* The dynasty had been founded by Gupta, maharaja of a sliver of Uttar Pradesh. His grandson Chandragupta I – ruling at the same time as Constantine the Great – conquered enough territory in north-eastern India, by marriage and war, to call himself Maharajadhiraja – great king of kings. His grandson Chandragupta II, a contemporary of Julian, conquered much of northern India, from Afghanistan to Bengal and the Himalayas, ruling in splendour from Pataliputra, the personification of the ideal Brahmin emperor alias Vikramaditya (Sun of Courage). He oversaw a golden age of writers – the Navaratnas (Nine Jewels), led by the playwright Kalidasa. He promoted the god Vishnu as the supreme deity, along with his avatars, but he also built Buddhist shrines.
* Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas was born in Mecca but his five sons died in places as far-flung as Medina, Syria, Tunisia and Samarkand, where Qutham ibn al-Abbas became a mystical saint known as the Living King, his tomb the centre of a sacred complex that became the location for the tomb of the conqueror Tamerlane and is still revered.
* In Chang’an, the emperor refused to intervene against the Arabs, but he gave asylum to the Sassanians, appointing Peroz, the last shah, as head of a Persian Area Command which he controlled for a decade until the Muslim advance led him to retreat to the Chinese capital, where Emperor Gaozong gave him the title Awe-Inspiring General of the Left Guards. Peroz died in 680.
* At the top was the empress, then four consorts, nine concubines and beneath them nine ladies of handsome fairness, nine beauties and nine talents, including Miss Wu. Beneath her were the ladies of the precious bevy, secondary concubines and selected ladies, 27 of each – 122 in total. No men apart from the emperor and his eunuchs, who grew rich selling luxuries such as Boreal camphor and Malayan patchouli to the girls, enjoyed access. The Confucian scholar-bureaucrats who wrote the histories of China were misogynists who presented female potentates as sex-crazed megalomaniacs, a chauvinism that must be taken into account; equally, sexual attraction was one way that women won political power in dynastic monarchies.
ACT SIX
207 MILLION
Houses of Muhammad and Charlemagne
ARAB CAESAR AND YAZID OF WHORING, YAZID OF MONKEYS
Mo-yi was Muawiya. By the time Gaozong and Wu heard his name, Muawiya had seized the throne of a new empire in a vicious family war. It is a hard thing to run an empire: Caliph Omar travelled the provinces on his mule with a single servant, leaving Muawiya to govern Syria. Muawiya wanted to build a fleet to confront the Romans, but Omar refused. Suspicious of Muawiya’s worldliness, he nicknamed him Arab Caesar.
In 644, Omar was assassinated by a disgruntled slave and the elders again overlooked Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, and chose the genial Othman, also married in turn to two elder daughters of the Prophet. He favoured his clan, House Umayya, confirming Muawiya as governor of Syria. So far the caliphate’s subjects were overwhelmingly Christian and Zoroastrian. Inheriting the Roman tax system, Muawiya used Roman officials led by Sergios – Sarjun ibn Mansur in Arabic – to run the bureaucracy. His doctor and court poet were Christian, his first governor of Jerusalem was supposedly Jewish and his favourite wife Maysun was a Christian princess. Amr al-As teased him for being bossed around by his wife. ‘The wives of noble men dominate them,’ replied Muawiya. ‘Low men lord it over their women.’
He prided himself on his sexual virility, but as he got older and fatter he laughed at himself. He slept with a Khorasani slave whom he asked, ‘What is a lion in Persian?’
‘
‘I am a
‘Well done,’ Muawiya told the girl.
In 655 Muawiya’s new Arab fleet defeated Emperor Constans II (Heraclius’ grandson), marking a new era. But a year later mutineers from Egypt and Iraq assassinated Muawiya’s cousin, Othman the caliph in Medina. Ali, now in his fifties, was chosen as his successor, appointing some of the assassins to his retinue. Muhammed had ordered his wives to keep out of politics after his death, but his favourite surviving wife Aisha (daughter of the first caliph) and respected as Umm al-Mu’minin – Mother of Believers – denounced Ali and the assassins of Othman. She led an army against Ali, pursuing him into Iraq. On the battlefield, she harangued the troops, commanding them from the armoured canopy of a red camel. But Ali won; her famous camel was killed and she was captured.*
Muawiya, firmly in control of the centre, demanded that Othman’s killers be punished, a challenge that Ali could not satisfy. Channelling Antony’s theatrics with Caesar’s bloodied toga, Muawiya displayed the relics of the caliphal assassination, the sanguine robes of Othman and the severed fingers of his wife Naila.
