* Muawiya’s philosophy was the perfect expression of statesmanship: ‘If there is but a single thread between me and my subjects I will never let it go slack without tugging on it and I never let them pull it tight without loosening it.’ He added, ‘I don’t use my tongue where money will suffice; I don’t use my whip where my tongue will suffice; I don’t use my sword where my whip will suffice. But when there’s no choice I will use my sword.’ He was the personification of
* To control the Tibetans, she turned to the Indian Pallava raja, Narasimhavarman II, known as Rajasimha, whom the Chinese granted the title General of South China. But Rajasimha’s greatest influence was cultural – he was both a playwright and builder of temples that still stand, the Kailasanatha at his capital Kanchipuram and the Shore Temple at his port Mahabalipuram, whence Pallava influence, Brahminism and Sanskrit were exported to the Indosphere of south-east Asia.
* Living in exile with his wife ex-Empress Wei, he feared every messenger from the capital would bring terrible punishments, and was always ready to commit suicide. But his wife always restrained him: ‘There is no set pattern to bad and good fortune. Since we will die one day, why hasten it?’
* The tortures enjoyed picturesque names: ‘Dying Swine’s Melancholy’, ‘Piercing a Hundred Veins’ and ‘Begging for the Slaughter of my Entire Family’. In ‘Phoenix Suns his Wings’, the victim was lashed to a wheel in the sun; in ‘Uprooting a Stubborn Foal’, the prisoner was collared; and in ‘Offering Fruit to the Immortals’, tiles were piled on the victim’s back. In one episode, more than 300 dissidents were massacred.
* All the family must have been thoroughly traumatized. Li Dan tried to live obscurely far from the capital with his sons including Li Longji, the future Emperor Xuanzong, avoiding politics, yet being carefully watched and often persecuted.
* They told me on a Friday Salma had gone to prayers.
Just then upon a branch a pretty bird sat preening.
I said, ‘Who here knows Salma?’
‘Ha!’ said he; then flew away.
I said, ‘Come back, birdy,
Have you seen Salma?’
‘Ha!’ said he; and struck a secret wound in my heart …
* The Umayya caliphs ruled from their palace complex in Damascus, spending summers in pleasure castles in Golan, the Bekaa valley and the Jordanian desert. Many of these ‘castles’ survive.
* Marwan’s sons fled southwards to Makuria (Sudan), which had converted to Coptic Christianity in the time of Justinian. During the Arab conquest, Makuria faced Arab attacks until its kings signed a mercantile treaty in which their chief export, slaves, were traded for Egyptian grain and cloth. In 747, exploiting the Arab civil war, King Kyriakos of Makuria raided Egypt. But when he saw the Abbasiya were winning, he won favour by killing the Umayya princes. Speaking Coptic, Greek and Arabic, Makurian kings ruled from a Constantinopolitan gold-encrusted palace in Dongola, a city where wealthy homes boasted ceramic lavatories, which did not appear in Europe for centuries. Their cathedral at Faris featured exquisite frescoes. When the Abbasiya caliphs demanded arrears of 5,000 slaves, King Zakarios sent his son Georgios to Baghdad to negotiate. The kingdom flourished until the thirteenth century.
* Xuanzong had agreed to hand power to his son Suzong. As retired emperor, he sent Gao to retrieve Consort Yang’s body, but it had decayed: the eunuch just brought back the bag of scents.
* In 779, meeting some Manichaean priests as he looted the Chinese capital, the Uighur khagan Bogu converted his empire to Manichaeanism. Though he was then murdered by his Tengrist chief minister, the Uighurs remained Manichaean until they later converted first to Buddhism and then to Islam.
* The Tang ruled a rump empire until 879, when they finally fell in an apocalyptic dystopia as armies of starving peasants harvested 1,000 humans a day for food at a time when ‘human flesh was more plentiful than dogmeat’. Chang’an was destroyed; after a thousand years, a world vanished.
* Charlemagne planned to marry his son Charles to Aelfflaed, the daughter of King Offa of Mercia, but when the Anglo-Saxon demanded Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha, he cancelled the marriage. The minor Britannic king had overreached.
