* In 1156 Prince Yuri ‘Long-Arm’ Dolgoruky, whose mother was Gytha of Wessex, daughter of King Harold, built a stronghold on a hill overlooking the Moskva River. At times he was grand prince of Kyiv, then of Vladimir-Suzdal. It was the Mongol invasions that ultimately made this fortress, Moscow, the pre-eminent principality of the Rurikovichi and future fulcrum of Russian empire.
* But the Assassins still controlled castles in Syria and Lebanon. In 1271, they attempted to assassinate Prince Edward of England who was on Crusade in Acre: the future Edward I survived to hammer the Scots. After the destruction of the last Assassin castles, the Nizaris split once again, with one branch continuing the sacred succession. In the nineteenth century, their imam was appointed governor of Qom by the Persian shah who granted him the title Aga Khan before he moved to British India, flourishing as a British client. In the twenty-first century, the Aga Khans are still imams of fifteen million Nizaris.
* A cousin of the last caliph escaped to Cairo where he was set up as honorary caliph, a lineage maintained by the Mamluk sultans there until 1517, when the Ottomans took the last of the family to Istanbul and, after almost a thousand years of greatness, into obscurity.
* When Genghis took Persia, Saadi became a Sufi pilgrim – Sufism being Islamic mysticism. Saadi studied in Baghdad and Cairo, visited Mecca and Jerusalem until he was captured and enslaved by the Crusaders in Acre for seven years and then ransomed by the Egyptians. After fifty years of wandering, Saadi went home and wrote his masterpieces. The wars inspired his love of humanity: ‘All human beings are members of one frame, / Since all, at first, from the same essence came,’ he wrote in
* The sultan was replaced by his widow, Shajar al-Durr, a former slave who now ruled as sultan, like Razia in Delhi – a rare thing in Islamic history, a woman ruling in her own right as Malikat al-Muslimin (Queen of the Muslims). But when her rule was challenged she was forced to marry a Mamluk general. She later had him murdered in his bath, a deed that infuriated the guards and led to her, naked except for a diamond-encrusted shawl, being beaten to death by the shoes of his palace-slaves: death by stiletto.
* After losing Antioch in 1268, Bohemond VI kept the Lebanese port of Tripoli, which was inherited by his sister Lucia. Sultan Qalawun took the port in 1289. Lucia, countess of Tripoli, the last Hauteville, may have perished in the ruins.
* In addition to his four wives, each with a court of several hundred, Kublai’s favourite concubines, were ‘very beautiful fair-skinned girls’ from Afghanistan. All his concubines were were trained by experienced Mongol women.
* The Great City was retaken by the Greek prince Michael VIII Palaiologos, whose family would rule the restored
The Keitas of Mali and the Habsburgs of Austria
RAPACIOUS RUDOLF AND MARCO MILLION
At Dadu, around 1271, Kublai received the Polos, interrogating them genially about the two Christian emperors, then ordering them to take a letter to Pope Clement IV requesting 100 scholars to teach Mongols as well as some oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Polos were dazzled by Kublai’s eight palaces, their ‘rooftops of green, azure peacock-blue, bright as crystal’, and a banqueting hall that seated 6,000.
Armed with an imperial pass,* the Polos set off back to Venice, but when they arrived Niccolò ‘discovered his wife was dead, and that she had left behind her a son of fifteen years of age, whose name was Marco’ – as Marco himself put it. The Polos found a Europe in chaos – Clement was dead, the heirs of Frederick had been murdered,* Ghibellines and Guelphs fought for Italian power. But one family thrived: the Habsburgs.
