The World полностью

In 1192, Venice elected a new doge, Dandalo, who received a delegation of French Crusaders seeking a loan to fund their Crusade against Egypt.^* When they could not raise the lucre, Dandalo commandeered the entire operation, took the Cross and declared that, although he was ‘old and weak, no one knows how to govern and direct you like me, and I will go and die’ on ‘the greatest enterprise anyone has ever undertaken’. Sailing across the Adriatic to Venetian Croatia, with 12,000 Venetians and Frenchmen, he attacked a rebel city Zara, where he was joined by a Romaioi prince, Alexios IV Angelos, who asked for his help in overthrowing his uncle, the emperor of Constantinople. Dandalo, enthusiastically backed by most of the Crusaders, sailed to the Bosphoros, expecting the citizens of the Great City to welcome Alexios, but they did not. Exasperated, he ordered the storming of Constantinople. Listening to the sounds of battle from the deck of the vermilion galley, he suddenly ordered his ship to be beached as he stood defiantly in the prow – a sight that inspired his troops and possibly the Constantinopolitans for they overthrew their emperor and welcomed the Venetian candidate. He paid some of the gold owed to Dandalo – not enough for Venice – but too much for his subjects: he was assassinated.

On 12 April 1204, Dandalo, infuriated, stormed the city, using merchant vessels lashed together as platforms for siege engines, while Venetian and French troops scaled the walls. This was possible only because the demoralized city was thinly defended. But, once inside, the Latins, disgusted by the effete, traitorous, icon-loving Greeks, sacked the city, raping nuns, killing children and desecrating the silver iconostasis of Hagia Sophia, where they enthroned an ancient prostitute. The doge organized the looting of the porphyry sculptures of the tetrarchs of Rome and the bronze horses that had stood above the starting line of the hippodrome (they still stand within and – in replica – outside St Mark’s in Venice). From the territories of the Romaioi, Dandalo created a new empire called Romania. Dandalo himself, now ninety-seven, was offered the throne but refused. A Frenchman was chosen instead, but Dandalo won for Venice three-eighths of the Partitio Romaniae. After accepting the resonant titles Despot of Romania and Lord of Three-Eighths of the Roman Empire, he died – the only person ever buried in Hagia Sophia. Constantinople never recovered; Venice seized Crete, Cyprus and southern Greece for its own mercantile empire. But Dandalo’s very success provoked war with Genoa, in which the doge’s only son was killed.

Queen Tamara of Georgia had watched all of this with horror: her blinded brother-in-law Manuel Komnenos lived in Tbilisi with his son Alexios. Now Tamara sent Georgian troops to take Trebizond, and there Alexios Komnenos declared himself emperor, founding a Trapezuntine client state of Georgia.^* As for Tamara, her beloved king David died and she suffered from a ‘feminine infirmity’, possibly uterine cancer, which prompted her to crown their son, Giorgi IV the Resplendent, as co-ruler. Hearing that there was a new crusade, Resplendent Giorgi took the Cross to liberate Jerusalem, encouraged by (fake) news that a Christian king, Prester John, was advancing from the east. Some of the news was correct, however: there was a new king in the east, and he was coming.

GENGHIS – MY GOLDEN LIFE – AND THE BLACK DEATH

In 1206, Genghis summoned a qurultai – the assembly that confirmed leadership of the steppes not by voting but by attendance – to celebrate his accession as khagan. Blessed after sacred consultation with Blue Heaven by his court shaman Kokochu, who had been with him since his youth, he officially became the khagan of All the Tribes Who Live in Felt Tents – Keraits, Naimans, Merkits, Tatars – at the head of a new nobility of trusted commanders, united under his white standard of nine yak tails. Genghis praised his retainers, telling stories from his past, and dubbing Jebe, the brothers Jelme and Subotai, and Kublai ‘the Four Hounds’.

His code of laws, the Yasa, was read out, cases to be judged by his adopted son Shigi, enforced by his son Chagatai. Although he was illiterate, Genghis hired a Uighur scribe to be his keeper of the seal, using Uighur script for business. A mounted courier service, the Yam, would communicate between armies and provinces. This was the enterprise of a divinely blessed dynasty now called the Golden Family: only the Golden Family would rule the world, only the Golden Family would select the khan at the qurultai and no Golden blood could ever be spilt. Genghis’s four daughters were entrusted with considerable power; all were married to potentates and given kingdoms to rule in their own right. The eldest daughter, Alakahi, ruled the Ongud tribes and later much of northern China, becoming chief horse supplier to her father, who called her Princess Who Rules.