The Viking colonies in America did not endure. Leif returned to Greenland, where his son Thorkell succeeded him as chieftain; Gudred made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ended as a nun on Iceland, where her American son became the forefather of many Icelanders. Their American adventure did not change the world – the colonists were too few and the European prizes were too rich. Yet, as a newly discovered Milanese document reveals, knowledge of the continent’s existence was passed down by Nordic sailors.*
A Danish king Harthacnut still ruled England, recognizing as his heir the Aethling Edward, son of Aethelred, later celebrated for saintly piety as the Confessor. But on 8 June 1042 Harthacnut, attending a wedding in London, raised a toast to the bride and ‘suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion’. The saintly Edward probably poisoned him. Edward was supported by the prince blinder, mass-scalper and kingmaker Godwin of Wessex, who, married to Canute’s sister-in-law, had helped destroy his father and killed at least one brother. But now they soothed these crimes with marriage: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith and raised his son Harold to earl. When Godwin died, Harold, half Anglo-Saxon, half Dane, succeeded as the first potentate of the kingdom, earl of Wessex. Since Edward had no children, who would inherit England?
The island was on the edge of Europe, but Canute’s Roman trip showed how this Scando-Britannic empire was now linked by Mediterranean trade routes to Asia. Two coins from a resurgent China have been found in Edward’s England, while in Egypt the Mad Caliph, al-Hakim, had gone much further, contacting the new Chinese emperor.
But in Cairo this Arab Caligula turned on his entourage. Once, passing a butcher’s shop, he just took a cleaver and killed one of his courtiers without even stopping. Then he cancelled his anti-Jewish, anti-Christian decrees and enforced a new puritanism on the Cairenes. All women had to wear veils and alcohol was banned – a sign of how lax society had become in Cairo. He beheaded many of his own concubines, banned all singing and dancing, then forbade women from going out at all, even to shop. When they ignored his orders, they were killed. When they protested that they had to go out shopping, al-Hakim told them to order deliveries to the home – a caliphal version of Amazon. Other strange measures followed: his
Touched by the sanctity of the imamate and the young caliph’s wild charisma, some Ismaili sectarians believed that al-Hakim ‘personified God within him’ and hailed him as divine, an idea that appealed to the caliph, who now wandered Cairo streets in drug-fuelled trances. But the grandees were worried.
Al-Hakim was close to his sister Sitt al-Mulk – a title that meant Lady of Power. She was fearless, fortyish, as blonde and blue-eyed as the caliph. But he now became paranoid about her intrigues. Some of his suspicions were correct. Sitt al-Mulk lived in splendour in her own palace where she dared to hide potential victims of her brother’s insanity. Al-Hakim accused her of ‘fornication’ with generals and viziers, executing one who may have been her lover. Sitt al-Mulk realized she was in peril and made her plans.
When al-Hakim nominated a cousin, not his young son al-Zahir, as heir, Sitt al-Mulk protected the child and wrote to a general called Ibn Daws to tell him that the caliph accused the two of them of having an affair. It was either kill or be killed.
In 1021, al-Hakim, now thirty-six, rode out of Cairo to meditate and never came back. His body was never found, just bloodied rags.
Yet his influence has endured to this day.* Al-Hakim, whose ports in Arabia and the Red Sea regularly traded with India and China, learned from these seafarers that something had changed in China. In 1008, he sent a sea captain, Domiyat, to China to deliver gifts and letters to Zhenzong, emperor of a new dynasty – the Song – that had opened a new act and made the Central Country the most dynamic, prosperous, sophisticated and technologically innovative empire on earth. As if inventing gunpowder, printing and the compass was not enough, its founder may have invented football.
