Sublime

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.

In both Byzantium and the Frankish West, it was the fusion of secular with religious influences that created societies cohesive enough to withstand the aftershocks of imperial breakdown, barbarian invasion and Islamic expansion.

The rise of Venice to become the great emporium for the West’s trade with the East was closely connected with the Byzantine recovery; culturally, Venice was really an outpost of the great metropolis at Constantinople – as its architecture revealed.

Europe’s expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe’s modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.