The World полностью

Embracing the multi-ethnic nature of Sicily, Roger II created a unique court that combined Norman, Greek, Arab and Jewish culture. Married to the half-Arab daughter of Alfonso of Castile, he ruled through George of Antioch, a Greek corsair who had formerly served Arab rulers in Tunisia and gloried in the title amir amiratus – amir of amirs (the origin of the word admiral). George took Tripoli in 1146 and a swathe of north Africa, then Corfu, and he next attacked Constantinople, firing arrows right into the Great Palace. Manuel was defended by his Venetian allies, to whom in gratitude he granted a bespoke trading quarter in Constantinople. But when he asked them to attack Sicily, they refused. Outraged, he awarded special status to the Genoese.

At home, Roger commissioned the breathtaking Palatine Chapel with its Byzantine domes and mosaics and Fatimiyya muqarna – stalactite vaulting – and the only contemporary portrait of Roger himself, presented as a sacred ruler. Escorted by Arab bodyguards, he favoured Arab and Jewish scholars. In 1138, the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi created the Tabula Rogeriana, a world map or planisphere, engraved on silver, incorporating the best knowledge available until the voyages of Columbus, and wrote The Avocation of a Man Desirous of Full Knowledge of the Different Countries of the World – which described the journeys by Arab sailors to the Saragossa Sea off Bermuda – and a description of China.^* But it did not show Mongolia, where during the 1120s, as Roger built his Sicilian empire, a chieftain of the Mongols was conquering his own.

* To the east, a warlord named Mahmud hacked out a new realm, based in Ghazni (Afghanistan), which he expanded from Persia to Pakistan, repeatedly raiding northern India. The Ghaznavis fought like Turks but embraced refined Persianate culture. Mahmud patronized a Persian poet, a Khorasani landowner’s son called Ferdowsi (Paradisiacal, his nom de plume), who for thirty years had been writing the Shahnameh – the Story of Kings – an epic poem of gods and heroes starring a strapping Prince Rustam and promoting the Persian over the Arab, fusing pre-Islamic and Islamic Persian culture. Mahmud promised Ferdowsi a gold piece for every couplet but took so long to pay up, the money arrived as the poet’s funeral cortège left. While the caliph remained nominal overlord, he granted the Ghaznavis a new title of secular authority: sultan, the power.

* Blondeness and pallor were much prized: myrrh, lime, saffron, sandarach and thapsia were used for hair dye; chalk and lead powder for face make-up. Her ingredients were imported from Egypt and India.

* Some of these differences were minor, others significant. The easterners rejected the western reforms – priestly celibacy and new wording in the Credo that the Holy Spirit derived not just from the Father but also from the son (filioque). The westerners in turn rejected the Roman emperor’s title, Equal of the Apostles.

* This was not just about England and Normandy. All of these princes were players in a complex eastern world. Hardrada was married to Elisiv, the daughter of Yaroslav of Kyiv. On the English defeat, many Anglo-Saxon exiles went to serve in Constantinople and were granted a colony called New England, probably in Crimea. Harold and his wife Edith Swanneck had four sons, who each invaded England to expel the Bastard – three were killed in the attempt. Their daughter Gytha was married to Vladimir Monomakh, prince of Kyiv, and it was their son, Harold’s grandson, Yuri Dolgoruky, who was the founder of Moscow and progenitor of all the tsars down to Ivan the Terrible.

* Manzikert is still celebrated by Turks every year. Western Europeans understood that the weakening of the eastern empire was a catastrophe. In 1074, after Manzikert, Pope Gregory VII had proposed a war to support Constantinople – the first step towards the Crusades twenty-five years later.

* Nizam wrote a guide to politics for Malikshah, reflecting amid much sage advice on the danger of family. ‘One obedient slave is better than 300 sons,’ he wrote, ‘for the latter desire their father’s death, the former their master’s glory.’