Third Transition:

"How very amusing! Actually attacking our camp! Most amusing."

--Remark of a responsible British officer
   on the occasion of the Isandlwana
   massacre in Zululand.
  ( 1879)

2311 A.D.
China, 11 A.D.: The texts of the classics are doctored to support the usurper's position.

2313 A.D.
Islam, 1687 A.D.: The Turks are defeated at Mohacs in Hungary; Sultan Mohammed IV is deposed and succeeded by Suleiman III.

2320 A.D.
Rome, 193 A.D.: Order is restored by the soldier emperor Septimus Severus, who eventually dies while trying to repair the defenses of Britain.

2322 A.D.
China, 22 A.D.: Wang Mang is overthrown. Civil war and peasant revolt follow.

It was the belief of this ideologue and his deluded adherents that the utopia of his imagination had actually existed in the first phase of the Chou Dynasty, long before the Era of Contending States. The Confucian system of statecraft, from this point of view, was originally intended to define just such a utopia. Wang Mang produced versions of some of the Confucian classics which supposedly dated from before the great bookburning by the First Emperor. This version of the classics became known as the "Old Texts," as distinguished from the "New Texts" reconstructed by scholars from memory during the early period of imperial history. The fraud was not completely exposed for another 1,500 years.

The Old Texts lacked much of the ethical and teleological content which may have been present in original Confucianism and which in any event had been characteristic features of social and political discourse during the Han period. The effect of these features had been to add flexibility and humanity to government practice. The Old Text school idealized an unreachable past and held out no particular hope for the future. Though much more "this worldly" than other forms of Confucianism before and since, the Old Texts do not appear to have facilitated rational decision-making in the next phase of Chinese history. As for Wang Mang, his attempt to create an anarchist utopia through the use of imperial power had predictable results. His body was found by insurgent forces in the great hall of his deserted palace. He died by his own hand in ceremonial costume, his ideological supporters having long-since absented themselves.

In Islam, the final failure to destroy the Holy Roman Empire reflected a more purely military incapacity, but the lesson was all the more striking for a regime which defined success in almost purely military terms. Mohammed IV, like Wang Mang, was a romantic. His society, as he understood it, was justified by the duty to carry out the jihad, an enterprise which had long since been defined as the conversion to Islam by the West. What made him unusual, and fatal, was his decision to make this largely metaphysical goal a matter of immediate policy. He saw no reason why his empire could not return to the project initiated by the first Caliphs of the seventh and eighth centuries. The fact that Europe was no longer inhabited by semibarbarian hordes, or that his own people lacked the enthusiasm or technique to sustain such an offensive, was not relevant to his calculations. The empire won many wars after the catastrophe before Vienna, but it never really left the defensive again.

The Empire of the West in the twenty-fourth century, for its part, attempted by a sheer act of imperial will to return to the glory days of the Age of Discovery, to break new ground as in the miraculous decades from Columbus to Galileo. It became policy to create a New Man within human society and a far vaster colonial empire beyond the limits of Earth. The New Eugenics "party," as the bureaucratic clique anachronistically styled itself, supported both these initiatives.

Ironically, the immediate causes of their fall from public favor were the small scale reforms with which they concerned themselves. Not the least repugnant of these was a concerted effort at "standardization" of the ornament in public places throughout the world, inspired by the somewhat garish Baroque revival then popular among designers and art historians.

The actual eugenics project itself did succeed in creating a strain of large, highly intelligent, but singularly incurious post-human hominids. Called "The New People," some thousands of juveniles had been produced by the time the government fell. They were then simply put up for adoption like human children and left largely unregarded by later administrations, with the expectation that they would simply disappear into the world population. This policy was a mistake. The New People were not interfertile with human beings and never identified with human society. In fact, they manifested a disconcerting penchant for anthropophagy during times of social disorder, when consumer goods became rare and police supervision non-existent. In later years they posed a considerable police problem, finally becoming the last and most terrifying of history's "barbarians."

The palace mutiny and assassination of the emperor, however, were occasioned by a far more prosaic event, the refusal of the Special Forces to send one more draft of conscript emigrants to the colonies against their will. The Europa settlement was quarantined because of yet another infestation of "pseudo-biologicals" during this period as far as returns to Earth were concerned, but coercive immigration was actually increased. (Though the emigration to Europa was finally halted, the quarantine was never lifted, even after the colony had clearly ceased to exist.) The largest single failure in terms of expense was on Mars. There, the sullen and overcrowded inhabitants of the hopefully named "afforestation villages" watched in dismay as the terraforming process created a methane-tainted atmosphere which was not only unbreathable but (locally) actually explosive. The single most serious cause of resentment against the government, however, was created by the attempt to "reintegrate" the government with civil society through the (literal) regimentation of the latter, particularly as this program applied to the emperor's policy of compulsory parenthood.

Even after basic discipline in the military was restored, the loss of prestige to the imperial government, which after all justified itself largely in terms of management skills and technical expertise, was never wholly made good.

As for the Roman Emperor Commodus, he believed that he could be as irresponsible as Alexander the Great. He ruled an empire that was just capable, with great care and a certain amount of luck, in maintaining its borders and providing some basic services to at least the inhabitants of the major cities. His decision to turn away from the hardworking prudence of his father was, in a sense, a return to the "Classical" spirit. Concern for the far away, for the distant in time, even for the purely theoretical, never fit that well into the political life of this civilization. Though of course every great society must do some long-range thinking, Classical societies had always put this off as long as possible. What else could be the case in a civilization which, in its youth, had favored limiting the terms of key offices to a year and selecting the incumbents by lot? After decades of cautious good government, the emperor's successor (by right of birth and not of adoption by his predecessor, as most of the best emperors had been, including Augustus), Commodus sought to rule by improvisation, to seek popular acclaim, to let the dead bury their dead. Though Commodus himself may never have drawn the parallel, his behavior was comparable to Alexander's, who from sheer high spirits conquered all the world he knew about (indeed, more than all) with nothing but ingenuity and good luck. The difference, of course, was that Alexander came from a growing civilization. In any event, his base of support was so small he had very little to lose. Commodus, and the strange parade of imperial pretenders who immediately succeeded him, had the world to lose, and no one was making any more of it.

Assassinations were not unknown in the life of any civilization before this period. Neither, for that matter, was the occasional military revolt. What is surprising during this Transition is the degree and length of disorder which attended these otherwise commonplace events, at least in some civilizations. Some of the ephemeral emperors during the crisis were elected or otherwise chosen through constitutional processes, some were chosen by the soldiers, and some chose themselves. Almost all, however, had a short lifespan and never succeeded in gaining control outside their capitals. Indeed, for the first time since modernity, we get here a hint of a world which is no longer effectively under the control of one master.