Knowt
Gunpowder Empire
My Notes:
Garner Notes:
“What the f@#k howard county” - Garner
Gunpowder Empires = Islamic Land Empires
Safavids are based on the islamic ruling faction, their religion and only their religion (Theocratic)
Shia Islam - forcibly converted
Believe they were decendants from Muhammad
Ottomans believed that they were THE Muslim empire yet were tolerant of other religions
Called the rulers Caliphs
Suni Islam
Both use religion to justify fighting for territory
Ottomans are the longest lasting (1299 - 1923) Turkey / Eastern Europe ish
Safavids (1502-1736) Arabian Peninsula ish
fall twice
rebellion that overthrows the Shah just a few decades before the final fall in 1736
Mughals (1526-1858) India ish
Taj Mahal (1632) goes bankrupt and is both the peak and the decline
1st end date is 7 year war in 1763 - hands over power to europe with a Mughal on the thrown yet has no power
Safavids In Class 1/29/24
Turks blended with Persians
Fundamentalist Sufi Shia sect of Islam: Safawiya
believe in 12th Hidden Imam: return in end times (like Jesus)
Believed they had to convert everyone to save them from his return when he purges sinners (“saves us”)
believe they have roots going back to Ali
Start as violent extremists
Shah = ruler, persian word
First Shah in 1501 was 14 years old at the time (Ismael)
The Third Force: Ghulams The Elite slave troops/workers/harems similar to Janissaries in Ottoman Empire captured from Christian territory
boys or girls captured and put into the military
girls became a harem (“sex slaves” - garner)
If your kid is the best your family becomes better off
fighting among families and children
Art, Clothing, Poetry, Bureaucracy all taken from Persian culture influence
Running water, plumbing, and very advanced cities'
Isfahan
Shah Abbas Mosque
Notes:
Gunpowder Empires were large multi ethnic states in Southwest, Central, and South Asia that relied on firearms to conquer and control their territories.
They included three Islamic empires in the period from 1450 to 1750: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal Empires, all of which left splendid artistic and architectural legacies
The Islamic empires did not modernize, while Russia modernized and reorganized its army to survive as an independent nation-state
Tamerlane, a Mongol-Turkic ruler of the late fourteenth century, set the stage for the rise of the Turkic empires and used gunpowder to build a government dependent on military and heavy artillery
He used it to protect land routes on the Silk Road but failed to leave an effective political structure in many of the areas he conquered, leading to war expenses that ravaged the empire's economy
Violence continued to mark the pattern of conquest that resulted in new dynasties: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. The last to fall was the Ottoman Empire, which came to an end following World War I
Video Notes
European art during the time period in question frequently showcased a tendency to portray individuals and cultures from outside of Europe through a distinctly Eurocentric lens. This Eurocentric perspective often resulted in the depiction of these individuals and cultures as exotic or primitive, perpetuating stereotypes and reinforcing the prevailing Eurocentric worldview. This artistic representation of non-European cultures provides valuable insights into the ethnocentrism and colonial mindset that were prevalent among Europeans during this era.
The Eurocentric worldview, which positioned Europeans as superior to other cultures, played a significant role in shaping the artistic representation of non-European subjects. European artists, influenced by the prevailing attitudes of their time, often approached their work with a sense of cultural superiority. This mindset led them to interpret and portray non-European cultures through a lens that emphasized their differences from European norms, often exoticizing or simplifying them in the process.
The portrayal of non-European cultures as exotic or primitive in European art reveals not only the limited understanding and appreciation of diverse cultures at the time but also the power dynamics inherent in colonialism. European artists, operating within the context of expanding empires and colonial ventures, often sought to reinforce the idea of European dominance and control over non-European territories. By depicting these cultures as exotic or primitive, they furthered the narrative of European superiority and justified imperialistic endeavors.
Moreover, the artistic representation of non-European subjects in a Eurocentric manner also reflects the limited exposure that Europeans had to these cultures. During this time, travel and communication between Europe and other parts of the world were not as widespread or accessible as they are today. As a result, European artists often relied on second-hand accounts, stereotypes, and their own preconceived notions when depicting non-European cultures. This lack of direct interaction and understanding contributed to the perpetuation of Eurocentric biases in European art.
In conclusion, the portrayal of people and cultures outside of Europe in European art during this time period was heavily influenced by a Eurocentric lens. The depiction of these subjects as exotic or primitive reflects the prevailing Eurocentric worldview, characterized by cultural superiority and a colonial mindset. This artistic representation not only reveals the ethnocentrism and limited understanding of diverse cultures among Europeans but also highlights the power dynamics inherent in colonialism. It serves as a reminder of the importance of critically examining historical artworks to gain a more nuanced understanding of the past.
Some important Mughal architectural achievements include the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Fatehpur Sikri, and Humayun's Tomb. These structures showcase the Mughal Empire's grandeur, intricate designs, and fusion of Persian, Islamic, and Indian architectural styles.
The Reading: Ch 19 Gunpowder Empire
New patterns and change arise from many sources. One of these was technology: gunpowder. The term Gunpowder Empires refers to large multiethnic states in Southwest, Central, and South Asia that relied on firearms to conquer and control their territories. In addition to Russia, the Gunpowder Empires in the period from 1450 to 1750 included three in which Islam was strong: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal Empires. Although their societies tended to be militaristic, all three left splendid artistic and architectural legacies.
The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires would decline as Western Europe grew in strength economically and militarily-particularly in terms of sea power. Unlike these three Islamic empires, Russia modernized and reorganized its army, modeling it after the armies of England, France, and the Netherlands. The Islamic empires did not modernize, and, as a result, Russia remained powerful enough to survive as an independent nation-state, while the other Gunpowder Empires fell. The last to fall, the Ottoman Empire, came to an end following World War I with the formation of modern Turkey. The Safavid and Mughal Empires each had fallen long before. (For more on Russia’s use of gunpowder and its military reforms, see page 337.)
The initial success of the Gunpowder Empires was a result of their own military might along with the weakness and corruption of the regimes that they replaced. Equally important to the history of these empires was the loose alliance of European nations that fought among themselves rather than uniting to topple the new powers growing in the east.
The Rule of Tamerlane The invasion of Central Asia and the Middle East by Tamerlane (Timur the Lame, a Mongol-Turkic ruler of the late fourteenth century) set the stage for the rise of the Turkic empires. Leading an army partly composed of nomadic invaders from the broad steppes of Eurasia, Tamerlane moved out from the trading city of Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan) to make ruthless conquests in Persia (modern-day Iran) and India. The Eurasian steppes were also the birthplace of the ghazi ideal-a model for warrior life that blended the cooperative values of nomadic culture with the willingness to serve as a holy fighter for Islam. According to some historians, this ideal served for centuries as the model for warriors who participated in the rise of the Gunpowder Empires, and it was a model that fit Tamerlane well.
Some historians believe that Tamerlane’s violent takeover of areas of Central Asia included the massacre of some 100,000 Hindus before the gates of Delhi in India. Violence continued to mark the pattern of conquest that resulted in new dynasties: the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals. Nonetheless, Tamerlane’s rule in Samarkand also brought the encouragement of learning and the arts a trend also typical of these later empires. For example, Tamerlane championed literature, and he himself corresponded with European rulers and wrote his own memoirs. Buildings still standing in the city of Samarkand are testaments to his interest in architecture and decorative arts.
While the empire he created largely fell apart (except for the area that his descendant Babur would take over to create India’s Mughal Dynasty), Tamerlane’s invasions were a testament to the significance of gunpowder. He used it to build a government dependent upon his military and the use of heavy artillery. He also used it to protect land routes on the Silk Road. However, he failed to leave an effective political structure in many of the areas he conquered. Without effective government, the expenses of wars eventually ravaged the empire’s economy.
Tamerlane’s rule casts light on two major forces that had battled each other continually from the late tenth century to the fourteenth century-Mongols from the northeast versus Islamic forces from Arabia and the areas around the Mediterranean Sea. These forces would clash continuously with the rise and fall of the three Asian Gunpowder Empires that are the focus of this chapter.
The Ottoman Empire
Extending into modern-day Turkey as well as to the Balkan areas of Europe and parts of North Africa and Southeast Asia, the Ottoman Empire was the largest and most enduring of the great Islamic empires of this period. Founded by the Osman Dynasty in the 1300s, the empire lasted until its defeat in 1918 by the Allies in World War I. Thus, a single dynasty controlled the empire for over 600 years.
Mehmed II Called "the Conqueror," Mehmed II (ruled 1451-1481) firmly established the empire's capital after his forces besieged Constantinople (once the center of the Byzantine Empire) in 1453. Despite its triple fortifications, the city fell as its walls crumbled under the bombardment of Ottoman cannon. Under Mehmed II's rule, the city-its name changed to Istanbul-prospered due to its location, which was a nexus for trade; the city controlled the Bosporus Strait, the only waterway linking the Aegean Sea with the Black Sea. Under Mehmed II, Istanbul grew even more beautiful and expanded across both sides of the strait. One famous landmark is the royal residence of the sultans, Topkapi Palace, which began construction during the reign of Mehmed II.
The armies of Mehmed II next seized lands around the western edge of the Black Sea. Then they moved into the Balkans in Southeast Europe. To counter the power of Venice, Mehmed strengthened the Ottoman navy and attacked various areas of Italy. Although he did not conquer Venice, he forced the city to pay him a yearly tax. In the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans added to their empire lands in present-day Syria, Israel, Egypt, and Algeria. When the Mamluk Dynasty declined, Istanbul became a center of Islam. (For more on the Mamluk Empire, see page 150.)
To staff their military and their government, the Ottoman sultans used a selection system called devshirme, begun in the late fourteenth century and expanded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Through this system, Christian boys who were subjects of the empire were recruited by force to serve in the Ottoman government. Boys ages 8 to 20 were taken each year
from conquered Christian lands in Europe. After converting to Islam, they were taught various skills in politics, the arts, and the military. The most famous group, called Janissaries, formed elite forces in the Ottoman army. Other boys were groomed to become administrators of the newly conquered territories; some were scribes, tax collectors, and even diplomats.
In some ways, becoming a Janissary provided a path of upward mobility in the Ottoman Empire, even though the Janissaries continued to be called "slaves of the state." Some parents even wanted their sons to be recruited into the service.
Suleiman I The Ottoman Empire reached its peak under Suleiman I (ruled 1520-1566). His armies overran Hungary in 1526 and, by 1529, were hammering at the gates of Vienna, the main city in Austria. Their attempt to take Vienna failed twice, but the ability of the Ottomans to send troops so far into the Christian Europe caused great fear there.
In 1522, Suleiman's navy captured the island of Rhodes (now part of Greece) in the eastern Mediterranean, which had long been a stronghold of Christian knights. In the 1550s, the Ottoman navy took control of Tripoli in North Africa.
Suleiman ordered many mosques, forts, and other great buildings constructed in the cities under his control. For example, he ordered the construction in Istanbul of the magnificent Suleimani Mosque, which can be seen from the Golden Horn promontory that juts into the Black Sea at its convergence with the Bosporus. Suleiman also reformed the empire's legal system and thus came to be called "the Lawgiver."
Ottoman Economy Ottoman trade was energized in its early years by repeated expansion through conquest. Rulers forced people in occupied areas to send monetary tribute as well as goods to the central government in Istanbul. The Ottoman navy allowed traders to serve as middlemen, handling goods from both directions and receiving profit in exchange, in much the same way that the Dutch served as middlemen in Western Europe. In this way, some European styles and furnishings became popular in the empire.
Because of his control of the North African coast, the Ottoman sultan controlled the trade in gold and slaves. Eastern luxuries, particularly silk and spices, continued to be popular trade items, but the Ottomans also had a strong trade in creations of their own artisans: distinctive tiles, pottery, and rugs, for example.
To finance an economy backed by a powerful military, the Ottomans levied taxes on the peasants. Local officials and tax collectors, distant from the central government, grew wealthy and corrupt from skimming money from the taxes in their areas. Agricultural villages continued to be burdened with the upkeep of officers and troops. This burden of taxes and the military would eventually contribute to the economic decline of the empire.
An additional reason for the flourishing of trade in the early years of the empire was that the tolerant sultans allowed Christian and Jewish merchants to prosper as long as they paid taxes. Also, to increase commerce, the Ottomans signed trade agreements such as those with France that opened up commerce between the two powers. However, the terms of the agreements with France would ultimately diminish the Ottoman profits in the long term.
Many business agreements were signed in the empire's coffeehouses, settings not only of business transactions but also of cultural events such as poetry recitations and scholarly debates. They also hosted trade meetings with representatives of such areas as Yemen, the major exporter of coffee. Trade agreements made by the sultans allowed European importers to purchase coffee through the Ottoman Empire at rates cheaper than direct purchase from Yemen. Interaction with the Americas led to the introduction of new crops on Ottoman lands that could be sold for cash. Near the city of Izmir, typical agricultural products such as dates, nuts, and olive oil were replaced by cotton and tobacco. Even though the use of the latter was officially prohibited throughout the Ottoman Empire, it quickly became popular among citizens.
By the seventeenth century, profits from imports dwindled. Problems in the neighboring Safavid Empire, for example, led to a reduction in silk production.
Social Classes The Ottoman social system was built around a warrior aristocracy that soon began to compete for positions in the bureaucracy with the ulama (scholars and experts in Islamic law). Within the military, more and more power and prestige was assumed by the Janissaries, who ultimately tried to mount coups against the sultans. The tension between the military elite and absolutist rulers became characteristic of all three Islamic Gunpowder Empires.
As sultans became less effective and less capable, strong advisors called viziers came to occupy influential positions in government, where they spoke for the sultan. Women also played social and political roles at court. Many wives and concubines of the sultan tried to promote their own children as likely heirs to the throne, giving rise to "harem politics," a reference to the harem, a residence where a man's wives and concubines lived.
Merchants and artisans formed a small middle class; below the middle class were the peasants, who were usually poor-particularly because they had to pay tribute to the government to help support the Ottoman armies. Below the peasants were slaves. They came from many areas as the Ottoman armies penetrated into Central and Eastern Europe, capturing prisoners of war in the Ukraine and elsewhere. Other European slaves were those captured by the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and then sold to the sultan or other high- ranking officials. Some people were impressed, or forced into service, in the navy as galley slaves-estimates of the number of people impressed go as high as a million or more between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
One reason for the success of the empire was its relative tolerance toward Jews and Christians. The empire accepted Jews who had been driven out of Spain in 1492; Mehmed II issued an invitation to them to settle in Istanbul. Some members of the Jewish community, which expanded rapidly after 1492, became court physicians and diplomats; others contributed to the literary community and (according to some accounts) were responsible for bringing the printing press to the Ottoman Empire. Often, however, Jews were only permitted to live in specified areas of the cities. Under Suleiman, Christians and Jews were allowed to worship and live with few restrictions as long as they paid a tax required of all non-Muslims in the empire. The elite of the empire, however, were always Muslim.
Decline of the Ottoman Empire In 1571, after Suleiman's death, a European force made up mostly of Spaniards and Venetians defeated the Ottomans in a great naval conflict known as the Battle of Lepanto. After the reign of Suleiman, the Ottomans fell victim to weak sultans and strong European neighbors. In time, the empire became known as the "Sick Man of Europe." Successors to Suleiman were often held hostage to harem politics conducted by women and eunuchs. Although neither group would have the opportunity to rule, women and eunuchs nevertheless became powerful behind the scenes. The Ottoman Empire as a whole grew less tolerant of non-Muslims and more insular. Slavery there continued into the twentieth century.
Continuity and Change Under the Ottomans While tremendous changes in government and religion took place in the area controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the arts, culture, and the economy showed continuities. Until 1453, much of the area had been controlled by the Byzantine Empire and followed the Eastern Orthodox religion. After the fall of Constantinople, the area became Ottoman and the dominant religion became Islam. The emperor was replaced by a sultan, and the Byzantine Empire's Justinian Law was replaced by shariah. Shariah is a system of Islamic jurisprudence that deals with all aspects of life, such as criminal justice, marital laws, and issues of inheritance, to name but a few.
Despite the above differences, continuities existed. Constantinople, newly named Istanbul, remained the western end of the overland Silk Roads, and the Grand Bazaar there continued to be full of many foreign imports: amber and wood products from Russia, spices and silk from China, ivory and slaves from Africa, and carpets from Persia. Demand for goods that passed through Constantinople created an export market to other cities of the empire. Coffeehouses, although banned by Islamic law, continued to do a thriving business throughout the towns of the empire.
Istanbul remained a center of arts and learning. Poets and scholars from across Asia met in coffeehouses and gardens, creating a rich intellectual atmosphere as they discussed works by Aristotle and other Greek writers, as well as the works of many Arabic scholars, such as Ibn Khaldun, quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Cultural contributions of the Ottomans included the restoration of some of the glorious buildings of Constantinople, most notably the cathedral of Saint Sophia (which the Ottomans turned into a grand mosque) and the Topkapi Palace. From the time of Mehmed II, who established a workshop for their production, Ottoman miniature paintings and illuminated manuscripts became famous. As in Europe, artisans belonged to guilds that set high standards, particularly for artisans working in gold, silver, and silk.
The Safavids
Sandwiched between the other Islamic Gunpowder Empires, the Safavids had two problems: first, they were on the Arabian Sea but had no real navy; and second, they lacked natural defenses. Nevertheless, they rose to power in the 1500s due to their military might and strong leadership.
Ismail An early Safavid military hero named Ismail, whose ethnic background is much disputed, conquered most of Persia and pushed into Iraq. Although only 14 or 15 years old, he soon conquered all of Iran and was proclaimed shah (equivalent to king or emperor) in 1501. Using Shia Islam as a unifying force, Shah Ismail built a power base that supported his rule and denied legitimacy to any Sunni. This strict adherence Shia Islam caused frequent hostilities with the Ottoman Empire, stronghold of Sunni Islam. In 1541, Safavid forces were stopped by the Ottomans at Tabriz, a city in Persia that became part of the border between Sunni and Shia societies. The hostility between the two groups lives on in present-day Iraq and Iran.
Conflicts between Ottomans and Safavids were not entirely religious in nature, however. An additional conflicts arose over control of overland trade routes. The fighting between these two Gunpowder Empires kept both from becoming as much of a threat to Europe as they might otherwise have been.
Shah Abbas I Called "Abbas the Great," Shah Abbas I (ruled 1587- 1629) presided over the Safavid Empire at its height. His troops, which were conscripted in ways similar to the recruitment of the Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, included soldiers-often Christian boys pressed into service-from as far northwest as Georgia in Russia. Abbas imported weaponry from Europe and also relied on Europeans to advise his troops about this newly acquired military technology. Slowly, the shahs came to control religion as well as politics. Using Shia practices to back up their legitimacy, Safavid rulers created a theocracy, one that provides a precedent for the Shia-dominated Iranian state of today.
Abbas beautified the capital city of Isfahan (which is south of the modern Iranian capital of Tehran), adding broad avenues, parks, and numerous mosques and schools. He also encouraged craft production, although exports of crafts were not a large part of the Safavid economy as they were for their stronger neighbors to the east and west. The Safavids carried on some trade with the Portuguese fleet, which for a time held the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Then, in 1622, Abbas took control of the strait with the help of English ships. This aid to the Safavid Empire began the long history of British interest in Iran.
Decline The ineffectual leaders who followed Shah Abbas combined lavish lifestyles and military spending with falling revenues, resulting in a weakened economy. In 1722, Safavid forces were not able to quell a rebellion by the heavily oppressed Sunni Pashtuns in present-day Afghanistan. The Afghan forces went on to sack Isfahan and their leader, Mahmud, declared himself "Shah of Persia." While the Safavid Dynasty remained nominally in control, the resulting chaos was an impediment to centralization and tax collection. Taking advantage of the weakened Safavids, the Ottomans and the Russians were able to seize territories. The Safavid Dynasty declined rapidly until it was replaced by the Zand Dynasty in 1760.
Isfahan Despite the decline of Safavids, the city of Isfahan retained its beauty. The renowned gardens with fountains and pools made an inviting contrast to the harsh countryside outside of the towns and cities. The gardens were acclaimed by Englishman Thomas Herbert and Frenchman Jean Chardin in their travelogues of the period.
Women While Safavid women were still veiled and restricted in their movements, as was traditional in the region, they had access to rights provided by Islamic law for inheritance and, in extreme cases, divorce. Women, however, are barely mentioned in local Safavid histories, an indication of their lack of political influence.
Mughal India
Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane, founded a 300-year dynasty in the 1520s, during a time when India was in disarray. He completed conquests in northern India and, under the new Mughal name, formed a central government similar to those of Suleiman in Turkey and Ivan the Terrible in Russia. It would be Babur's grandson Akbar, however, who would achieve grand religious and political goals.
Akbar Ruling from 1556 to 1605, Akbar proved to be the most capable of the Mughal rulers. For the first 40 years of his rule, he defeated Hindu armies and extended his empire southward and westward. From his capital in Delhi, Akbar established an efficient government and a system of fairly administered laws. For example, all his people had the right to appeal to him for final judgment in any lawsuit. As Akbar's fame spread, capable men from many parts of Central Asia came to serve him. They helped Akbar create a strong, centralized government and an effective civil service. Paid government officials in charge of specific duties, such as taxation, construction, and water supply, were called zamindars. Later, they were given grants of land rather than salaries but were permitted to keep a portion of the taxes paid by local peasants, who contributed one-third of their produce to the government. The system worked well under Akbar. Under the rulers who came after him, though, the zamindars began to keep more of the taxes that they collected. With this money, they built personal armies of soldiers and civilians loyal to them.
Toleration and Prosperity Akbar was tolerant of all religions. He allocated grants of money or land to Hindus and Muslims. He gave money for a Catholic church in Goa, on the southwest coast of India. He provided land grants for the relatively new religion of Sikhism, which developed from Hinduism and, some believe, may have been influenced by the Islamic mysticism known as Sufism. He tried to mediate the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. He gave Hindus positions in his government-zamindars of both high and low positions could be Hindu-and he married Hindu wives. He exempted Hindus from the poll taxes paid by all non-Muslims in the empire. Because he enjoyed religious discussions, Akbar invited Roman Catholic priests to Delhi to explain Christianity to him.
Regarded as one of the world's outstanding rulers, Akbar encouraged learning and the growth of art, architecture, and literature. He is also noteworthy for trying (in vain) to prohibit child marriages and sati, the ritual in which widows killed themselves by jumping on the funeral pyres of their husbands. He died in 1605 without successfully converting his Hindu and Islamic subjects to the religion called Din-i-llahi, or "divine faith," which he had created for the purpose of reconciling Hinduism and Islam.
The Mughal Empire under Akbar was one of the richest and best-governed states in the world. Overseas trade flourished during the relatively peaceful period; commerce was carried out mostly by Arab traders, since Indian traders did not care for travel on the Indian Ocean. Traded goods included textiles, tropical foods, spices, and precious stones, all of which were often exchanged for gold and silver. Trade within the borders of the empire was carried on by merchant castes. Castes are social groupings in India, usually associated with specific occupations. Members of the merchant castes were allowed to participate in banking and the production of handicrafts.
Shah Jahan Mughal India flourished from Babur's time through the early eighteenth century. Magnificent architectural accomplishments included the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan (ruled 1627-1658) as a tomb for his wife. Mughal rulers beautified Delhi and had forts built. The craftsmen and builders of Mughal India combined the arts of Islam (calligraphy, illumination of manuscripts, and ceramics) with local arts to create magnificent airy structures distinguished by their decorative geometric designs.
Aurangzeb Shah Jahan's son and successor, Aurangzeb (ruled 1658-1707), inherited an empire weakened by corruption and the failure to keep up with the military innovations of external enemies. Nevertheless, Aurangzeb hoped to increase the size of the empire and bring all of India under Muslim rule. Additionally, he wanted to rid the empire of its Hindu influences. In expanding the empire to the south, he drained the empire's treasury and was unable to put down peasant uprisings. Some of these uprisings were sparked by Aurangzeb's insistence on an austere and pious Islamic lifestyle. Under his rule, for example, music was banned. There were revolts as well among the Hindu and Islamic princes. The empire grew increasingly unstable after his death, which allowed the British and French to gain more and more economic power in India. The British would take political power away from the Mughals in the nineteenth century.
Decline of the Gunpowder Empires
The decline of the Gunpowder Empires resulted from pressure from European trading companies, especially the British, and from competition among heirs motivated by harem politics. Aurangzeb, for example, seized the throne by killing his brothers. Other factors in the decline included weak or corrupt leadership and failure to keep in step with developments in military and naval technology. The expensive armies that each empire needed to keep under control placed harsh financial burdens on the peasants and villages forced to support them. Religious differences also created problems. In Mughal India, there was a deep religious division between Islam and Hinduism, and there were deep religious divisions between the Sunni Ottomans and Shia Safavids, setting the stage for conflict between the present-day countries of Iraq and Iran. (Test Prep: Write a paragraph comparing the decline of Mughal India with the decline of the Roman Empire. See pages 83-85.)
Video
The heavenly vaults, but made by the earthly hand of man. The imagined form of the universe, a circle, no beginning, no end, just wheeling eternity. Dome's had appeared in antiquity and the medieval centuries, but never with such compulsive grandeur.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Dome's appeared everywhere, constellations of them. They were all the work of mortal men, but by the lights of philosophers, the infinite capacity of man's mind made him a mortal god, king of the lower beings.
Artists and architects, east and west, now began to be spoken of as touched by a divine gift. The domes they built from Rome to Lahore were the crowning achievement of this moment of supreme, almost sacrilegious creative confidence.
So why do we treat those blossoming as though they were happening on different cultural planets? Well, I think you all know the answer to that one. It's that word renaissance, isn't it? Invariably attached to the word Italian by those who coined it.
Oh, I know every so often it's extended north and west to France and Germany and even as far as literature was concerned at the very shores of Albion. But if we want to feel the pulse of one of those great moments, the surge of inventiveness when civilization bounded forward, we need to look much further.
Further than that, we need to look east. The great flowering we call the Renaissance owed much to Arab scholars who recovered the lost classics of antiquity of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Through the centuries that followed, the outpouring of creativity would flow both ways between Islamic East and Christian West.
But for the imaginative freedom of the artists themselves, the future awaiting them, East or West, could hardly have been more different. you Don't hit me with rounds. When something profound happens, which propels civilization forward, it usually happens not through isolated sparks of invention in one city or state, but through the spur of competition.
Competition across time going one better than the ancients, but competition across borders too, even when those borders divided warring cultures. So it was with the Renaissance in the Muslim and Christian worlds.
A thousand miles apart, in Rome and Istanbul, two old men, Michelangelo and the Turk, Mimar Sinan, both veteran builders were competing for the same prize. To outdo what for almost a millennium had been regarded as the greatest house of God in the world, the Hagia Sophia.
Commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the early 6th century, the Byzantine Basilica was the greatest architectural achievement of the early Christian church. Its dome wrote once again. This scholar seemed not to be founded on masonry at all, but suspended from heaven itself.
When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, instead of demolishing the Hagia Sophia, they converted it into a mosque. But there was no escaping the fact that this conversion was superficial.
Islamic elements had merely been bolted onto a church. Somehow, Christianity was always showing through. There came a time when this partial makeover wasn't good enough, not at any rate for the greatest of the Ottoman rulers, Suleiman the Magnificent.
His armies had cut a sway through Christian Europe. So when he decided to build a new mosque, unencumbered by Christian leftovers, he was making a point for Allah. And he was making it directly at his rivals, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.
Ironically, the master builder ordered to create the great Friday service mosque, had been born a Christian. Mimar Sinan was a genisary converted with Islam as a child and conscripted into the crack household troops of the Sultan.
Sinan rose through the ranks to become the greatest military engineer of his day. But he always felt himself destined for something greater than bridges and fortresses. I wished to become an architect, he told his biographer.
So my perfect skills should leave art to the world. Suleiman's order was thrilling but daunting. A great dome surrounded by half -domes, four minarets, a structure as immense as the two continent empire, a mosque that would eclipse Hagia Sophia.
The visible proclamation of Islam's victory. Sinan's great idea is the indivisibility of space, the architectural proclamation of the union of all believers. Here, the space isn't chopped up by forests of columns and barriers of quiet and altar.
Here, we are all in it together. Islam is a religion of unity. Law and simple faith. Everything revealed to all. you Islam means submission. And what we submit to here is the light, the light of true faith and the Quran, its record, the light of God's law streaming through 249 windows, drowning the space with radiance.
How weightless this all feels, even the gigantic dome. And that's all the more extraordinary, because it could only be supported by absolutely titanic architecture, these huge four masonry piers. Everything is kind of airy and light and graceful, but you feel behind it is this hard, mathematical engineering mind of Sinan.
That achievement, something built on the ground that is full of this kind of planetary uplift towards which our gaze is sent over and over again, is what makes this place one of the most beautiful buildings on Earth.
Sinan was not working in isolation. He knew very well that in Christian Europe, architects have been working to remake Christian architecture on an imperial scale. Turkish visitors to Rome, just like their Italian counterparts visiting Istanbul, would have seen firsthand this east -west competition of cultural one -upmanship.
Sinan had thought obsessively about the long history of Constantinople, and in Rome too, artists and architects found themselves in a dialogue with the past. The Western Renaissance had been founded on the idea of rebuilding the ruins of the classical pagan past and reconsegrating them for a new Christian age.
The supreme test would be St. Peter's. The original Basilica built by Constantine in the 4th century was by 1500 in danger of collapse. In 1505, Pope Julius II shocked Rome by deciding to demolish the old basilica.
The visionary architect Donato Bramante won a competition to build its successor. He got the job because a small, perfect building caught the Pope's eye. This little gem is really a glimpse inside the Renaissance mind.
particular into Donato Bramante's mind. It's a freestanding shrine to St. Peter in the cloister of the church of San Pietro in Montorio, the place where St. Peter himself was said to have been crucified upside down.
Let's think about what the word Renaissance means. It means rebirth, and what was being reborn was classical antiquity. Bramante walked round Rome, making very careful scholarly notes of what he saw.
And what he saw were pagan temples. So what we have here is the perfect classical form of one of those ruined Roman temples, a dome sitting on a drum with a colonnaded encelthament outside. And as such, what it does is take those perfect forms, the hemisphere, and the temple.
and the wheeling circle, the revolution of the planets, like a great cosmic timepiece, and says this harmoniously is how the new sacred art is going to be. There's something else on Bramante's mind as well.
This is really a miniature -sized doll's house prototype for what he will want to happen to St. Peter's itself. Only one problem. This is so perfect because it is so teeny weaning. But his job was to put Hagia Sophia in the shade, so St.
Peter's had to be very big indeed, and that was going to be a mighty challenge. Bramante began work in 1506, but he didn't live to see his miniatures and Peter's translated into the big one. But the greatest of his successors, Michelangelo, was determined to honour the essence of Bramante's design, a central dome pierced by windows.
Michelangelo was in his 70s. When, as the Pope's third choice, he got the job grumbling that he was doing it only for the glory of God. Many of his greatest late works, like The Last Judgment and The Sistine Chapel, were in their own way titanic architectural constructions, vast masses of figures pulled and pushed through space.
Most of his drawings for the project have been lost, but a wooden model survives to show us that his vision, like Bramante's, was of an enormous Christian temple, a Greek cross. no nave or fussy sidechappels distracting from the focal point of the great crowning dome, its windows flooding the interior with light, the whole immense structure supported on four giant piers.
It's astonishing to realize that the two greatest monumental buildings in the world, one for Islam and one for Christianity, were going up at the same time in the 1550s. And on the same basic building principles.
Any wonder, did Mima Sinan and Michelangelo know what each other was doing? For Michelangelo as for Sinan, the challenge was how to make the mighty engineering beautiful, apparently seamless. He took his cue from Bramante, a perfect, elegant, hemispherical dome, an echo.
of ancient Rome. But it was also somehow pure Michelangelo, colossal strength, translated into flowing line. Michelangelo toiled away into his 80s on this, living in a cell -like room in St. Peter's wracked with pain, refusing pay, eating very little.
February 24, 1552 was a great day. Both in the career of the 76 -year -old Michelangelo, and in the long extraordinary history of the biggest stone in the world, the cupola on top of St. Peter's. Because it was the day when the cornice of the drum was finished.
Cornice is just below the area of the windows. Essentially, it's the base which made it impossible for anyone, no matter what happened after Michelangelo's death, 12 years later, to change its size. But more importantly, it made it impossible to change Michelangelo's beautiful vision.
To mark this great occasion, what did Michelangelo do? He threw a party. And it wasn't for the patricians and the princes and the cardinal and the pope, it was for the workmen who've made this possible.
It was all a sausage you could possibly eat for enormous pork livers. And what does this tell us about Michelangelo beyond the lovely anecdote? That he felt a kind of fraternal solidarity with the workmen.
Well, it tells us this. That Michelangelo, through all his life, valued what his contemporaries called ours. Ours means art, but it means art in the old sense of hands -on skill. In his case, of an almost sublime gift for technical engineering, for structural power, knowing exactly what should go where.
But you weren't going to be a great artist, unless you could also marry that technical ability with what Michelangelo's contemporary is called, ingenio, the ability to conceive a sublime idea. And that heroic idea survived even his successors making the curve of the dome much steeper.
Michelangelo died 89 years old, but before he could see the dome completed, the Greek cross -temple idea struck later popes as altogether to pagan. A big long nave was added, the opposite of what Bramante and Michelangelo had wanted.
But you still feel the essence of his ingenio beneath that dome. Rising 120 metres above the ground, over 40 metres diameter, the tallest dome in the world, taller than the dome of the Cilamania Mosque, taller than the Hagia Sophia.
The work of the man his biographer's called Il Divino, the divine one. No one would have quite dared to say that about Mima Sinan. But in Europe, a cult of the superhero artist listening to his own voice, which is to say the echo of God rather than his patron had taken off.
Their lives were now for the first time since antiquity, the subject of page turning biographies. As fascinating, if not more so than those of saints and kings, for often they describe the work of sinners.
And among the gallery of self -described geniuses, no one sinned quite like the Florentine Goldsmith, Benvenuto Cilini. It was from Houseress, for living in the city of Cilini. Living in sin with a boyfriend, who had shocked him to the authorities that Cilini wrote his blood -soaked, chest -beating thriller of an autobiography, which, aside from the catalog of murders, prison escapes, and gunfights, was one long document of yearning to be treated as a true artist genius, alongside his hero, Michelangelo.
Michelangelo knew Cilini, and in fact, on at least one occasion, gave him a hearty endorsement, but as the world's best goldsmith, and for Benvenuto, that was not going to be enough. Only a bona fide genius, after all, could have managed to turn a golden salt -seller into a witty, erotic sculpture.
But the godly former Poseidon showed that Cilini could make heroic figures with the best of them. In Florence, the bronze to beat was Donatello's heroine from Cilini. scripture Judith, holding up the head of the enemy general, Holofernes, she just beheaded.
The Judith had been set up on the Piazza della Signoria in front of the seat of Florence's government to celebrate chasing the Medici despots out of Florence. So when almost a century later, Cosimo de Medici became Duke, he wanted a statue which would reverse all that, a manly hero beheading a female monster.
And Cellini, an alpha male who knew all about bloody killings, seized his chance. Donatello, who cast Judith in pieces, Cellini promised to do the Perseus in one casting. Impossible, scoffed the Duke.
The liquid bronze won't reach all those extremities. Watch me, said Cellini, who liked talking back to his patrons. Cellini was playing for the highest stakes imaginable. The casting of the Perseus was the moment that was going to transform him from a goldsmith, a craftsman, the mere artist and whom everybody condescended into an artist superhero.
The real thing. Having set up everything we just write, suddenly, when some melty bronze was going to be poured, Cellini falls, deathly ill of a terrible fever. So sick, so ill, he's sure he's going to die.
There's an incredible storm, wind, rain, the roof is partly removed, the cover of the furnace explodes. And most fatally, the temperature of the molten bronze starts to lower. That word that nobody wants to hear in a foundry, caking.
The premature coagulation of the alloy starts to be said. The assistants come running, maestro, maestro, everything is going pear shaped. The bronze alloy will cool, it won't run to all the extremities of the mold.
And you end up with this little kind of dwarfish homunculus. So Cellini jumps off his deathbed and gets every conceivable kitchen utensil, plates, platters. all made of puter. They're thrown on the fire.
He's got his heat back. The alloy flows through the mould everywhere it should. He has won the transformation. He's so badly wanted. He's got his heat back. And Cellini has a wonderful, vane -glorious sentence for what happens.
He said, I revived a corpse. This is the mind -blowing masterpiece the tourists don't notice as they're too busy doing selfies with the copy of Michelangelo's David nearby. But if they did give it a minute or two, they'd see Cellini's outrageous miracle in bronze, hard metal that somehow gushes, hot blood and writhes with snakey horror.
Perseus, head down, arm raised in triumph like some sports champion with the ultimate trophy. All the ancient Perseusism adducers were contrasts between beauty as hero and grotesque Gorgon, not here.
Cellini has the genius crazy idea of making them interchangeably androgynously beautiful. Boy girl, girl boy, both looking down. Even the hairdos aren't actually that different tousaled curls or writhing snakes.
Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist. He's made hard metal sweat with the exertion of killing. He's turned that hot alloy back into liquid, the blood coursing through the hero's body, the blood pouring from adducers sliced away neck.
And remember, even dead, her look could kill you. Cellini has one bit of mischief to play out at the expense of his hero, Michelangelo, no less. Positioning the sculpture where it would seem, it had caught David's attention.
The petrifying gaze of Medusa turns David into cold, lifeless stone. Cellini got away with his stupendous work, only because it flattered his meditapatron sense of self -importance. The great days of Florence are gone, but a show of grandstanding art would postpone insignificance indefinitely.
And for rising empires, art and artists were indispensable to the... the projection of their power. And this was as true in Muslim Asia as in Christian Europe. The Mughal Empire in India was a sponge for all the cultures it inherited and admired.
And that tolerant, curious openness to many influences, East and West, under the Emperor Akbar, became a principle of government. When he and his descendants rebuilt the old, ruined Hindu city of Lahore, they borrowed from Indian temple style and from Persian architecture.
But most crucially, Akbar, who had learned painting himself, made art the mirror of his civilization. There are many that hate painting, Akbar said, but such men I dislike. Achba established workshops of hundreds of artists, great factories of royal culture, that dwarfed the modest studios of Western painters.
Mughal art drew on Indian epics, Persian poetry, calligraphy and profuse decoration, but it quickly developed its own style, crowded with dashing incident, courtly elegance and, sometimes under the influence of Western art, seen by Achba, a flair for naturalism.
Achba himself, always at the centre of the subject matter, paid personal attention to the work regularly, descending on workshops and to the terror of the artists, promoting or demoting painters, depending on how he liked or disliked their latest work.
And though, like all the generations of Mughal emperors and their successors, he was embattled, sometimes literally with his son Jahangir, he bequeathed to him the sense that the authority of the Mughal empire would be built on art, as much as government and military power.
It would be seen to contemporaries and posterity, above all as a civilisation. Jahangir really didn't need to be told by his father how important art was. In his own right, he was the most intellectually and aesthetically driven of the whole dynasty.
Well, this is one of the great masterpieces of Mughal painting, but it's also an extraordinary masterpiece of imperial self -congratulation, even by the standards of the world's Caesar. That's what Jahangir's name means, the title he gave to himself.
He's encircled with a golden halo. that's the size of a small planet, and it's giving off these extraordinarily intense golden glimmer. So fierce that one of the little putty, one of the cupids who's been flown in directly from European art, has to cover his eyes with his hands, lest his eyeballs be scalded by the radiation of Jahangir's magnificence.
The slightly implausible conceit of the painting is that Jahangir prefers the company of a saintly Muslim holy man to worldly rulers. The Sufi Sheikh himself has been painted with wonderful fustian simplicity, a brown coat, perfect candy floss whiskers there.
He's receiving a present from the hands of Jahangir himself. But of course the hands don't actually touch. And there is something else. you going on in this extraordinary painting. It's also a picture about the competition between Mughal art and European art between East and West.
There's an Ottoman sultan who's shown with the Turkish turban and he's looking respectfully in the direction of Jahangir. But most significant is that the gesture he's making with his hands like that are the gesture of Indian deferential respect.
No Turk would ever have done that. But if the Ottoman sultan is belittled by Jahangir's court painter, it says nothing compared to what happens to King James I of England, who is placed below the Empress' feet wearing a look of what can only be described as sour resentment at his low place in the pecking order.
And the artist who's doing this and is enjoying it all has an exquisite self -portrait at the bottom of the painting. His name is Bachitra, he's a Hindu, you know that, by the saffron robe. And it's a beautiful, beautiful profile self -portrait.
Exquisite details of the beard, of the turban, of his painterly hand, almost as refined as the technique he's used for the Emperor himself. In fact, this is a doubly reflective self -portrait, a miniature of a miniature.
The one Bachitra is holding and which tells us everything about the ambiguous status of the Mughal artist. There are the signs of favour and elephant and two horses which the Emperor has given his painter, but on an understood condition.
Ultimately, for all that he's slick streaming behind the power and the glory of Jahangir, he knows his place and that's defined by the last detail in that tiny frame of him needing... and feeling prostrating himself at the feet of the Caesar of the world.
And look where he is. He has literally backed himself into a corner. Four, when all is said and done, these intricate, beautiful paintings are miniatures, book illustrations contained within the framing page, and their enjoyment confined to the emperor, his court, and anyone he sought to impress.
Only once, albeit spectacularly, did Jahangir make art visible to all of his subjects. On the outer wall of Lahore Fort, Jahangir set a vast display of mosaic tiles, creating the biggest mural in the world.
70 metres high and four, 150 meters long. Kashi Kari, the name for this mosaic technique, came from Persia. But as with all Mughal art, it's a glorious hybrid. There are angels from Europe, Chinese dragons, royal hunts and epic battles, history, mythology, birds and beasts, the whole world Jahangir reveled in is on display.
Thank you for watching. In effect, it's a huge vertical book, the one truly open book in all of Mughal art, readable by all Jahangir subjects passing through the gates of Lahore Fort. Or is it? Despite the sheer boldness of the gesture, the link forged between ruler and subjects is undermined by vertical remoteness.
As your eye travels up, the brilliant pages swim in and out of vision until they disappear into the great city. Ultimately, even the experimentally -minded Jahangir couldn't conceive of public art that was truly accessible to his subjects.
The Mughals, with their fast, tedious connoisseurship, could barely have imagined the revolution in looking that was unfolding in western art. By the 17th century, European images were busy exploding through any kind of containing frame.
They body -slam the beholder with great, meaty, muscular life -size or larger figures, deployed by artists who rewrote the rules about decorum or threw them away altogether. And this liberation of the senses began in the place you would least expect, the Rome that had been remade by Michelangelo and the counter -reformation popes.
The came a point when the Roman church would be a victim of its own success, all that wealth, all that power, the biggest basilica, with the biggest stone in the world. And you know that sooner or later someone's going to come along and say, remember the simplicity of Christ, remember Christ's mission to teach and preach to the poor.
And then there'd be a second great point that the whole idea of the Christian message is that the compassion of God lay in giving his own son the form of human. flesh and blood. Now, you put those two things together, poverty and the physical presence of flesh and blood, and you know there has to be a new kind of art.
Only problem is nobody could do that since the death of Michelangelo, and then along comes a second Michelangelo. We shouldn't get carried away, but isn't it striking that the rule breakers in art were often law breakers?
Like Cilini, Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio was a bisexual murderer with major anger management issues foul -mouthed, short -fused, in and out of jail. But if he acted like a devil, he painted like an angel.
And patrons who suddenly wanted startlingly raw, realistic images of ordinary people, many of them poor, to persuade themselves they were reviving Christ's gospel to the humble couldn't get enough of him.
This is the church of San Agostino in Rome, and this just may be my favourite Caravaggio, the Madonna of the Loreto. Even by the standards of Christian legends, this one is a bit of a stretch. To escape destruction in the 13th century, the House of the Virgin was supposed to have been airlifted out of the Holy Land, touching down in the Italian town of Loreto, where it became a place of pilgrimage.
Every so often, the Virgin herself would show up for the pilgrims. But this is no provincial scene, is it? It's a peeling doorway in the back streets of Rome, the doorstep drama is lit by a great wash of light.
you But the reason why one of Caravaggio's critics said the painting caused a great schiamatso, a cackle, was because so much flesh was on display. This is a barefoot Madonna, not the spun sugar version of conventional painting, but a real -life body, probably Caravaggio's girlfriend.
And the adoration dwells on that sumptuous form, the heavy lids, the glossy ropes of hair. And the naked Christ child is a squirmy bambino, fat with pasta. And the poor pilgrim couple who kneel before them are made bodily present to that big rump of the man, those calloused feet from the long walk.
As in all the greatest Caravaggio's, these big, fleshy figures are uncomfortably almost just... disturbingly close to us. Caravaggio has broken right through the fourth wall, and he's done it in the name of making the Christian message true, which he means physically true.
We don't get a kind of remote heavenly apparition that's granted to us by the intercession of some priests. No, we are physically in the company of the banana and chard just as much as if we are walking down the street and look round, and there they are, standing in a doorway.
And this, of course, is a breach in every kind of decorum, social, as well as aesthetic. But breaking rules was what this generation of Western artists was all about. And the closer they got both to God and to King's, paradoxically, the more freedoms they claimed.
And one of the most spectacular of those rule breakers was a woman. In her forties, when she painted this in England, Artemisia Gentileschi. Well, I love the fact that this extraordinary picture is in the royal collection, because in its way, it, too, is a kind of royal proclamation.
If artists of this generation made the claim that they were sovereigns of the realm of art, this picture does something much more ambitious. It says that claim was not only for men. Women, too, can be sovereigns of painting.
Only a woman could have done this particular painting as a combination of a self -portrait and the allegory of painting. And the allegory comes from a book written by a man called Cesare Repa. He says, the image of painting should have black hair, should be slightly dishevelled with a passion and engagement.
of painting. Painting should wear a gold chain around her neck. There you see the gold chain with a mask at the end of it indicating imitation or mimicry. She should hold a brush in one hand and a palette in the other.
An automisia does all that. But there's one detail that is missing. It's there in what Reaper says the allegory of painting should be and it's painting doesn't speak. Now men of course thought women shouldn't speak certainly until they were spoken to.
But Artemisia Gentileschi who'd been raped by one of her father's assistance at the age of 18 was determined that nobody was going to shut her up either in life or in her work. And what she does here is of course liberate the figure from painting to a kind of conventional stereotype.
stereotype in Reaper's book and turn it into something like a living physical force. Look at the twist of her body. The twist of her body is so that she can paint what she's painting as the painting we're looking at.
The whole thing is apologetic. Look at me. I'm a professional. I'm in a business. I'm in the throes of creativity and what is wrong with that? Artemisia's breakthrough self -portrait was bought by none other than King Charles I, that great stickler for protocol.
They're also a great lover of art. And there was no court in Europe more obsessed with protocol than that of Philip IV in Spain. But right at the heart of that court was the greatest of artistic free thinkers, Diego Velasquez.
As official painter to the king, Velasquez produced images of the royals on demand, though always with unprecedented sparkling naturalism, the human showing through the fancy dress. And on one occasion at least, despite or maybe because of the strength of his position, he committed an extraordinary act of painterly lairs majesty.
Towards the end of his career in 1656, Velasquez produced a picture, this one, Las Meninas, the Maids of Honor, which more than any other before or since, stakes the most ambitious claim for the power of art and the artist.
It's a painting which reverses all the usual expectations of the relationship between patron and artist. In this picture, it is the painter thoughtfully looking at us. who is truly sovereign. Anyone who comes into the presence of this masterpiece, or as it really feels, steps across the threshold of that huge work, feels him or herself uncannily in the presence of all the characters who'd populated.
That thoughtful painter, the little princess, her maids of honor, the dwarves, even that slumbering dog. It is an absolute triumph of illusionistic painting, something else as well. Velasquez is the most cerebral artist of his generation, and this is a huge brain teaser.
There's a giant in the room, and it's that epic -sized canvas. But what's on it? A painting of the little princess? or of Philip IV and his queen. Is that mirror showing a reflection of the royal couple painted on Velasquez's canvas?
Or the real king and queen who are actually present in the room? Is the sudden attentiveness the beginnings of a curtsy on the part of the maid because the royal couple have come into the studio? Or are they just departing?
It's full of games that play with the mind. It's full of complicated layers of meaning, all of which build into a meditation on which it is to paint. And they are so fiendishly ingenious that they challenge generation after generation of writers and commentators and artists to nail its ultimate meaning.
And, you know, I don't think anyone has yet quite got to the bottom of it. But if presumptuously, I were to tell you in a sentence what I think it's about, I think it's about who or what, in every sense, controls the way we look.
The look we put on when we know we're being watched. Our body language, when we suddenly have to defer to authority. The concentrated look of the artist glancing from subject to picture and back again.
There's really only one sovereign of staring here, and it's not the king. He only exists in the picture, courtesy of the painter. The royal ego is shrunk and contained inside that small frame at the back of the room.
A reversal of roles that was provocative in the West and inconceivable in the East, where anything so cheeky would get you in the deepest trouble. And taking liberties with conventions didn't stop when monarchs went missing from the picture.
you The Dutch Republic fought Spain to a standstill to secure its freedom. But independence often goes along with civic myths, and in Holland the rich burgers of Amsterdam like to portray themselves as vigilant militia companies ready at the drop of a hat to go off to war.
Though when they commissioned group portraits what they actually wanted for their money was just a bunch of likenesses, and if there were a lot of them the artists elasticated the format accordingly to get everyone in.
But then there was Rembrandt, and what he thought his militia patrons might like more than a collection of the overdressed was an action portrait of an ethos. The actual title of the picture is the March Out for the company of Franz Bannin Koch.
And boy, are they marching. They're on the point of beginning that march. And the idea of this painting is above all energy, dynamism, vitality. That's what Rembrandt wanted to celebrate in Amsterdam.
It is propulsive. It moves through that frame into our own space. Rembrandt has used his entire box of tricks to make this feel like a moving image, like a movie in fact. If you look at the kind of foreshortened hand, the order that's being given is happening in his body language.
Look at the foreshortened spear. You can see his rather glamorously dressed left hand and a gorgeous yellow leather coat is just on the point of moving as well. Everything is coming at us. And it also has a soundtrack.
Everything is exploding. The gun is being fired. A drum is being beaten. A dog is barking. Take a look at Franz banning Cox's perfect little mouth, and it's open. He is giving that order. A little girl, maybe the mascot of the company, is running into the brilliant light.
Some people who have trouble with this painting, who've thought of it for centuries, this kind of garish chaos, too much, too much going on. But Rembrandt being Rembrandt, he stops just this side of chaos.
That amidst this extraordinary kind of melee is an incredibly strong compositional armature. And it's an armature of two parallel lines, one angle of the parallelic line. The arm is made by the rhythm of the lines of the spear, the gun, the partisan.
On the other hand, it's made by the baton of the undying captain, the musket, the gorgeous flag of the cloven ears. And if you think about it, those two lines converge at a kind of arrowhead, and the arrowhead appropriately is the commander.
The Night Watch is a perfect miracle of dynamism and discipline together. And that's the living ethos that Rembrandt is trying to communicate. In his boiling brain, he reckons he's doing the overstuffed patricians a favour.
They no longer pose and preen. They act. And the fact that there's a painting about freedom with order makes it an extraordinary moment, not just in the history of painting, but it's a moment in the history of civilization too.
Amsterdam is beating not only the drum, but its own chest, saying we can be free, but we are also strong and disciplined. This is the visual declaration of Republican liberty. Watch out, art, but watch out the world.
Nothing, you'd suppose, could be further from the unleashed energy that produced the Night Watch than a controlled refinement of Indian Mughal art. But Rembrandt, who had a lifelong fascination with non -European cultures, was in love with them.
In the 1650s, he began to draw his version of miniatures, which had found their way to Amsterdam, probably as copies, through the East India Company. Rembrandt responded to the miniatures with his own graceful, pen and ink variations, all rich with what he loved best, human interest.
A group of Sufi sheikhs. The bond between father and son, a favourite Rembrandt theme. Some of the miniatures he copied still exist, and they make a fascinating contrast with Rembrandt's versions. This is a painting of the emperors Achbar and Jahangir.
Rembrandt keeps the profile, but ditches the formalism for humane naturalism. The rulers become characters. Father and son look each other in the eye as Jahangir hands Achbar a book. A Mughal portrait of Jahangir's son.
The son, Shah Jahan on horseback, is still and poised. But Rembrandt adds movement and action. What Rembrandt's sketches show is that the tide of artistic inspiration also flowed from east to west. In the end, Rembrandt was a stay -at -home cultural traveler.
But what might he have made of the real thing? Of the marbled perfection of Agra. Each building, a dialogue between curve and straight line. A civilization as painterly in its architecture as in its art.
continuance. you an extraordinary dome. A marble monument to love, 20 years in the making. The tribute of the Emperor Shah Jahan for his dead wife Mumtaz Mahal. Grief and yearning translated into architectural poetry.
While European art was fizzing with experiment, the Mughals' perfected royal eleges crafted in stone. This building, the Itimadu Daula, is the first of their marble morseliums, built a decade before the Taj Mahal.
Some claim it's the most perfect building in India, and I think they may be right. It too was a work of devotion, but this time designed by a cultivated woman, Jahangir's favourite wife, Nur Jahan. She was the child of a Persian father, Miza Beg, Jahangir's closest advisor.
When he died, Nur Jahan built a tomb for him, as handsome as any Emperor's. And looking at it, you would say her creation is about as perfect as anything the hand of man can accomplish. And then you go inside and see this.
Death in a jewel box, the chilly funereal marble warmed by an uncountable force. The incredible myriad of gems. Encrusted in glowing paint, the ceiling burns. And on the walls, in a technique borrowed from Italy, of plain down jewels, a paradise garden.
There are images of flowers designed so naturalistically, so scientifically, that they could have come straight from the pages of one of their endlessly curious Jahangir's great books. Here, in the presence of the dead, we have an eternal springtime.
And that perhaps, is both its glory and its limitation. The Morsilium is like a page from one of Jahangir's picture books. And like their books, it's private and contained. Every hint of the uneven roughness of life is smoothed away.
It couldn't be more different from European art with its earthy, subversive humanity, the force of individual genius coming at you. How different that is from the anonymous serenity of this royal tomb, a serenity that would all too soon be shattered.
Out there, the Western Hurley Burley is getting ready to make terrible mischief to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault to stick its bloody, great, brutal boots right into the Paradise Garden.
It'll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets, and then, slowly but surely, the Mughal Empire will disappear entirely inside its courtly refinement, becoming inexorably just a cultural ornament.
So after centuries of extraordinary flowering, did the Eastern Renaissance simply wither away? Not quite, because these delicate blooms and glowing jewels did survive. They reappeared in what Europeans wore on their bodies and how they decorated their homes.
Mughal domes appeared in Brighton. Western art critics called that beauty decorative. To distinguish it from pictures they put in frames what they considered real art. But it was in the East that the ancient meaning of art as craft was preserved in all its majestic splendour, and still is, because if the work of art is to intensify our delight in the beauty of the world and to do so with pattern and colour, the music of the eye, then what you see here was not an ending, but another vibrant beginning.
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores the history of different civilizations through artefacts. To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553 or go to the address on screen and follow the links for the Open University.
And you can watch the full series of civilizations now on BBC iPlayer. Is music always a civilising force? That's a question of the essay on BBC Radio 3 Tonight at 10 .45. Add a modern and acclaimed version of Hamlet with Andrew Scott as a troubled Danish prince Saturday night at 9 here on BBC 2.
