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

his empire outwards in an irregular circle from his father’s possessions, encompassing almost all of the Ganges river in his kingdom. He also campaigned his way south, into the land of dynasties that had not yet come to their full strength. These dynasties (the Pallava on the southeastern coast, the Satavahana in the Deccan, the Vakataka, just to the west) were not quite powerful enough to keep Samudragupta out, and were forced one by one to pay him tribute.
    Ruling from his capital city Pataliputra, at the great fork in the Ganges river, Samudragupta carved the names of his conquests on one of the ancient stone pillars erected long ago by Asoka the Great himself. Asoka had scattered these pillars around his own empire, using them for inscriptions later known as the Pillar Edicts; Samudragupta inscribed his own victories right over top of Asoka’s words. Samudragupta needed to connect himself, explicitly, with the glorious past. He was facing an enormous challenge: holding together a geographically far-flung empire populated by lots of minor warleaders, kings, and tribal chiefs who were stubbornly holding on to their own power, their own bloodlines, their own identity. Constantine had tackled this same problem by gathering his empire together under the banner of the cross, but Samudragupta had a two-prong strategy instead. First, he did not insist on the same power and control that Constantine asserted for himself. He called himself “conqueror of the four quarters of the earth,” 5 but the larger the boast, the smaller the truth. Samudragupta did rule over more land than any Indian king before him, but he was not the master of his empire. Most of the “conquered” land was not folded into his empire; to the north and the west, he wrung tribute money out of the “conquered” kings and then pulled his armies back and let them rule their territories, as before, with only nominal acknowledgment of his victory. He did not even attempt to conquer the stubbornest of the independent strongholds: the lands of the Shaka, which lay in western India and were governed by the descendents of Scythians, roaming nomadic tribes from north of the Black Sea.
    The land directly under Samudragupta’s rule was nothing to sneeze at; it was, in fact, the biggest Indian empire since the collapse of the Mauryans four centuries earlier. But in the days of their most powerful king, Asoka the Great, the Mauryans had controlled almost the entire subcontinent. By contrast, Samudragupta’s empire, barely a fifth of the land south of the Himalaya mountains, was a pale shadow of former glory.
    Once Samudragupta counted his tributaries though—the surrounding kingdoms that had agreed to pay him off on an annual basis—his kingdom tripled in size. So he found it simplest to ignore the difference between empire and tributary land. As far as he was concerned, he had conquered his neighbors to the south and west. Had India been facing imminent outside invasion, this would not have worked. But, guarded for the moment by the mountains, Samudragupta had the luxury of lifting his hands away from the “conquered” lands. He could have a form of emperorship without the headaches thereof.
    Thus, under the Gupta rule, India arrived at what is sometimes called a golden age, and sometimes the classical age of Indian civilization. The label points us towards the second part of Samudragupta’s strategy, already hinted at by his use of Asoka the Great’s old pillar: he made conscious use of nostalgia, trying to create from the past a core that would exert a gravitational pull on the far edges of his empire.
    The Gupta kings had been turning towards the past for their power for some years already. In the decades leading up to Samudragupta’s reign, the ancient language Sanskrit had become more and more widely recognized as the language of scholarship, court, government, and even economics. Sanskrit had come down into India long ago, trickling across the