* When Bohemond died at fifty-six, Antioch was inherited by his son, Bohemond II, who was brought up by his mother in Europe until he was of age. In 1126 he arrived to build his own realm, allying himself with Baldwin II of Jerusalem, cousin of the first, who married him to his daughter Alice, thereby linking the largest of the fragile Crusader states. But being a Crusader monarch was a risky enterprise. Bohemond II, ‘forceful’ like his father but less lucky, fought Frankish rivals and Islamic foes before invading Syria with his father-in-law Baldwin II. There he was killed four years later – his head sent to the caliph of Baghdad – leaving Antioch to his baby daughter, Constance. Raymond of Poitiers was the son of William IX the Troubadour, duke of Aquitaine, who had campaigned against the Muslims in Spain, bringing back from al-Andalus the knightly poets and enslaved dancer-singers who helped promote a fashion for courtly love, sung in French by singer-songwriter-knights – the troubadours. William personified the cult of love, devoting himself to his beautiful mistress, the wondrously named Dangereuse de l’Isle Bouchard, who was the grandmother of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
* After Raymond was killed in battle, his widow Constance, liberated from political marriage, fell in love with a reckless, penniless adventurer, Reynald de Châtillon, whom she married and raised to titular prince – while her stammering son Bohemond III succeeded to the throne. Constance had to recognize Manuel, to whom she married her daughter Maria, thereby joining the Hautevilles to their enemies, the Komnenoi.
* When Roger II died in 1154, his third wife was pregnant. A girl, another Constance, was born posthumously. Given the number of sons and male relatives, it seemed unlikely that she would be politically significant.
ACT EIGHT
360 MILLION
Genghis: A Conquering Family
RISE AND FALL OF THE KHAN
Khabul Khan, chieftain of the Borjigin clan, was successfully uniting the nomadic peoples who had long lived around their sacred mountain, Burkhan Khaldun, and now acclaimed him as khagan of a mysterious federation, Khamag Mongol – the Whole Mongol.* His great-grandson, raised in a family totally destroyed by fate, would revere his memory and avenge his downfall.
Khabul benefited from the division of China into warring kingdoms – the sophisticated Song in the south vying against the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty in the north, the Xi Xia realm of Tangut peoples, in the west dominating Xinjiang and, in Central Asia, the Qara Khitai Liao empire. When he was invited to pay tribute to the Jurchen emperor in Zhongdu – Central Capital (later Beijing) – Khabul behaved like the most ‘uncooked’ barbarian, gorging and quaffing with unrestrained oafishness, then jovially tugging the beard of the emperor. Courtiers ordered Khabul’s assassination, but he escaped and defeated the Jurchen, winning their recognition.
His Mongol tribe were just one of the many that existed in a constant struggle for power, an ever-mutating kaleidoscope of alliances sometimes coalescing into confederacy. Usually an aristocracy of
Mongol warriors wore fur hats with earmuffs, a tunic covered in fur for winter, felt stockings and boots, with a leather helmet reaching over the neck and a breastplate of lacquered leather. In summer they wore silks from China. ‘The men shave a little square on the top of their heads and what is left of their hair they braid into plaits which hang down either side as far as their ears,’ noted a western visitor much later. They were ‘astounding men, alien in face, customs, full bodied, bold, strong, handsome with small narrow dark eyes, thick black hair, flat-browed, noses set so low that their cheeks stood out, completely without facial hair’.
