The World полностью

* The main eastern sources of the life of Genghis and his family are the works of three remarkable historians. The most important is the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, original title unknown, commissioned by Genghis’s son Ogodei not long after his death and, some believe, written by his adopted son and chief judge, Shigi. The other two historians – the Persian treasurer Ata-Malek Juvayni, writing twenty years later, and the grand vizier Rashid al-Din a hundred years later (but using another official family history which was afterwards lost) – were both high-ranking ministers of Genghis’s descendants who were thus able to learn much family history at first hand.

* This time the charismatic preacher-warrior was Ibn Tumert, who fulminated against the decadence of the Murabits in favour of a mysticism mixed with puritanical fundamentalism that promoted a return to the Quran. His followers called themselves al-Muwahhidun – people of unity (Almohads). In 1121, Tumert declared himself Mahdi. In 1147 his successor Abd al-Muamin declared himself caliph and captured Marrakesh, before conquering the Maghreb and then in 1172 crossing to Spain, where he based himself in Seville and launched a vicious persecution of Jews and Christians. The great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides escaped their repression and arrived in Cairo, where he became doctor and adviser to Saladin and his sons. These Berber caliphs were avid minaret builders: after his father’s death in 1163, the second caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf built the Giralda Tower as a minaret to his mosque in Seville, as well as the palace that became the Alcazar. The third caliph, al-Mansur, who in 1195 massacred a Castilian army, built the Hassan Tower in Rabat. There was no reason to suppose that Spain would ever be fully Christian again.

* The competence of the first five monarchs was formidable: Baldwin I and II were gifted, indefatigable warrior-kings, while Queen Melisende (the latter’s daughter with his Armenian queen Morphia) was every bit their equal as a potentate – though she required a husband, Fulk, to lead her armies. It was she who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the market that we see today in Jerusalem. Her son Baldwin III deposed her, but inherited the family gifts, as did his obese brother Amaury.

* Barbarossa’s death spawned the legend of a sleeping emperor who would rise again at the End of Days, his mystical prestige inspiring a later German ruler, Adolf Hitler, who named his invasion of Russia in his honour. Richard inherited the bountiful accumulations of his father Henry II, duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, and his mother Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine: all of England and the western half of France. Persecutor of the Jews, whom he expelled then allowed to return, Philippe later won the epithet Augustus for dramatically expanding France, reducing the English holdings, aided by the spectacular and vicious incompetence of Richard’s brother John. But the English kept Gascony for three centuries.

* In 806, Ashot the Carnivorous (a meat-chomping enthusiast even at Lent) was appointed by Haroun al-Rashid as prince of Armenia, founding the Bagration dynasty that ruled in the Caucasus for the next thousand years, until 1810. In 885, Ashot the Great was recognized by both caliph and Roman emperor as the first king of Armenia, and three years later another of the family, Adarnase IV, was installed as king of Tao, in south-western Georgia, by Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer. In 1122, King David IV the Builder took advantage of Islamic distraction during the Crusades to take Tbilisi, unite an expanded Georgia and wage holy war against the Seljuks so ferociously that, after one battle, blood supposedly poured out of his belt when he took it off. Fusing Persian, Turkic and Frankish troubadour cultures, marrying one Christian and one Turk, splicing one daughter to a Seljuk and another to a Komnenos, David travelled with sword and library, reading the Quran and Persian poetry and, like his biblical namesake, writing hymns.

* The queen’s treasurer, Shota Rustaveli, was also a poet, author of the Georgian epic Knight in the Panther Skin, in which the beauteous princess and her suitor are tributes to Tamara and David. Rustaveli celebrated the rare partnership of the king of kings and her king consort: ‘She who strikes terror from the East to the West, wherever she fights: / Those who are traitors, she destroys; those who are loyal, she delights.’ As with Melisende in Jerusalem, the partnership showed that a woman could remain in charge in Crusader times even when married to a warrior-consort – precedents later relevant to Queen Elizabeth I of England, who feared this was not possible in her time.