Petrarch lost his son to the Mortality, but after working as a diplomat for a decade he retired with his daughter to Padua. He and Boccaccio, who also served as a diplomat, remained close friends and correspondents. When Petrarch died, he left fifty florins to Boccaccio ‘to buy a warm winter dressing gown’. Ibn Khaldun served kings from Granada to Cairo, but it was the experience of the Mortality that inspired his great project: a world history. In his extraordinary career, he personally witnessed how the fall of dynasties and the Destructive Death opened the World Game for two new Turkic contenders.
Two castles and a wedding marked the arrival of a new power in Europe. The wedding, held in 1346, just as the Mortality was about to hit Constantinople, was between Theodora, the sixteen-year-old daughter of imperial claimant Joannes VI Kantakouzenos, and a Turkish bey – war-band leader – named Orhan, aged sixty-five, whose family would one day dominate south-eastern Europe and western Asia until 1918.
Orhan was the descendant of a warlord, Ertuğrul, granted lands by the Seljuks in north-western Türkiye. Ertuğrul’s son Osman – or Othman, hence the family name Ottoman – had carved out a principality near the Bosphoros by exploiting the civil wars in Constantinople, which was also fatally weakened by the Mortality; the Ottomans were less affected. In 1329, Osman’s son Orhan, a tireless warlord who ruled for almost forty years, defeated Andronikos III, annexed Nicaea and Nicomedia and forced Roman emperors to accompany him, a mere Turkish bey, on campaign. In return for backing a claimant to the throne of Justinian, he won this Roman imperial marriage.
Then, in 1354, the Ottomans made their European debut. The Mortality had scarcely restrained the outbreak of a new war between the rapacious Italian cities Genoa and Venice, fought out in Constantinople. Orhan backed the Genoese and crossed into Europe, where he occupied a fortress, Gallipoli, its walls shattered by a fortuitous earthquake.
It was the beginning. Orhan sent his son Murad, son of a Greek concubine, to take command in Europe, where he later seized Bulgaria, attacked Wallachia (Romania) and invaded Albania, Bosnia and Serbia. Emperor Joannes V appealed to the nearest Christian kings of Serbia and Hungary for aid against the Ottomans. In 1371, Murad smashed the Serbians on the Maritsa River. The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the
A master of spectacular violence and connoisseur of exquisite art, he was a collector of writers and female slaves, cities and kingdoms who built both towers of human heads and minarets of surpassing beauty. Borrowing the game of chess from India, and typically developing his own rules, this harsh predator was lame and mutilated – but far from crippled.
THE HEAD TOWERS: TAMERLANE AND THE POET HAFIZ
As a teenager in the 1350s, Timur, son of the chieftain of the Barlas tribe of Turko-Mongols, born at Kesh (Shahrisabz near Samarkand), was raiding a neighbour’s village when a shepherd shot him with arrows that pierced his leg and hand. He lost two fingers, his arm was damaged and his limp must have been marked, yet these injuries neither inhibited his riding or marksmanship nor dampened his astonishing confidence. At forty, tall with a huge head, reddish hair and barrel chest, his encompassing charisma had allowed him to master the chaotic rivalries of the Golden khanates and build a coalition of Mongols, Turks and Persians that would soon dominate western Asia. His contemporaries called him Timur the Lame: Tamerlane.
