Yet in the 10th century, while Europe was paralysed by Viking raids, Merv was a flourishing Silk Route capital, and the second city of Islam, trumped only by Baghdad with its 100 million citizens. On one side a forest of smokestacks belches fumes into the desert on the other a spread of barren collective farms extend towards the encroaching dunes: “If you meet a viper and a Mervi,” advises a local proverb, “kill the Mervi first, and the viper afterwards.”
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Traditionally, of course, it is a part of the world that rarely figures in Eurocentric histories: who, for example, now remembers those Turkish converts to Judaism, the Khazars, who dominated the trade and culture of the steppes from the 8th to the 10th century, when they were finally and savagely wiped out by the Rus Vikings, who after spilling “rivers of blood” and plundering the Khazar capital Atil were “gorged on loot and worn out with raiding”? Equally, how many of us recall the legendary greatness of the Seljuk sultans of Merv? The ruins of their once magnificent capital lie now amid the camel-coloured wastes of Turkmenistan: a scatter of mud walls, a few ambiguous foundations, the odd cracked dome of a mud-brick Sufi tomb forgotten on the outer edge of a polluted and provincial post-Soviet town. But he throws his net wider still, showing how the belt of territory between China and Constantinople was for much of history the centre of the world, and a place from which we drew so much of what has come to be regarded as “western civilisation”.
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Runciman’s great insight was that the real heirs of Roman civilisation were not the crude chain-mailed knights of the rural west, but instead the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arabs of Damascus, both of whom had preserved the Hellenised urban tradition of antiquity long after it was destroyed in Europe: “Our civilisation,” he wrote, “has grown … out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” Frankopan shares Runciman’s love of the rich, cosmopolitan cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, and the way they seeded so many of the great ideas of the west – it was here, he writes, quoting the historian Sallust, that “Roman soldiers came of age: learned how to make love, to be drunk, to enjoy statues, pictures and art”. Frankopan’s 650-page tome on the subject takes some of the most fascinating of Von Richthofen’s ideas and cross-fertilises them with those of Runciman to spectacular effect. He used it to describe the trading routes that first linked China with the Mediterranean west, which he realised formed one of history’s great spaces of cultural transfer, economic change and intellectual fusion. The concept of a “Silk Road” is not an ancient one: it was first coined only in the late 19th century by the Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, a cousin of the first world war flying ace the Red Baron. Like Runciman, Frankopan is a multilingual Byzantinist whose first books were about the crusades now he has taken on an even larger and more daunting chunk of history – nothing less than a history of the world, seen through the timely lens of east-west interaction.
Runciman died 15 years ago, but he would greatly have approved of Peter Frankopan, the brilliant and fearlessly wide-ranging young Oxford historian who is in many ways the true heir to his mantle. One of the tragedies of our time is that it is no longer considered relevant to write history well.” In the preface of his three-volume masterpiece, A History of the Crusades, Runciman threw down the gauntlet to his more workaday rivals: “I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.” But perhaps his most undonnish quality was his wish – and ability – to write wide-ranging books about big subjects and to do so in beautifully honed prose for a general audience, something that is still rare, but which in 1954 seemed a radical departure from the academic norm: “When Gibbon or Macaulay were writing,” Runciman told me, “the publication of one of their volumes was a great literary event.
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