The World

Tang and Sasan

DEADLY HUNTER, LION OF THE EAST: KHUSRAU’S MEGALOMANIA

Oblivious to revelations in Arabian oases, ultimate victory did not seem inevitable to the Romans. Royal Boar seized Egypt. In 619 Khusrau’s general Shahin advanced through Anatolia as far as Chalcedon, across the Bosphoros from Constantinople. Heraclius considered moving the capital to Carthage, then, meeting Shahin in person, offered to recognize Khusrau as supreme emperor with the ability to appoint Roman rulers. It looked as if Khusrau had won the 600-year World Game between Persia and Rome. In the north-east, the Turks had been defeated by another of his generals, the Armenian prince Smbat Bagration, but they would have their revenge. Khusrau called himself Parviz – the Victorious; world domination was in his grasp. Iranian aristocrats recommended Heraclius’s offer. Khusrau turned it down.

The challenge was how to take Constantinople, its walls almost impregnable. Khusrau negotiated with the Avar khagan, who was rampaging through the Balkans. But in 622 Heraclius envisaged a bold counter-attack. Leaving the Great City well defended, he transported 20,000 men along the Black Sea coast and landed behind Persian lines in eastern Anatolia, where he received a letter from the shah calling himself ‘the deadly hunter, Lion of the East’ and ‘Noblest of the Gods, King and Master of the Whole World’ and mocking Heraclius as a ‘vile and foolish slave of Khusrau’. The words were magniloquent enough to be authentically composed by Khusrau, encamped with his army in Azerbaijan. ‘You say you trust in God. Why then has He delivered to me Caesarea, Jerusalem, Alexandria?’ He suggested Heraclius retire to grow vines in Ctesiphon.

Heraclius turned the disaster of Jerusalem into the first holy war, literally a crusade to regain the True Cross. ‘Our danger,’ he declared, ‘is the harbinger of everlasting life … Let’s sacrifice ourselves to God … Let’s win the crown of the martyrs.’ He marched fast towards Khusrau, surprising him and driving him into an ignominious retreat, then burning the great Zoroastrian shrine of Adur-Gushnasp, vengeance for Jerusalem. Early in 625, Heraclius contacted the Turkish khan, Sipi, nephew of their supreme khagan Tong, to propose an alliance. He manoeuvred brilliantly against the overconfident Persians, ambushing Royal Boar, who fled naked on horseback, leaving behind his gold shield and even his bejewelled sandals.

To the west, Khusrau the Victor now ordered the last battle to conquer the Great City, an endgame of the End of Days. As he had warned Heraclius, ‘Could I not destroy Constantinople?’ Royal Boar advanced to Chalcedon; the Avars and another tribe from the east, the Slavs, arrived on the European side, rowing into the harbour, wheeling up siege engines to the Theodosian Walls. The situation looked desperate. Yet the Romans managed to foil any transfer of Iranians to the European side. As the Persians watched across the Bosphoros, the Avars attacked the walls, but, aided by the Virgin Mary patrolling the ramparts, the Romans repelled them and they withdrew.^*

Far away in Iraq, Heraclius, now in alliance with 40,000 Turks under Sipi, outmanoeuvred three Iranian armies, killing Shahin. Khusrau now feared Royal Boar, ordering his deputy to kill him, but Heraclius intercepted the letter and sent it to the general himself. A secret understanding was reached and Royal Boar set up court in Alexandria. In 627, Heraclius met Sipi at a summit outside Tbilisi and promised the shamanist khan his daughter. Leaving Sipi to besiege Tbilisi, Heraclius galloped towards Ctesiphon.

Panic struck the Persian capital. The shah was blamed. ‘How long shall we fear and tremble before this bloody king? Didn’t many of our brothers perish on countless occasions in thousands by all manner of tortures, some even by drowning, at his command?’ Khusrau ordered all his prisoners to be murdered – the last straw. The Victor had ridden Iranshahr into the dust. His elder son Kavad II betrayed ‘that evil man’ his father, who escaped in disguise but was hunted down. The grandees spat on him; sixteen of his sons were murdered in front of him, then he was shot with arrows. His widow Shirin refused to marry her stepson Kavad and was murdered too. The plague flared again, killing Kavad II – just as Royal Boar arrived to make himself shah. He restored the True Cross to Heraclius, who betrothed his son to Royal Boar’s daughter – a couple who could one day rule the world. But his usurpation was resisted: Royal Boar was assassinated. Two daughters of Khusrau were enthroned, but one was strangled, the other poisoned. In Medina, the Muslims observed the downfall of Persia, ‘where women now rule’, and appreciated the apocalyptic significance as Heraclius celebrated the success of his holy war by bearing the True Cross into Jerusalem. In Ctesiphon, a Sasan prince, grandson of Khusrau and Shirin, the eight-year-old Yazdgard, was installed on the throne in 632 just as the Turks swooped in to destroy Persia.

Yet suddenly the Turks vanished. At the other end of the Eurasian steppe, as Heraclius was joining forces with the Turks and Muhammad was adapting his own concept of holy war, the new emperor of the Tang dynasty was making his own Turkish deal.

The rise of the Tang started with a dangerous rhyme.

TAIZONG AND THE KING OF TIBET

In 614, a poem circulated in China declaring that someone called Li would kill the emperor, who therefore executed thirty-three Li – and, unsurprisingly, one of the few who were not killed considered his position. In 617, Li Yuan, the partly Turkic duke of Yuan, and his second son, the future Taizong (born Li Shimin), decided to rebel not just out of self-preservation but also to fulfil that prophecy of ‘Heaven’s conferment’. ‘If we don’t take what is conferred,’ said the father, ‘calamity will befall us.’

Peasant risings had destroyed the Han but during their rule they had resettled many steppe nomads within the empire, fostering a multi-ethnic empire, while the Indian religion of Buddhism had become popular, coexisting with traditional Chinese beliefs.^*

In 618, Li Yuan, later Gaozu – High Progenitor – of the Tang dynasty, made a deal with the khagan of the Gokturks (Celestial Turks) to give him the cover to seize China. After a decade of wars, he and Taizong had unified the empire. Yet quickly all of this was placed in peril by the fratricidal rivalry of the heir apparent and his brother – both of them opposed to the dynamic Taizong. When the brothers tried to poison him, Taizong accused them of having sex with the emperor’s concubines, knowing that they would be summoned to explain themselves. On their arrival, he shot one brother with his crossbow and beheaded the other. Gaozu, who was fishing, was shocked to be informed that he was now retired and Taizong in charge. China did not practise primogeniture: since emperors were meant to be sages, dynasty was balanced by the selection – by choice or force – of the ablest prince to succeed.

Taizong, aged twenty-six, was both killer and humanitarian, scholar and soldier, brusque, energetic and fiercely intelligent, ice-cold and yet emotional. He had not been raised as heir so he had seen the grit of ordinary life – ‘When I was eighteen,’ he later wrote to his son, ‘I was still living among the people and I knew everything true and false’ – but he was the son of a well-connected, part-Turkic general, educated in Confucian ideals and Taoist ritual, and trained in Turkic archery. He was one of those who defy pigeonholing – a poet and calligrapher who killed his own brother with his own bow. At fifteen he volunteered to fight against the Turks and at eighteen he helped Gaozu plan their coup. Taizong was a conqueror who ruled for twenty-three years, pushing Chinese power as far west as the Han. But it was also he who found the most extraordinary woman of Chinese history, Empress Wu. Between them they would dominate the century.

Taizong was immediately challenged by the Goturk khagan who had forced his father to make embarrassing concessions. Starting in 629, Taizong deployed generous diplomacy, such as exchanging bales of silk for myriads of horses, cunning manipulation, such as ‘using barbarians to control barbarians’, and savage violence. After the Goturk khagan tried to assassinate him, he fought the khaganates of the eastern and western Turks,^* forcing them to recognize him as Tengri Khagan, Heavenly Khan of the Turks, and propelling Tang power back into central Asia. Taizong personified his multi-ethnic ‘empire open to all’, in which Turkic fashions and dances were popular, where elites spoke Turkic as well as Chinese and embraced Turkic equestrian style, women riding horses and men playing polo, where caravans of Bactrian camels bearing Indian pepper, Malay patchouli, aromatic woods from Java and figs from Persia joined Uighurs, Persians and Indians in the markets of his million-strong capitals Chang’an and Luoyang.

Yet each move has its unpredictable consequence. In this case the breaking of the Goturks presented an opportunity for the Tibetans, under a young king called Songtsen Gampo, to extend their mountain kingdom southwards into northern India and eastwards into Szechuan province, an expansion that would one day cost the Tang dear. The son of a murdered chieftain, Songtsen united much of Tibet, sending his minister to India to learn about government, Buddhism and language, and devising a Tibetan script. He married Bhrikuti, believed to be an Indian princess, an incarnation of Tara, a Hindu and Buddhist goddess. When he campaigned against barbarian Tanguts on the Chinese border, he won the attention of the Chinese emperor.

Songtsen requested the greatest recognition an Asian king could receive: a Tang princess. Taizong grandly refused. The Tibetan raided Tang provinces in Szechuan and, once pushed back, Songtsen again sent an envoy. The emperor was not going to give a daughter to such a barbarian. Instead in 640 he found a cousin, created her Princess Wencheng and sent her to marry Songtsen. Later Taizong lent troops to back a Tibetan raid into India – the first Indo-Chinese clash.

Taizong now became fascinated by Buddhism and studied its spread in China. In his Emperor’s Preface to the Sacred Teachings, he tried to reconcile Indian Buddhism and Chinese Tao. When a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang asked permission to embark on a pilgrimage to India, Taizong refused, but in 629 Xuanzang ignored orders and set off on an astonishing journey, almost dying several times, to reach Samarkand and then Afghanistan, where at Bamiyan he admired the giant statues of Buddha before trekking through the Khyber Pass to make a pilgrimage to study and pray at Peshawar and Nalanda. Xuanzang was witnessing an extraordinary conquest of the east, not by armies but by a culture. ‘People of distant places with diverse customs,’ he noticed, ‘generally designate the land they admire as India.’

XUANZANG’S TRAVELS: THE OPENING OF THE INDOSPHERE

Xuanzang was right. An Indic florescence had spread Sanskrit language, Indian art and Brahmin and Buddhist religions right across east Asia from as early as the Bactrian Greek kings, with their Shiva and Krishna coins. The spread of this Indosphere had intensified under the influence of a Hindu dynasty in northern India, the Guptas,^* but their glory was short-lived. It was their downfall, smashed by invading Huns in the 480s, that dispersed their court of priests, missionaries, merchants and artists not just within India but also west to Afghanistan, east to the islands and mainland of south-east Asia and north to Tibet, China and Japan. Now it was Taizong’s contemporary and member of the Pallava family, Narasimhavarman, nicknamed Mahamalla or Great Wrestler, who conquered much of southern India and Sri Lanka. He also built a port at Mahabalipuram, from which merchants and missionaries spread Indic culture through east Asia. His capital at Kanchipuram was visited by Xuanzang.

The Indic culture flowed east and west. In Afghanistan, the Bamiyan Buddhas, seen by Xuanzang, had just been completed. To the east, Khmers and Malays learned Sanskrit as the language of power and sanctity; kings titled themselves in Sanskrit and Tamil. Buddhism arrived first with merchants, and Hinduism followed. The first Sanskrit inscription, found at Vo Canh (Vietnam), was the work of an Indic king from around 250; in 400, parts of Borneo were ruled by a Brahmin raja, Rajendra Mulwarman, who erected pillars inscribed in Sanskrit and boasted of the arrival of Shaivite Brahmins from India. An Indian prince, Kaundinya, was said to have married a Cambodian queen called Soma to found an Indianized kingdom of Funan that ruled much of the south-eastern mainland during the Tang era. Around 717, a Javanese prince named Sanjaya, a Shaivite Brahmin, founded the Mataram raj in Java, based around a devaraja – the cult of the king-god in which the chakravartin was the embodiment of Lord Shiva or Vishnu. Mataram dominated Java for centuries; the Sailendra dynasty embraced Buddhism, and their temples around Yogyakarta, far from India, are among the greatest Indic monuments.

Buddhism now reached Japan. In 552, Korean envoys arrived in Japan bearing a statue of Buddha. A powerful kingdom was developing there, encouraged by contacts with Tang China. The ruling Yamato family claimed descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu in unbroken succession since 660 BC, but this was entirely dynastic myth. The real as opposed to legendary dynasty emerged now in the sixth century AD as the ruling clan in central Japan mediating between the people and the gods: their title tenno literally meant Heaven-Descended, translated as emperor. Heavily inspired by Taizong and Tang, the emperors created a system of court ranks for the aristocracy and an academy to train civil servants, who spoke Chinese, wore Chinese robes and read Chinese poetry. In 587, a semi-mythical emperor’s son, Prince Shotoku, merged Buddhism with the Japanese pantheon.

When Xuanzang returned to Chang’an leading a caravan bearing 500 trunks full of treasures (though an elephant, gift of an Indian ruler, had fallen off a cliff), Taizong said, ‘Welcome back after seventeen years, Xuanzang, but you never asked permission to go.’ Taizong forgave the insubordination and invited him to be his minister. Xuanzang declined. ‘It would be like taking a boat out of water,’ he replied, ‘not only ceasing to be useful but it would just rot away …’ Instead the emperor made the traveller his blood brother and rewarded him with his own monastery (which still stands in Xi’an – the Great Pagoda of the Wild Goose). Buddhist monasteries became wealthy, though Taizong limited their riches. Ideas flowed both ways: in 635, a Christian monk, Rabban Olopun, arrived from Constantinople and was welcomed by Taizong, who explained, ‘Right principles have no invariable location,’ and ordered the building of the first church in China.

Yet Taizong remained a soldier, even into his last years, leading his troops into battle and ordering that his beloved steeds be sculpted for his tomb. He spent his last years trying to subdue the three Korean kingdoms in the east and the western Turks in central Asia. His Turkish wars had saved the new shah Yazdgard from the Turks, little realizing that to the south another nomadic army was gathering.

THE FAMILY OF MUHAMMAD

In 630, Muhammad, Prophet of the Believers of Medina, led his army south against Mecca, where he negotiated with his relatives. The cannibalistic Hind was not impressed, tormenting her husband by crying, ‘Kill this fat greasy bladder of lard.’ Instead Abu Sufyan negotiated a peaceful handover of Mecca.

Muhammad kissed the Kaaba but smashed the idols around it. Abu Sufyan was a pragmatist and later converted. Muhammad needed him: he married his daughter Ramla and hired his son Muawiya as secretary.

Muhammad still ruled from Medina. When delegations arrived to offer submission, he sat on the ground in his mosque with the steadiness and conviction that won so many followers, never claiming to be anything more than the Messenger of God. His humour was dry: once an old woman asked if Allah allowed old women into Paradise. No, he replied. She started to weep, at which he added, ‘He changes them first into nubile virgins.’

Born into a world of family feuds, he knew the strength but also the danger of dynasty. ‘Genealogy is lies,’ he said, but he took immense trouble with an increasingly complex court. The family is important: its fissures still exist in Islam today.

When Khadija died, Muhammad married around thirteen more wives, many of them political alliances. First he married his follower Abu Bakr’s daughter, Aisha: he was in his fifties, she a teenager, but he adored her, his favourite. Two younger wives, widows of fighters killed in battle, joined the household along with a Jewish girl, Rayhana, who had been enslaved after the crushing of her tribe. He had married his beautiful first cousin Zaynab to his adopted son, the ex-slave Zayed; they were unhappy, but Muhammad admired her. When she heard that ‘The Messenger of God is at the door,’ she dressed up and ‘excited the admiration of the Messenger’. His son offered her to him and he finally agreed to marry her. Zaynab was jealous of Aisha. ‘Zaynab was my equal in beauty,’ admitted Aisha, ‘and in the Prophet’s love for her.’

Along with the wives, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima cared for him: married to his cousin Ali, she was the mother of his grandchildren Hussein and Hassan. Moving between their separate houses, the Prophet liked to sit with his wives and joke and discuss life, sometimes remembering Khadija. He loved to play with his grandsons, letting them ride on his back, saying, ‘Oh, what a fine camel you have.’

Yet already there was tension at his court. During the wars against Mecca, Aisha, looking for a lost necklace, became separated from her husband in the desert until rescued by a young man who returned her to the Prophet. She was accused of adultery. The loudest accuser was Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. Aisha was supported by her rival Zaynab and Muhammad ultimately believed Aisha, but this was just the beginning of the feud that still divides the Islamic world.

Heraclius’ concept of holy war had reached Muhammad – Abu Sufyan had actually seen the emperor parade through Jerusalem – and he commandeered it as his jihad. Muhammad offered peace – ‘Invite all to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching,’ he said – but he also advocated war: ‘Kill the idolaters wherever you find them.’ He wrote letters demanding conversion even to the emperor, who sent back a fur coat as a gift; and the Roman governor of Egypt sent back a Coptic girl, Maria, whom he married. Later, in 630, Muhammad sent two columns to raid Syria. One reached Aqaba (Jordan); the other was intercepted by Roman troops and defeated. But they brought back interesting intelligence: Rome was rotten. The spoils of the empires, Persia and Rome, weakened by plague and war, were irresistible. But everything depended on one man, and there was no plan for the succession: who can succeed God’s last prophet? There was only one Messenger of God.

PRUNE THE FORESKINNED ONES WITH YOUR SWORDS! CONQUESTS OF THE MUHAMMAD FAMILY

In 632, Muhammad, by then aged sixty-two, caught a fever. Realizing he was dying, his followers asked where he wanted to be. ‘Aisha,’ he said, so they took him to her and he died in her arms, leaving the elders to choose his veteran companion Abu Bakr as Amr al-Mu’min, Commander of the Believers, later known as khalifa – caliph. But Ali and the family disagreed. The Meccan aristocrats were sceptical, while much of Arabia now broke away under their other prophets. Abu Bakr sent forces under his top paladin, Khalid bin Walid – Sword of Islam – to retake these backsliding provinces. Khalid killed one prince who had converted to Islam so he could marry his beautiful wife. It caused a scandal in Mecca, but in 634 Abu Bakr dispatched Khalid, his other general Amr al-As and Abu Sufyan’s two sons, Yazid and Muawiya, into Syria with 20,000 troops.

To contemporaries – and historians – the Arab invasions seemed astonishing in their speed and span, but only recently the Arab armies of Ghassan and Lakhm had galloped through Palestine and Syria; now it is likely those warriors served a new cause. Plague had culled Roman and Persian cities but had barely touched the desert. The Arabs were fielding armies of 12,000 or more at a time when Heraclius could muster only 5,000. They travelled fast on camels, leading their horses. Then for battle they transferred to horseback.

Heraclius, exhausted by two decades of warfare, took command behind the lines as the Arabs besieged Roman Damascus, negotiating its surrender just as the caliph died and was replaced by Omar. Hulking and indomitable, a wrestler in his youth, Omar, who wore plain robes and brandished a whip, started to compile the Quran and Hadith of the Prophet. An austere and prudish man, he devised restrictions on women never mentioned by Muhammad, and had his own son thrashed to death for corruption. He loathed the freebooting swagger of Khalid, whom he recalled to Mecca. ‘Take your booty out of your arsehole!’ he growled. Khalid surrendered his treasure and was dispatched back to Syria.

Heraclius ordered his brother Theodoros to stop the Arabs. At Yarmuk, south of Golan, the two evenly matched armies faced each other. The cannibal poetess of Arabia, Hind, was there to encourage her two sons, crying, ‘Go on! Prune the Foreskinned Ones with your swords!’

Khalid told his men, ‘This is one of God’s battles!’ His cavalry trapped the Romans between rocks and rivers, then cut them up, aided by the defection of their Christian Arab allies. Theodoros was killed.

Amid the booty, the Arabs received another gift from the Romans: plague. Yazid, first governor of Syria, died of it, handing over Damascus to his brother Muawiya. The cities of Homs, Tyre and Caesarea negotiated their surrender in return for promises of freedom of Christian worship and payment of jizyah, the tax for People of the Book.

Omar sent Khalid raiding into Persia where Shah Yazdgard struggled to resist as the Arabs galloped right up to the wall of Ctesiphon–Seleucia, that complex of canals and palaces, the fruit of centuries of civilization, that the raiders called the Cities. When Yazdgard mobilized his army with its colossal tiger banner, his armoured steeds and elephants, he drove off one Arab army, but in 636, at Qadisiyya and then Jalula, his forces were defeated. The Arabs besieged Yazdgard in the Cities until their fall was imminent, whereupon he fled eastwards, leaving the Bedouin to enjoy their astonishing good fortune. They prayed in the splendid iwan of Khusrau amid statues of Sassanian monarchs. Unlike the Persians with their gold-trimmed armour and caparisoned horses, the Arabs were rough riders who wore robes of camel blanket belted with reeds, bandannas made of a camel’s girth rope, hair sticking up like ‘goat horns’. They rode stumpy horses and bore a shield ‘like a thick round loaf of bread’ together with bows and lances, but their one indulgence was their saif, not the curved scimitars of legend but straight, polished and much-loved weapons about which they wrote poems and sang songs. The poet Amir ibn al-Tufayl had spoken of ‘swords that reap the necks, keen and sharp of edge, kept carefully in sheaths until the time of need’. Even more exciting were the spoils. The Arabs were so bewildered by Khusrau’s carpet, the Shah’s Spring, that they snipped it into pieces; used expensive camphor scent as cooking salt; and harvested a bounty of loot – cash, treasures and hundreds of thousands of slaves. A small campaign in Sistan by itself yielded 40,000 slaves. At first the Arabs were not keen on converting the conquered peoples for then they would have to be freed, but gradually the slaves did convert, becoming the mawla, freedmen of their Arab patrons.

In 638, Arab armies converged on Jerusalem with its special eschatological aura that Muhammad had often cited: ‘The Hour has drawn nigh!’ and it would take place in Jerusalem. The patriarch of the Holy City refused to surrender to anyone but the Commander, so Omar rode up on a mule and negotiated the covenant, witnessed by Muawiya, that protected Christian worship. Then Omar entered the city, walking up to the Temple Mount where, shown the location of the Jewish Temple by a Jewish Believer, he prayed, setting up an open-air mosque. But after hearing that Khalid had enjoyed a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy where poets had sung of his exploits, he sacked the Sword of Islam.

When Omar returned to Mecca, he left Muhammad’s brother-in-law and secretary Muawiya in charge of Syria, where the population was overwhelmingly Christian.

Christian Arabs fought for the Muslims, as did Jews; and even Persian Zoroastrians were accepted in the form of a corps of cataphract cavalry. In Jerusalem, Jews were allowed to pray with Muslims at the mosque on the Temple Mount for many decades, while in Damascus Christians and Muslims prayed together in the Church of St John (today’s Umayyad Mosque). Monophysite and Nestorian Christians persecuted by Heraclius probably regarded the Arabs as uncouth ruffians but fellow monotheists.

In 640, Omar ordered Amr al-As to invade Egypt. When Alexandria fell, it marked the end of nine centuries of Graeco-Roman culture and three of Christianity. The Arabs then rode on westwards across north Africa. Some 150,000 Arabs had conquered much of west Asia, fanning out across the world.^*

Even though there were already lethal divisions in the Muhammad family, soon to break out into war, Commander Omar was not finished. Heraclius died in 641, and it could only be a matter of time before Constantinople too fell, but first Omar sent more troops to catch Shah Yazdgard, who was chased, now alone and abandoned, to a remote mill near Merv (Turkmenistan), where he spent the night in a heap of straw until the mill owner returned and killed him, tossing him into the pond. But the last of the Sassanian shahs had a final idea that could change everything: he dispatched his son Peroz to call in the Chinese.^*

The next half-century of Chinese power belonged to women.

In 637, as Arab armies swept into eastern Persia and northern Africa, Emperor Taizong lost his beloved wife. To cheer up the emperor, the Inner Palace eunuchs recruited new concubines. Taizong noticed the ‘enticing beauty’ of a fourteen-year-old girl, who was the well-educated daughter of a Tang official and merchant, related through her mother to the recent emperors. Nicknaming her the ‘enchanting Miss Wu’, Taizong enrolled her as a concubine of the sixth rank, a talent.^* When Wu’s mother burst into tears, the precocious daughter replied, ‘How could looking upon the Son of Heaven be anything but a blessing! Why weep like a child?’ Sexual magnetism, fearless intelligence, cultured wit and a sense of adventure may have made her unusual in the Inner Court, where a strict hierarchy could be overturned by a beguiling glance. There, Wu was educated by eunuchs and learned the arts of cosmetics – eyebrows were plucked and embellished with ‘moth antennae’, cinnabar gloss applied to lips, faced whitened with lead oxide.

The emperor rarely visited, but one day when she was attending him, Wu cleverly engaged him on his favourite subject. ‘Emperor Taizong had a horse named Lion Stallion,’ she remembered later, ‘who was so big and powerful that no one could mount him.’ She offered to break in Lion Stallion. ‘I only need three things to break him,’ she said. ‘An iron whip, an iron hammer and a sharp dagger. I will whip him with the whip. If he doesn’t submit, I’ll hit his head with the hammer. If he still doesn’t submit, I’ll cut his throat with the dagger.’

‘Do you really believe,’ replied Taizong suggestively, praising her boldness, ‘that you’re qualified to stain my dagger?’ This was probably when the emperor had sex with her, but by the early 640s he was struggling with bad health and insubordinate sons. The crown prince turned out to be mad, two more princes planned to assassinate him; as heir Taizong chose his reticent ninth son, Li Zhi, the future Gaozong. Seeking diversion in a disastrous campaign to conquer Korea, Taizong found power draining away. His hair turning white with the strain, Gaozong sat by Taizong’s bed while Wu waited on the crown prince, four years her junior, who was increasingly attracted to her. But it was a sensitive situation since technically she was a stepmother and any liaison incestuous. Nonetheless they started an affair.

ENCHANTING WU: THE EMPRESS KILLED MY BABY

In 649, Taizong died at the age of fifty-one. Young Emperor Gaozong sent all his father’s girls to the Buddhist convent for ‘purification’, their heads shaven and wearing sackcloth, before they would emerge for marriage and normal life. After a year Gaozong visited them to honour his father and saw Wu. The chemistry was reactivated, and both of them started to weep. He allowed her to grow her hair while she wrote a sensuous poem that encouraged his frequent visits:

I look upon your disc of jade and my thoughts scatter in disarray

As haggard from grief sundered and separate I so keenly miss my Sovereign.

If you don’t believe this endless litany of tears

Then open my chest and examine my tear-stained pomegranate red dress.

Gaozong was married to Empress Wang, who made the mistake of encouraging his passion to distract him from another mistress, Consort Xiao. But, as so often, the cure was lethal. Moving back into the Inner Palace, Wu dazzled the emperor and charmed the maids, eunuchs and concubines who became her devoted agents, while the anxious Empress Wang, who was childless, adopted another girl’s son to appoint as crown prince, hoping to stop the rise of this gorgeous upstart. After a son, Wu had a daughter whom the empress liked to dandle on her knee. In 654, the empress played with the baby; when she left, Wu suffocated her own daughter and then, when the emperor visited, she revealed in an agony of grief the blue-faced child, blaming Empress Wang. Gaozong questioned the staff, all of whom replied that ‘the Empress’ was responsible. Gaozong cried, ‘The Empress has murdered my baby!’ Wu’s career was recorded after her death by hostile historians, but even if she did not murder her own daughter, she used the death to destroy Gaozong’s relationship with his wife, whose barrenness was a tragedy in a dynastic court when her rival would deliver six children.

Empress Wang resorted to magic to get pregnant, which allowed Wu, informed by her spies, to accuse the wife of illegal witchcraft. Gaozong proposed to divorce Wang and marry Wu, a move that was opposed by veteran ministers who cited her intimacy with the dead emperor. But in 655 Empress Wang and Consort Xiao were both found guilty of sorcery and imprisoned in a turret. Wu, now thirty-one, became empress consort and her eldest son Li Hong was appointed crown prince. But one day, passing the tower where his ex-wife and ex-consort were imprisoned, Gaozong was touched by their cries. This provoked Wu to have them flogged, dismembered alive then drowned in a flagon of wine with the words, ‘Now you crones can get drunk to your marrow!’

Gaozong was devoted to Wu, who gave birth to a last daughter, the Taiping Princess, at the age of forty. While always protecting her power with ingenious energy and seeking to destroy her enemies, never forgetting a slight, she ruled in partnership with the emperor, who appreciated her acumen. Wu’s power reflected the way forms of family shaped east and central Asia: women among nomadic peoples enjoyed more freedom and authority than those in sedentary states. Yet no emperor, especially not Gaozong, could fill the gap left by Taizong and the couple struggled to hold the empire together.

Gaozong suffered a stroke early in his long reign, but he recovered and Wu shared much of the work with him – they were nicknamed the Two Sages. She refused to promote her own family, helping to organize a campaign against Korea, another to defeat the Turks, initiating the use of meritocratic examinations for the civil service, fostering a bureaucracy controlled by the monarch rather than a hereditary elite and arranging the complex ritual spectacular of the Feng and Shan sacrifices at Mount Tai. They celebrated their double act by adopting the Taoist titles of Celestial Emperor and Empress. Wu revered Buddhism and Taoism, though she was, like everyone at that time, extremely superstitious. Her patronage of a magician was denounced to the emperor by a eunuch. Gaozong consulted his veteran chancellor Shangguan Yi, who advised, ‘The empress has no control of herself, and the entire empire is dissatisfied with her. Please depose her.’ Gaozong was about to sign this edict when the empress’s spies informed her and she arrived just in time. The emperor blamed Shangguan Yi, who, accused by the empress of planning to assassinate Gaozong, was then executed together with his son. Yet much later the chancellor’s granddaughter would play a special role with Wu.

Wu understood her husband’s sexual appetites. She first imported her widowed sister as mistress (the emperor nicknamed her Beauty of State and she bore him a son); then on her death, the sister’s daughter, Wu’s niece the Lady of Wei became imperial paramour – too successfully. Ever vigilant, Wu had her niece poisoned.

After the crown prince died of tuberculosis (some historians claim Wu killed him too), Gaozong promoted their son, Li Xian. But here there was a problem. As the emperor weakened, Li Xian planned to remove his mother from power. The coldness between them became icier. The boy had discovered a secret. He was not really her son at all but her late sister’s bastard, born in secret then adopted by her. The emperor did not improve matters when he announced that his wife and son would be joint heirs. The couple consulted a mystic who warned that Xian was unsuitable. Xian heard this and had the mystic murdered. He was duly exiled and his brother Li Zhe became crown prince in his stead. With famines, earthquakes and epidemics suggesting that the Mandate of Heaven was in doubt, Gaozong deteriorated, dying in 683. As Wu laid her plans, they received reports from Syria of a new monarch named Mo-yi: the opening of the age of Arab dynasties.

* Around 650, the greatest city in the Americas, Teotihuacan, was systematically burned in a revolution of the ordinary people. It was not a foreign invasion: invaders usually destroy homes and the infrastructure of ordinary people but keep the monuments. Here it was the opposite: palaces and temples were burned. In the resulting vacuum, the much smaller city of Tula, capital of the Toltecs, and the Maya cities in Yucatán continued to thrive.

* The first evidence of the fusion of Indic and Chinese culture, mixed with Persian Zoroastrianism, is found in the beautiful and colourful frescoes of the Kizil Caves at Turfan in Xinjiang, dated between 300 and 400.

* In the Tarim Basin, today’s Xinjiang, Taizong conquered the Tocharian peoples, who had partly intermarried with the Uighurs, but live for us vividly because of the love poems they left behind. ‘A thousand years, you will tell our story,’ reads one. ‘There was no human dearer to me than you and likewise hereafter there’ll be no one dearer to you than me. Your love, your affection, my jubilant song rises up. I will live with one love for the whole of my life …’

* The dynasty had been founded by Gupta, maharaja of a sliver of Uttar Pradesh. His grandson Chandragupta I – ruling at the same time as Constantine the Great – conquered enough territory in north-eastern India, by marriage and war, to call himself Maharajadhiraja – great king of kings. His grandson Chandragupta II, a contemporary of Julian, conquered much of northern India, from Afghanistan to Bengal and the Himalayas, ruling in splendour from Pataliputra, the personification of the ideal Brahmin emperor alias Vikramaditya (Sun of Courage). He oversaw a golden age of writers – the Navaratnas (Nine Jewels), led by the playwright Kalidasa. He promoted the god Vishnu as the supreme deity, along with his avatars, but he also built Buddhist shrines.

* Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas was born in Mecca but his five sons died in places as far-flung as Medina, Syria, Tunisia and Samarkand, where Qutham ibn al-Abbas became a mystical saint known as the Living King, his tomb the centre of a sacred complex that became the location for the tomb of the conqueror Tamerlane and is still revered.

* In Chang’an, the emperor refused to intervene against the Arabs, but he gave asylum to the Sassanians, appointing Peroz, the last shah, as head of a Persian Area Command which he controlled for a decade until the Muslim advance led him to retreat to the Chinese capital, where Emperor Gaozong gave him the title Awe-Inspiring General of the Left Guards. Peroz died in 680.

* At the top was the empress, then four consorts, nine concubines and beneath them nine ladies of handsome fairness, nine beauties and nine talents, including Miss Wu. Beneath her were the ladies of the precious bevy, secondary concubines and selected ladies, 27 of each – 122 in total. No men apart from the emperor and his eunuchs, who grew rich selling luxuries such as Boreal camphor and Malayan patchouli to the girls, enjoyed access. The Confucian scholar-bureaucrats who wrote the histories of China were misogynists who presented female potentates as sex-crazed megalomaniacs, a chauvinism that must be taken into account; equally, sexual attraction was one way that women won political power in dynastic monarchies.