* Frederick II’s son Conrad by the queen of Jerusalem had been elected king of the Romans in his father’s lifetime and had then inherited Sicily too, but he died in 1254 of malaria. The succession of his half-brother Manfredi, son of the emperor’s
* The German princes who elected the kings of Germany were known as the electors. The kings were crowned in Aachen, Charlemagne’s old capital.
* Ottokar was the greatest so far of the Czech Prˇemyslovci family, who had started as Slavic chieftains around Prague and created a Bohemian kingdom.
* But it was not the end of the Prˇemyslovci: his son Wenceslas II became king of Poland and Bohemia and procured Hungary for his son, ruling a Mitteleuropean empire that fell apart after his death.
* Marco praised the town of Kamul (Hami, Xinjiang) where ‘If a stranger comes to his house, a man receives him with great joy’, ordering ‘daughters, sisters and others to do all that the stranger wishes’, even leaving the house while ‘the stranger stays with his wife, does as he likes and lies in bed with her, continuing in great enjoyment. All the men are thus cuckolded by their wives and not the least ashamed of it … All the women were very fair, exuberant and very wanton, greatly enjoying this custom.’
* Kublai did not just tolerate but celebrated the festivals of ‘the Saracens, Jews and idolaters (Buddhists).’ On being asked the reason, Kublai replied, ‘There are four prophets. The Christians had Jesus, the Saracens Muhammad, the Jews Moses and the idolaters Buddha, who was the first. I reverence all four.’ When the Polos asked him to be baptized, he jovially replied that his shaman, astrologers and sorcerers were much more powerful than Christians: ‘My lords and other believers would demand “What miracles have you seen of Jesus?”’
* The Song manufactured iron bombshells, fire arrows and fire lances, but in 1257 an official who inspected the arsenals concluded that their supplies were totally inadequate ‘in the event of an attack by the barbarians. What chilling indifference!’ The earliest iron cannon that actually exists comes from Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Xanadu, which is dated to 1298.
* Kublai appointed his brother Hulagu the Il-Khan of Persia-Iraq: when he died in 1265, he was buried with the human sacrifice of his favourite slaves. The Golden Horde (Russia) remained the khanate of Batu’s family, now Muslims.
* Kublai invited the young Tibetan lama Phags-pa to join his debates on religion and also to create a new writing based on the Tibetan alphabet. Phags-pa helped him add Tibet to his empire, ruling there as his ‘master of the realm’.
* Raden Wijaya’s Hindu Majapahit kingdom was expanded by his remarkable daughter, Princess Gitarja, who as Rana Tribhuwana – often portrayed as Parvati, goddess of beauty, love and courage – after the murder of her brother the raja in 1328 sometimes commanded her own forces to conquer an empire that extended across Indonesia from Borneo to the Philippines and southern Thailand before her death around the age of forty. The empire controlled the spice trade between China and the Indian Ocean for three centuries.
