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

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Chapter Two
     

Seeking the Mandate of Heaven
     
    Between 313 and 402, the Jin cling to the Mandate of Heaven, while the northern barbarians aspire to seize it
     
    A S C ONSTANTINE WAS UNITING his empire in the west, the eastern empire of the Jin * was disintegrating. Its emperor, Jin Huaidi, had been forced into captivity and servanthood. In 313, at the age of twenty-six, he was pouring wine for his masters at a barbarian feast, and his life hung by a thread.
    The Jin empire was a young one, barely fifty years old. For centuries, the old Han dynasty had held the Chinese provinces together in one sprawling and unified whole, the eastern parallel to the Roman empire in the west. But by AD 220, the Han had fallen to rebellion and unrest. The empire fractured apart into thirds, and the Three Kingdoms that took over from the Han—the Cao Wei, the Shu Han, and the Dong Wu—were unstable, shifting and battling for control.
    The northernmost of the Three Kingdoms, the Cao Wei, was controlled by its generals; the kings who sat on the Cao Wei throne were young and easily cowed, and did as they were told. In 265, the twenty-nine-year-old general Sima Yan decided to claim the Cao Wei crown for himself. His entire life he had watched as army men pulled the puppet-king’s strings. The commanders of the Cao Wei army, including his father and his grandfather, had led in the conquest of the neighboring kingdom of the Shu Han, reducing the Three Kingdoms to two; Cao Wei dominated the north, but its generals remained crownless.

     
    2.1: The Three Kingdoms
     
    Unlike them, Sima Yan did not intend to spend his career as puppet-master. He already had power; what he craved was legitimacy, the rightful power to command—the title that accompanied the sword.
    According to the Three Kingdoms , the most famous account of the years after the fall of the Han, Sima Yan buckled on his sword and went to see the emperor: the teenager Wei Yuandi, grandson of the kingdom’s founder. “Whose efforts have preserved the Cao Wei empire?” he asked, to which the young emperor, suddenly realizing that his audience chamber was crowded with Sima Yan’s supporters, answered, “We owe everything to your father and grandfather.” “In that case,” Sima Yan said, “since it is clear that you can’t defend the kingdom yourself, you should step aside and appoint someone who can.” Only one courtier objected to this; as soon as the words left his mouth, Sima Yan’s supporters beat him to death. The Three Kingdoms is a romance, a fictionalized swashbuckling account written centuries later; nevertheless, it reflects the actual events surrounding the rise of the Jin dynasty. Wei Yuandi agreed to Sima Yan’s plans; Sima Yan built an altar, and in an elaborate, formal ceremony, Wei Yuandi climbed to the top of the altar with the seal of state in his hands, gave it to his rival, and then descended to the ground a common citizen.
    That day the entire body of officials prostrated itself once and again below the Altar for the Acceptance of the Abdication, shouting mightily, “Long live the new Emperor!” 1
     
    The ceremony had transformed Sima Yan into a rightful ruler, a divinely ordained emperor, holder of the Mandate of Heaven. Wei Yuandi, stripped of the Mandate, went back to ordinary life. He died some years later in peace.
    Sima Yan took the royal name “Jin Wudi” and became the founder of a new dynasty: the Jin. By 276, he was confident enough in his grasp on his empire to launch a takeover bid against the remaining kingdom, the Dong Wu.
    The power of the Dong Wu had been dwindling under an irrational king who had become unbearably cruel; his favorite game was to invite a handful of palace officials to a banquet and get them all drunk, while eunuchs stationed just outside the door wrote down everything they said. The next morning he would summon the officials, hungover and wretched, to his audience chamber and punish them for