Al-Hakim was handsome, strapping and blond, with blue gold-flecked eyes, the son of a Christian concubine. While the boy caliph pursued his studies and adventures in the stews of Cairo, Barjawan, a dandyish connoisseur who owned 1,000 pairs of ornate trousers and cummerbunds, restored order in the empire. They pursued their Syrian war, but in 999 Emperor Basil himself hit back furiously as far as Baalbek (Lebanon), causing a crisis in Cairo. Turkic and Berber troops clashed in the streets in an atmosphere of apocalyptic turbulence, intensified by the approach of the 400th anniversary of Muhammad’s journey to Medina and the resurgence of Christian power in the person of Basil, who was fortunately diverted to Georgia. Al-Hakim negotiated a truce with Basil, who was finally free to strike north. A new Bulgar Caesar, Samuel, had exploited Basil’s Arab wars to re-establish a kingdom from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Now in 1000, Basil stormed into Bulgaria, the start of fourteen atrocious years that culminated in 1014 with victory at Kleidion, where the emperor blinded ninety-nine out of every hundred of his 15,000 prisoners, with each unit led home by their solitary one-eyed guide – a sight that so horrified Samuel that he died of a stroke. There is no reason to doubt the atrocity. Basil had demolished the Bulgar state, re-establishing his empire as an Eurasian power. After a reign of forty-nine years – the longest of any Roman emperor east or west – the titanic but terrifying Bulgar Slayer, died aged sixty-six, hand on sword, planning to reconquer Italy.
Basil’s focus on the Balkans allowed the fourteen-year-old Caliph al-Hakim to concentrate on his own power and salvation. He had promoted Barjawan to vizier, but the eunuch gave him orders and, he heard, nicknamed him the Lizard. Al-Hakim ordered another eunuch to stab Barjawan to death, appeasing the alarmed crowds by claiming that he was a traitor. But Barjawan’s death unleashed more skirmishes between Berber and Turkic troops in Cairo, while the caliph of Baghdad mocked al-Hakim as half-Christian and the Fatimiyya as semi-Jews unrelated to Muhammad.
Al-Hakim was wildly inconsistent, founding a Dar al-Ilm – House of Knowledge – similar to al-Mamun’s House of Wisdom – where not only Ismaili theology but astronomy and philosophy were taught in sessions that he himself often attended. But once Barjawan was gone al-Hakim seems to have believed that tolerance had displeased God. In 1004, noticing rich Christian caravans setting off for Jerusalem, he started executing Christians and converting churches into mosques. On hearing of the frenzied Christian rite of the Holy Fire that took place every Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he banned Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, and wine drinking as well. Then he ordered that Jews and Christians wear distinguishing clothing, a Jew a wooden cow-yoke (and in the baths a cowbell) and Christians a cross. Jews and Christians were ordered to convert or die; many pretended to convert.
Next, in 1009, al-Hakim ordered the Jerusalem basilica of Jesus’ Sepulchre, built by Constantine the Great, to be demolished ‘stone by stone’ – to the horror of Christendom, which began to take a new interest in the Holy City. In Rome, where Pope Sergius IV (nicknamed the Pig’s Mouth either for his good looks or for his greed) and his master John Crescentius proposed an expedition to save Jerusalem. Nothing came of it, but it was the first flicker of a movement that would change the world.
In 1027, Pope John XIX, descendant of Marozia,* crowned a new German king, Conrad II, as Roman emperor, a coronation attended by King Canute of Denmark and England. The Vikings were no longer just traders and raiders: in Kyiv and Normandy, and now England, Iceland and America, they were settlers and empire builders too.
THE BLUETOOTHS TAKE ENGLAND: UNREADY, IRONSIDE, FORKBEARD AND HAREFOOT
In 1013, Canute’s father Sweyn Forkbeard intensified his raids on a prosperous England, almost united by the family of Alfred the Great. Alfred’s grandson Aethelstan had seized York and Northumbria. In 927 he received the submission of the Scottish and Welsh monarchs of Alba, Strathclyde and Deheubarth, declaring himself King of All Britain,
