* The split between Sunni and Shia was the schism within the House of Muhammad. Ever since the assassination of Ali, the faction – Shia – of Islam had regarded the Umayya and Abbasiya caliphs as impostors, revering the descent of the People of the House of Muhammad as sacred imams. Different Shiite sects followed the descent of different imams, but the Fatimiyya claimed descent from the mysterious seventh Imam Ismaili – hence known as Ismailis – who had occulted or vanished around 762 and now they awaited the Mahdi – Messiah – a member of the family. The Mahdi would restore the unity of Islam before the End of Days, the apocalypse that thanks to chaos of the Baghdad caliphate was believed to be imminent. Al-Mahdi Billal claimed to be the eleventh imam.
* Muslim, Jewish and Christian potentates vied for power. Both Jews and Christians in Ethiopia claimed mythical descent from Solomon and Sheba, but there were ancient links between Arabia and Ethiopia and it is likely these Jews were connected to the interactions between the kingdom of Axum and the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (Yemen). Himyar was Jewish from around the fourth century to its conquest by Axum in the sixth. A significant Jewish community remained in Ethiopia known as the Beta (House of) Israel. At some point, the kings of Axum tried to convert the Jews of the kingdom of Simien situated in north Ethiopia. A Jewish king, Gideon IV, was killed in the fighting, but just around this time, 960, his daughter Queen Gudit (Judith) hit back, destroying Axum and establishing a Jewish kingdom that endured for several centuries alongside Muslim and Christian realms. Historians debate all this; much of it is based on Beta Israel tradition; but it is likely that these Gideonites were the ancestors of today’s Beta Israel (Falashas). Makuria continued to thrive after repelling the Arab armies in 652, enduring until around 1000 when it merged with Christian Dotawo, a regional power until the sixteenth century.
* Madagascar became a uniquely Afro-Polynesian society, where the Merina, a Malay elite, crushed earlier settlers, the Vazimba, hunted to extinction the giant animals (including lemurs the size of gorillas) and imported African slaves to work for them there in a singular caste system that lasted into the late nineteenth century.
* A Christian Arab doctor, Ibn Butlan of Baghdad, wrote a guide to slaves in the 1050s. He flaunted racial stereotypes, but colour was not the ideological basis for slavery. Like most medieval people he regarded race ‘not in binary terms’, writes Hannah Barker, ‘but as a profusion of human diversity signifying the endlessly fertile creativity of God’. The best slaves he claimed were from India and Afghanistan. Those from Syria and Maghreb were inferior; Rus and Slavs were strong. ‘Were a Zanj (east African) slave to fall from sky to earth, the one quality he’d possess would be rhythm.’ The doctor warned against the customs in Bagawi (Sudan/Ethiopia) where ‘they practice excision. Using a razor they completely remove external skin on top of the vulva.’ His conclusion: ‘Armenian slaves are the worst of the whites; Zanj worst of the blacks.’
* A fifth of slaves may have died on the nightmarish journeys across the desert, where their bones were a well-known sight. Between 700 and the abolition of slavery, it is likely that as many slaves were traded from east Africa as in the Atlantic trade. Ralph A. Austen estimates 11.75 million were traded – but the numbers are educated guesses.
* As he fled Egypt, Mutanabbi, the whole white man, flung this at the black eunuch:
A well-hung, well-heeled white man’s sense of gratitude soon palls;
What thanks can be expected from a black man with no balls?
* Al-Muizz was also the inventor or commissioner of the fountain pen, telling his scribe: ‘We wish to construct a pen which can be used for writing without dipping it in an inkbottle, whose ink will be contained inside it … and it will not stain nor will any drop of ink leak out of it.’
* The Genizah was an accidental archive since it was the rubbish dump of the Jews there who believed that God’s words in Hebrew should never be burned, only buried.
* John Crescentius was the last of the Crescentii but the other Marozian line, the counts of Tusculum, controlled the papacy until 1049. Nor was this the end of the family: the Colonna princes, potentates for centuries to come, were and are descended from the Tusculum counts.
* Yet the Anglo-Saxons were already a hybrid of English and Viking. DNA shows that Vikings may have started with murder and rape but ultimately settled and intermarried with Celts and Anglo-Saxons.
* It was the age of eponyms that defined men by their looks and actions instead of their birth. Aethelred’s was a (rather bad) joke. His name meant Well Advised. Unready meant Badly Advised. So he was Well Advised the Badly Advised.
