* Little is really known of Vladimir, beyond a priestly chronicle, Tale of Bygone Years, written three hundred years later. Most of the story is a myth but Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century used it to justify his wars to ‘regather’ western lands. Peter the Great adapted the word ‘Rus’ to create the name of his new empire, Russia. Russian nineteenth-century Slavophiles and twenty-first-century believers in ‘the Russian World’ – such as President Vladimir Putin – used it to promote the myth of a Russian nation, encompassing the peoples of Russia and Ukraine. For Ukrainians, the story of Volodmyr is the founding myth of their nation.
* Two of Vladimir’s sons, Boris and Gleb, were killed in the struggles after their father’s death and became the first saints of the new church, seen as sacrifices for this new sacred land, Holy Rus, and launching the sacralization of the rulers of Russia.
* ‘I’ve now reigned over fifty years in victory or peace,’ Abd al-Rahman mused on his deathbed in 969, ‘beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies and respected by my allies. I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, don’t place confidence in this present world!’
The Ghanas and the Fatimiyya
AFRICAN POWER: GHANA OF WAGADU AND THE MASTER OF CAIRO
It started deep in the desert. In 905, when Abd al-Rahman III was a boy, Said bin Husain, at the age of thirty-five, proclaimed himself the Mahdi – the chosen one, God’s representative on earth, in the remote Moroccan oasis of Sijilmasa where recently converted Berber tribes had already been convinced of his sanctity by secret missionaries. They were part of a clandestine Shiite network of Dawa – the Calling – who from Yemen to the Atlantic preached the restoration of the dynasty of Ali and Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. Said claimed this descent and his family called themselves the House al-Fatimiyya. Said’s family had been hunted and killed by the caliphs of Baghdad, but he himself, disguised as a merchant, had escaped with his son. Though pursued by assassins, he reached Morocco, where he adopted the title al-Mahdi Billah and launched his jihad, aiming to march all the way to Iraq and destroy the heretical caliphate.*
It seemed unlikely that this would ever happen when al-Mahdi took command of a tiny posse of Berbers in Sijilmasa, gateway to the most powerful African kingdom, Wagadu, ruled by the Soninke ghanas – kings – who commanded an army of 200,000. In their capital Koumbi Saleh in Mauritania, ‘the ghana sits in audience … in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials,’ wrote an Arab visitor, al-Bakri, a little later. ‘Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the kings of his country wearing splendid garments, their hair plaited with gold.’ Gold was everywhere: even the ghana’s guard dogs had ‘collars of gold and silver studded with a number of balls of the same metals’. When ghanas died they were buried with treasures and sacrificed servants; such tombs were found in the Niger River area. Western and eastern Africa were not unknown before the Europeans arrived. In fact Afro-Asia was a single world linked by tenuous but ancient caravan and shipping routes across the desert and seas to the Maghreb, Spain, Egypt and the Indian Ocean. Across the Sahara, the ghanas traded ivory, copper, bronze and gold from Barmaka (today’s Ghana) and bronze from Igbo-Ukwu (Nigeria), where craftsmen produced bronzes of snakes, birds and vessels set with beads imported from afar: the ghanas’ treasure house contained 100,000 glass and carnelian beads from Egypt and India. Wagadu was just the biggest of the west African realms – Gao, Timbuktu and Kanem-Bornu – that traded with the north. Two-thirds of European gold came from west Africa, and so probably did the lions in Abd al-Rahman’s menagerie.
The caravans were manned by Berber cameleteers who were often Muslim, so that Islam flowed like the salt from the north into the land of gold. Islam had reached Wagadu: Koumbi Saleh was divided into two towns, one mainly Muslim, the other following Soninke pagan religions, and the ghanas practised a hybrid of both. Al-Bakri witnessed human sacrifices of servants, intoxicated with ‘fermented drinks’, to accompany dead kings.
