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The two armies met at Siffin near Raqqa (Syria) where, with the intense savagery of fraternal hatreds, 70,000 were killed in hand-to-hand fighting. Finally Muawiya’s troops stuck pages of the Quran on their lances, shaming the other side into stopping. Ali agreed to negotiate. Muawiya’s envoy Amr al-As outmanoeuvred Ali, whom Muhammad had never given an important job. ‘The Messenger of God appointed only capable men,’ said Muawiya, ‘not men strained beyond their capabilities.’ Ali’s army disintegrated. In 660, Muawiya held a conclave on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem where he was acclaimed as Commander, channelling the sanctity of the Holy City.^*

Soon afterwards Ali was assassinated in Iraq, leaving his two sons Hassan and Hussein as his heirs. But while Muawiya and the Umayya dynasty had triumphed, the Party (Shia) of Ali, who believed the succession should descend through Ali, would be a sempiternal schism at the heart of Islam.

In 674, Muawiya, having routed the Roman fleet, attacked Constantinople. The siege, commanded by his son Yazid, lasted four years. The Arabs thought the city would fall, a view probably shared by Emperor Constans, who moved to Sicily where he was murdered in his bath by a slave with a soap dish. But the walls of the Great City and the restored Roman fleet, along with the first use of a new secret weapon, Greek Fire, an early flamethrower that squirted burning naphtha oil through a tube, finally forced Muawiya to recall his fleet.

Caliphs had always been chosen by the elders. Muawiya created a family monarchy, controversially nominating Yazid, son of his Christian wife, a playboy who enjoyed wine and girls and walked around Damascus with a pet monkey. As for any rival, ‘If you seize him,’ advised Muawiya, ‘chop him limb from limb.’ But when Muawiya died aged eighty, Yazid’s debauchery shocked the Medinese, who called him ‘Yazid of the liquors, Yazid of whoring, Yazid of monkeys’. Muhammad’s grandson Hussein declared himself caliph in Iraq but was killed at Karbala, playing into the Shia narrative of martyrdom, still expressed in the lamenting and whipping of the holy day of Ashura. Hussein’s head was sent on tour and Yazid stuck his sceptre in its mouth. When Yazid died unexpectedly, probably of the plague, contenders in Kufa (Iraq) and Medina claimed the throne.

Far to the east, the Arabs were approaching Chinese territory – just as Emperor Gaozung’s extraordinary widow seized control.

POLITICAL JISM: THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF EMPRESS WU

Wu, dowager empress and regent, was sixty. The late emperor’s will specified that ‘great matters of state shall be determined by the Celestial Empress’, but their son Li Zhe – under the influence of his young empress Wei – planned to give power to his wife’s father. When confronted about appointing his father-in-law Wei Xuanzhen as minister, the young emperor shouted, ‘If I wish to give the empire to Wei, what is there to stop me?’ But there was something to stop him: Wu. She rallied the ministers and generals. Facing Turkish and Tibetan advances,^* famines and rebellions, they appreciated her experience and nerve. The boy was deposed. He asked what his crime was.

‘You wished to hand over the empire to Wei,’ snapped Wu. ‘How’s that not a crime?’ While he was sent into well-supervised obscurity,^* Wu appointed her youngest son Li Dan, aged twenty-one, as emperor. Unsurprisingly he was terrified of her, particularly after she forced another of her sons, the exiled Li Xian, to commit suicide.

When her gambits provoked a rebellion by Tang princes, she orchestrated a terror led by a trio of sadistic secret policemen – her ‘teeth and claws’ – led by Lai Junchen, a psychotic former cake salesman who used denunciations to frame princes and officials, even compiling a Manual of Entrapment. Thousands were killed in Wu’s newly opened prison where Lai tortured his victims, devising ingenious atrocities.^* Eighty per cent of Wu’s ministers were removed, many killed. Lai requested promotion to censor. ‘But you can’t read,’ teased Wu. She promoted him anyway, but preferred to consult her capable daughter, the Taiping Princess.

Wu was also a master of public presentation, regularly ‘rectifying names’ – changing regal names both to bring luck and for rebranding – to relaunch her reign, publicizing her views on good government in her Regulations for Ministers and ordering that family members should betray treason committed by their relatives – loyalty to the state was everything.

Wu was recommended a lover by Princess Qianjin, a fifty-something daughter of the founding emperor Gaozu – an example of the uninhibited earthiness of Tang women. The candidate was a strapping and much younger snake-oil salesman from a poor family called Xue Huaiyi whose sexual athleticism and gigantic member had first impressed a maid of the princess, who in turn enjoyed his gifts before raving about them to the empress.