The World полностью

* The sultan, Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq, was the grandson of Muhammad bin Tughluq, who had been visited by Ibn Battuta.

* Ibn Khaldun had seen a lot since the Mortality: he served the kings of Fez, Tunis and Granada as vizier, was imprisoned in palace conspiracies and was attacked and robbed by thieves before joining the Mamluk court in Cairo. He understood the importance and perils of history: his brother Yahya, a fellow historian, was assassinated on orders of a rival historian (a cautionary tale of the perils of literary rivalry!). But he had finished his world history. He was fascinated by dynasties, arguing that family power initially fortified the essential asabiyya – social cohesion – that held together any society, but ‘the term of life of a dynasty does not normally exceed three generations’ because the asabiyya was lost. His analysis of slavery reveals the Arab attitude to race: ‘The only people who accept slavery are the blacks owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage.’

* The size of these armies put the tiny scale of the Anglo-French war in perspective. At the battles of Poitiers and Agincourt, fifteen years later, the English armies of the Black Prince and Henry V numbered around 6,000.

* In a huge square, the Registan, Tamerlane was constructing the three-domed Bibi Khanum Mosque in honour of his empress Khanum Saray, as well as palaces and a gorgeously simple turquoise-domed tomb, the Gur Amir, for his favourite grandson Muhammad Shah. Perhaps he built the mosque too fast; parts of it collapsed in an earthquake, but some of it still stands.

* Tamerlane had planned to be buried with Jahangir in his home town of Kesh, but instead he rested in the Persian-style octahedral Gur Amir with its azure dome in Samarkand beside his grandson Muhammad Shah. Legend claimed that if Tamerlane’s grave was disturbed, a more terrible conqueror would arise. In 19 June 1941, on Stalin’s orders, the Soviet archaeologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened the grave – identifying the leg fracture of Tamerlane and using the skull to recreate his face, thus enabling us to see what he looked like. Three days later Hitler invaded Russia.

* If correct, the fleet was comparable in numbers to the Spanish Armada or the combined British, French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. But in vessel size these were ‘the largest wooden ships ever seen in the world’, writes Edward L. Dreyer, dwarfing anything in the west, not least Columbus’ tiny vessels ninety years later. It is possible there was exaggeration in both numbers and size of the ships. Zheng He’s voyages were not Yongle’s only expeditions: he also sent another trusted eunuch Yishiha to sail down the Amur River, establishing Ming power in today’s Siberia (Russia).

* The Hindu spice empire of Majapahit was breaking up. On Borneo, three brothers created the spice-trading city state of Brunei, where they welcomed an Arab adventurer, Sharif Ali, a Hashemite from Mecca, who married into the family and succeeded to the throne, building a thalassocratic empire that, survives today as an oil-rich monarchy, still ruled by his dynasty. The raja of Singapore, also a convert to Islam, founded his Malacca sultanate that now took over the spice trade. This was the world that would be encountered by the Europeans when they arrived in the east.

* In Ethiopia, a Christian emperor Yeshaq (Isaac) was fighting Islamic and Jewish warlords. His ancestor Yekuno Amlak had seized the throne in 1270, claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and more plausibly from the last kings of Axum. The Solomonic grandeur lent much needed biblical glamour to a dynasty that ruled parts of Ethiopia, occasionally united under one ruler, until 1974. These Christian emperors – negus negust (king of kings) – now found themselves under aggressive attack by Islamic rulers backed by the Mamluks of Cairo. In the north, a Jewish kingdom, known as the Gideonites as their kings were often named Gidewon, ruled the Simien Mountains, the highest in the Horn of Africa, and the vicinity. The Gideonites defied Emperor Yeshaq, who was killed fighting the sultan of Adal.

* The real name of the kingdom is unknown. Zimbabwe simply means ‘stone buildings’; the area has other smaller zimbabwes – one survives at Bambusi.

* The same family also founded another kingdom, Oyo, that was closely connected to Benin by familial intimacy and vicious rivalry that endured into the nineteenth century. Oyo was now the leading power; Benin’s expansion took longer. Still nominally ruled by branches of the family, their dynasties still reign in republican Nigeria.