked the beginning of the European Renaissance, which brought a flourishing of art, culture, and philosophy beginning in Italy that with time launched a growing challenge to authority, whether secular or ecclesiastic, as a source of absolute truth.

On October 31, 1517, the act of a dissident Catholic priest sparked a rebellion against the religious monopoly of the Roman Christian Church, launched the Protestant Reformation, and added a new element of division and instability to European politics. Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in protest against a corrupt Roman Catholic Church that he charged had lost its moral authority and become a self-indulgent imperial power in its own right. He professed that the ultimate spiritual authority is the authority of conscience, not the authority of the church. The hundred years from 1560 to 1660 featured periodic outbreaks of religious slaughter of Protestants by Catholics and of Catholics by Protestants, often encouraged or aided by rulers whose political interests aligned with one side or the other. It was a time of destructive wars, rapacious tax collectors, and looting soldiers.²⁰

Gradually the western European nations would resolve the chaos of competition and intrigue among feudal lords and feuding religious functionaries by consolidating the powers of monarchy in the institutions of the modern nation-state, which for most people offered a welcome relief from the turmoil of feudalism.

Those who lived in the Middle Ages might have looked back with justification on the comparative order and amenities of the Roman Empire, 124especially during the brief reign of the Five Good Emperors, as a better time than their own. Those who eulogize the Roman Empire in the age of the democratic ideal, however, should recall the violence, injustice, and debauchery that were hallmarks of Roman rule. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome were three of history’s most celebrated empires. Each had its moments of greatness, but at an enormous cost in lives, natural wealth, and human possibility, as vain and violent rulers played out the drama of Empire’s inexorable play-or-die, rule-or-be-ruled, kill-or-be-killed logic.

Social pathology became the norm as the god of death displaced the goddess of life and the power of the sword ruled over the power of the chalice. The creative energy of the species was redirected from building the generative power of the whole to advancing the technological instruments of war and the social instruments of domination. Empire built great civilizations, but then swept them away in successive waves of violence and destruction as jealous winners sought to erase the memory of those they vanquished.

The sacred became the servant of the profane. Fertile lands were converted to desert by intention or rapacious neglect. Rule by terror fueled resentments that assured repeating cycles of violent retribution. War, trade, and debt served as weapons of the few to expropriate the means of livelihood of the many and reduce them to slavery or serfdom. The resulting power imbalances fueled the delusional hubris and debaucheries of psychopathic rulers who fancied themselves possessed of divine privilege and otherworldly power. Attention turned from realizing the possibilities of life in this world to securing a privileged place in the afterlife.

The ruling elites maintained cultural control through the institutions of religion, economic control through the institutions of trade and credit, and political control through the institutions of rule making and organized military force. Although elite factions might engage in ruthless competition with one another, they generally aligned in common cause to secure the continuity of the institutions of their collective privilege, often using intermarriage as a mechanism of alliance building.

If many of the patterns associated with ancient kings, pharaohs, and emperors seem strangely familiar to our own time of the democratic ideal, even though democracy has ended monarchy in its historic form, it is because the dominator cultures and institutions of Empire simply morphed into new forms in the face of the democratic challenge. To 125free ourselves from Empire’s deadly grip we must understand not only its historical roots, but as well its contemporary expression. So let us now take a brief look at the formation of the colonial empires of the modern European nation-states and their transmogrification into the institutions of the global corporate empires of the late twentieth century as the ruling class negotiated an end run around the modern democratic challenge to its power and privilege.