* The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.
* Öljaitü’s mosque complex and tomb with its stunning turquoise double-shell dome still stand. Although textbooks still frame the ‘Renaissance’ as an Italian phenomenon, this Persian-Mongol masterpiece probably inspired Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, which it anticipated by a century. The Il-Khans were allied with the Palaiologoi emperors of Constantinople. To cope with marauding Turkic amirs, led by a warlike family, the Ottomans, operating between their empires, the desperate emperor, Andronikos II, sent a daughter, Eirene, to the khanate; she married first Ghazan and then Öljaitü. These imperial Greek wives were always known as Despina Khatun –
* The history of Mali is told partly through the observations of Arab scholars – Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, al-Kathir (author of the world history
* The Kouroukan Fouga’s approach to women reflected the Mandinke’s matriarchal traditions: ‘Never offend women, our mothers’; ‘Always consult women in government’; ‘Never beat a married woman until her husband has tried to solve the problem.’ Divorce was permitted if the man was impotent or incapable of protecting or if either spouse was insane.
* On slavery the
* The Mexica had no domesticated pack animals; porters were their only transport. Their most valued material was jade, followed by gold or silver. They traded goods and enslaved people at huge markets where hair was cut, food was served, gold and silver exchanged, using cacao beans and cotton as currency (a fresh avocado was worth three beans, a turkey 100). People were enslaved by virtue of war, debt and punishment, but slavery was not hereditary. Enslaved people worked as servants, the unlucky were sacrificed, the lucky freed.
* Most historians believe that it is impossible that Africans crossed the Atlantic because they lacked the shipbuilding technology. But of course they could have copied Genoese ships that were shipwrecked down the African coast. A Spanish friar who interviewed Yucatán Maya in 1588 was told that ‘in ancient times seventy Moros [black people] reached the coast in a vessel that must have been through a great storm’ led by a ‘xeque’ – a sheikh: all, he claimed, were killed.
