The World полностью

* In 1090, the fissiparous schisms of the Fatimiyya caliphate produced the Assassins. Like Shia itself, it started with a family split when the caliph handed the succession to his son al-Mustali over the claims of the eldest al-Nizari, who in 1095 rebelled and was killed by immurement (entombed while alive). Nizari’s backers, led by a mystic-scholar named Hassan i-Sabbah, believing that the immured prince was occulted and would return as the Mahdi, fled Egypt and seized the castle of Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia, founding a principality that lasted two centuries. Its early leaders called themselves the Dai – the Missionary – but later they claimed descent from Nizari, ruling as sacred imams. The Nizaris compensated for their small size by fanaticism, assassination (and, some claimed, drugs, hence the nickname Hashishim – Assassins). Their hitmen killed thousands of Sunnis, including two Abbasiya caliphs. Later: Saladin twice survived their attacks; a hit squad disguised as monks assassinated a Crusader king of Jerusalem; another wounded the English prince who survived to become Edward I.

* The trope of penises and palm trees refers to the Arab story that Mary shook a date tree while giving birth to Jesus, leading to much ribaldry among these female poets. In Muhja’s shocking verses, she compares Wallada’s mysterious pregnancies to that of the Virgin Mary: ‘Wallada has become fertile by another man; the secret-keeper revealed it. To us, she resembled Mary, but this palm tree is an erect penis.’

* The name al-Murabitin (possibly meaning people of the ribat after their fortress-monasteries) was translated as Almoravid in English.

* The poet-king al-Mutamid was exiled to Morocco. When Cordoba fell to the invaders, his daughter-in-law Princess Zaida fled to Alfonso, who made her his concubine before converting her to Christianity and marrying her as Queen Isabella. In 2018 newspapers claimed that the British queen Elizabeth II was descended from the Prophet Muhammad, citing Zaida as her ancestor. Zaida had two daughters; one, Elvira, married Roger, the Hauteville count of Sicily; the other, Sancha, is the progenitor of a line of royalty, via Richard earl of Cambridge and Mary queen of Scots, to George I. It is a link between Islam and Christendom from a more cosmopolitan time. Al-Mutamid was descended from the Arab kings, the Lakhm of Iraq – royalty older than the Prophet but not related to him – and al-Mutamid was Zaida’s father-in-law, not her father. There is no evidence Zaida, let alone Elizabeth II, was descended from Muhammad.

* Kilij Arslan was killed fighting rival Turkic lords; in 2020, his tomb was discovered at Sivlan, Türkiye.

* Genoa had initiated the Crusades with raids on Mahdia and Tunisia (in 1016 and again in 1087, the one rejected by Roger I’s fart). It was a republic, known as La Superba, ruled by consuls chosen by a cartel of mercantile families – led by the Doria, Grimaldi (today princes of Monaco) and Embriaco. The Genoese traded silver from Sardinia and wool, but above all gold and slaves, black and white, from Africa and Russia, trading between Nile and Atlantic, building up colonies from Ceuta in Morocco to their slave market in Kaffa (Feodosia, Crimea). But they spent much of their energy fighting their hated rivals, Pisa and later Venice.

* It was the second Crusader state. Baldwin of Boulogne, brother of the Jew-hating Godfrey of Bouillon, had already galloped off and seized Edessa (Urfa, south-eastern Türkiye) as his own county.

* Genoese ships commanded by the merchant prince Gugliemo ‘Hammerhead’ Embriaco were essential not just for the conquest of Jerusalem but also of Caesarea, Acre (where they received a third of the income) and (in today’s Lebanon) Tripoli, Tyre and Gibelet (Byblos) which became a family fiefdom of the Embriaco family. The Venetians, arriving later, clashed with their Pisan rivals and afterwards stormed Haifa, where the mainly Jewish population was slaughtered.

* The Crusader paladins were not all male: in 1101, a small German crusade was partly led by Ida, margravine of Austria, who aged around forty-five was ambushed by Sword Lion, the Seljuk sultan of Rum, and killed in battle.

* While her brother turned out to be the greatest of the late emperors, Anna survived for decades, writing her history to exorcise her bitterness: ‘I died a thousand deaths,’ yet ‘after my misfortunes, I am still alive – to experience yet more’. Her loss was history’s gain. Just as Ban Zhao was the first female historian in China, Anna was the first in the west.