The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade Read Online Free PDF Page A

entirely different from that of the Christians in the west. There, Christianity had begun to serve the needs of the emperor; but in the land of the Jin, Hui-yuan argued, successfully, that Buddhist monks should be exempt from the requirement to bow to the emperor. They had chosen to exist in a different reality, where neither the battles in the north nor the warring in the south had any real importance.
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    TIMELINE 2
     
ROMAN EMPIRE
     
CHINA
     
 
Fall of Han (220)/Rise of Three Kingdoms: Shu Han, Cao Wei, Dong Wu
 
Wei Yuandi (260–265)
 
Destruction of Shu Han (263)
 
Fall of Cao Wei/Rise of Jin (265)
 
Jin Wudi (265–290)
 
Destruction of Dong Wu (280)
 
Unification under the Jin (280–316)
Diocletian (284–305)
 
 
Rebellion of the Eight Princes (291–306)
Maxentius (306–312)
Jin Huaidi (307–313)
Licinius (308–324) Maximinus Daia (308–313)
 
Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312)
Liu Cong of the Hanzhao (310–318)
Constantine (312–337)
 
Battle of Campus
Edict of
Milan (313)
 
 
Fall of unified Jin (316)
 
Jin Yuandi (317–323)
Council of Nicaea (325)
 
 
Fu Jian of the Qianqin (357–385)
 
Battle of the Fei River (383)
 
Rise of Bei Wei (386)
Tuoba Gui of the Bei Wei (386–409)
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Chapter Three
     

An Empire of the Mind
     
    Between 319 and 415, the Guptas of India conquer an empire and resurrect Sanskrit to record its greatness
     
    W HILE THE J IN were trying to re-create themselves in their shrunken domains, while Constantine ruled from his new city on the Black Sea, India was a sea of battling subkingdoms and tribal states. No religion, or idea, or emperor united the patchwork of tiny countries. The Mauryans, the last dynasty to claim a large part of the subcontinent as their own, were long gone. The north of India had been conquered and reconquered by wave after wave of foreigners: Greeks, central Asians, Parthians. 1
    Unified rule had lasted a little longer in the south, where a dynasty called the Satavahana had managed to keep control over the Deccan, the desert south of the Narmada river. But by the third century, the Satavahana empire too had collapsed, giving way to a series of competing dynastic families. Even farther south, a line of kings called the Kalabhra was slowly building a more lasting dynasty that would hold power for more than three hundred years and swallow the entire southern tip of the subcontinent; but this kingdom left few inscriptions and no written history behind it. Throughout the rest of India, small states stood elbow to elbow, none of them claiming much more territory than the next. 2
    In 319, a very minor king of one of those small jostling states passed his throne to his son. We know the name of the father, Ghatokacha, but it is not entirely clear where his original territory lay—possibly in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, near the mouth of the Ganges, or perhaps a little farther to the west.
    Ghatokacha’s single most important accomplishment in life was to make a match between his son, Chandragupta, and a royal princess from the Licchavi family, which had once ruled a small kingdom of its own and still controlled land to his north. 3 So when Chandragupta inherited the throne from his father in 319, he had a little bit more than most other petty Indian kings: he had not only his own kingdom but also the alliance of his wife’s family. This proved just enough. He began to fight, and over the next years he conquered his way from Magadha through the ancient territories of Kosola and Vatsa, building himself a small empire centered on the Ganges. As a reward he gave himself the title maharajadhiraja, “Great King of Kings” (a claim that somewhat anticipated the reality). 4 In 335, Chandragupta died and his crown went to his son Samudragupta. In Samudragupta’s hands, the little empire reached the critical mass that it needed in order to spread across the Indian countryside. Over the forty-five years of his reign, Samudragupta expanded