The World

The Ghanas and the Fatimiyya

AFRICAN POWER: GHANA OF WAGADU AND THE MASTER OF CAIRO

It started deep in the desert. In 905, when Abd al-Rahman III was a boy, Said bin Husain, at the age of thirty-five, proclaimed himself the Mahdi – the chosen one, God’s representative on earth, in the remote Moroccan oasis of Sijilmasa where recently converted Berber tribes had already been convinced of his sanctity by secret missionaries. They were part of a clandestine Shiite network of Dawa – the Calling – who from Yemen to the Atlantic preached the restoration of the dynasty of Ali and Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. Said claimed this descent and his family called themselves the House al-Fatimiyya. Said’s family had been hunted and killed by the caliphs of Baghdad, but he himself, disguised as a merchant, had escaped with his son. Though pursued by assassins, he reached Morocco, where he adopted the title al-Mahdi Billah and launched his jihad, aiming to march all the way to Iraq and destroy the heretical caliphate.^*

It seemed unlikely that this would ever happen when al-Mahdi took command of a tiny posse of Berbers in Sijilmasa, gateway to the most powerful African kingdom, Wagadu, ruled by the Soninke ghanas – kings – who commanded an army of 200,000. In their capital Koumbi Saleh in Mauritania, ‘the ghana sits in audience … in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials,’ wrote an Arab visitor, al-Bakri, a little later. ‘Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the kings of his country wearing splendid garments, their hair plaited with gold.’ Gold was everywhere: even the ghana’s guard dogs had ‘collars of gold and silver studded with a number of balls of the same metals’. When ghanas died they were buried with treasures and sacrificed servants; such tombs were found in the Niger River area. Western and eastern Africa were not unknown before the Europeans arrived. In fact Afro-Asia was a single world linked by tenuous but ancient caravan and shipping routes across the desert and seas to the Maghreb, Spain, Egypt and the Indian Ocean. Across the Sahara, the ghanas traded ivory, copper, bronze and gold from Barmaka (today’s Ghana) and bronze from Igbo-Ukwu (Nigeria), where craftsmen produced bronzes of snakes, birds and vessels set with beads imported from afar: the ghanas’ treasure house contained 100,000 glass and carnelian beads from Egypt and India. Wagadu was just the biggest of the west African realms – Gao, Timbuktu and Kanem-Bornu – that traded with the north. Two-thirds of European gold came from west Africa, and so probably did the lions in Abd al-Rahman’s menagerie.

The caravans were manned by Berber cameleteers who were often Muslim, so that Islam flowed like the salt from the north into the land of gold. Islam had reached Wagadu: Koumbi Saleh was divided into two towns, one mainly Muslim, the other following Soninke pagan religions, and the ghanas practised a hybrid of both. Al-Bakri witnessed human sacrifices of servants, intoxicated with ‘fermented drinks’, to accompany dead kings.

To the east, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, Arab traders in ivory, spices and slaves already traded in Zanj – east Africa – and they too brought Islam with them. The link between Arabia and Africa was as ancient as Solomon and Sheba. The Arabs traded with the Bantu-speaking Africans, gradually developing a new hybrid language, Swahili, from the Arabic al-Sahel – the Coast. In Sudan (from the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan – Land of the Blacks) and Ethiopia (which the Arabs called al-Habasha – Abyssinia), the old Christian kingdom of Axum was disintegrating.^* Wars and raids produced prisoners who were traded to the Swahili coast where Gulf traders – the sons of Omanis and Persians married to local African women – founded a port, Kilwa, the first of the Swahili trading cities. Voyages went both ways across the Indian Ocean: bananas that originated in south-east Asia arrived in these ships and were planted in Africa to become a quintessentially African crop, spread by the Bantu as they moved southwards. Kilwan sailors crisscrossed the Indian Ocean. The first outsiders to reach Australia were not Europeans (the Dutch landed there in 1606), but African sailors from Kilwa, as evidenced by the discovery of copper Kilwan coins, inscribed in Arabic with the name of an amir of Kilwa, dug up on Marchinbar Island, Northern Territory. Asians had travelled east and west much earlier: Javanese and Malays had probably reached Australia, as suggested by two Javanese inscriptions.

Indians, Javanese, Malays and Polynesians frequently sailed to Africa. Around 400, Malay sailors started colonizing Madagascar, the last major landmass, other than Iceland and New Zealand, to be settled.^* In 945, according to an Arab history, a Javanese–Malay fleet from Mataram/Srivijaya landed on the Swahili coast to seize ivory, furs and black slaves, but failed to seize whichever city they coveted.

The Arab slave traders, based in the Swahili cities from Mogadishu (Somalia) and Zanzibar (Tanzania) to Sofala (Mozambique), ruled by African-Arab merchant dynasties, bought slaves from Africans in the hinterland and traded them with the Indic and Arab worlds as far as Mataram. Medieval slavery was based on religion: Islam technically banned the enslavement of Muslims, but most east and central Africans were pagan, ripe for enslavement. That did not mean the Arabs who were now penetrating Africa were not racist: their guides to slavery shows their enjoyment of racist stereotyping.^* The tales of Buzurg in the Persian Gulf recount how the African king of Sofala traded ‘man-eating Zanj’ slaves (average price 20–30 dinars) with Omani traders, until he was captured himself and traded to Oman, then Cairo, before converting to Islam and returning to retake his throne. We have no idea of the numbers, but it is likely many millions of Africans were enslaved.^*

Back in north-west Africa, in Sijilmasa, the Mahdi’s jihad had almost ended before it started. In 910, the local sheikh arrested him, but his agents stormed the jail. On his liberation, riding on a wave of religious fervour, flourishing the white banners of House al-Fatimiyya, he and his Berbers galloped eastwards to seize Qairawan (Tunisia), founded a new capital, al-Mahdiya, and then advanced on Egypt. Soon declared caliph, his flotillas, commanded by his son al-Qaim, captured Sicily and raided Calabria, even Genoa. Al-Qaim reached Alexandria, but was beaten back by the ruler of independent Egypt, a talented Nubian eunuch.

AL -MISK’S PERFUMES, JAWAR’S FISH AND THE JEWISH VIZIER: THE HOUSE OF FATIMIYYA

Abd al-Misk Kafur, known as the Master, had been captured somewhere in east Africa, enslaved and castrated, then sold to a Turkic general, the Ikhshid (viceroy), who had ruled Egypt as an autonomous realm when the caliphs in Baghdad lost control of their empire. The Ikhshid noticed that while the other slaves rushed to stare at wild animals that arrived from inner Africa, Kafur never took his eyes off his master. Said to be ugly and deformed but sensitive and intelligent, he was such a connoisseur of perfume that he was named after two of them: black musk and white camphor. On his deathbed, the Ikhshid advised his son to employ Kafur as vizier, and ultimately he became the ruler in his own right: the Master.

Kafur was a talented general and artistic patron, but he fell out with the poet al-Mutanabbi (who mocked him when Kafur did not appoint him minister).^* Kafur protected Christians and Jews, including his treasurer Yakub ibn Killis, a Jew who converted to Islam. But when Ibn Killis lost out in a court intrigue, he fled to the Fatimiyya, joining the talented, cosmopolitan entourage of Caliph al-Muizz. Al-Muizz ordered his paladin, Jawar the Slav, a blond freedman enslaved in eastern Europe who had been given to al-Muizz’s father, to crush all resistance as far as the Atlantic. Jawar sent a tank of fish to al-Muizz to demonstrate the job was done. As long as Kafur lived, Egypt would not fall, but on his death it lay open. In 969, Jawar stormed into Egypt, where he and al-Muizz^* founded a new city that they called the Conqueror, al-Qahirah – Cairo.

Egypt was just a step towards the liquidation of the godless usurpers of Baghdad and the infidels of Constantinople. Jawar advanced into Syria, but was thrown back. Ibn Killis, the Jewish vizier, was reappointed by al-Muizz’s son al-Aziz, ‘tall, with red hair and blue eyes’ – his mother was al-Muizz’s favourite slave singer Durzan, nicknamed the Tweeter. Al-Aziz’s partnership with Ibn Killis, whom he called Yakub, was almost familial; there were rows, and Ibn Killis was fined and fired but always reappointed. Ibn Killis was so rich that he had his own guards of 4,000 male slaves, a harem of 5,000 and built a mosque and university named al-Azhar (the Shiites called Fatima al-Zahra – the Luminous).

The dynasty ruled magnificently, creating a court designed to impress, projected by resplendent dress and spectacular processions. Cairo, initially just a few palaces and the al-Azhar mosque and university, only gradually became the capital, while Fustat and Alexandria thrived on the trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Ibn Killis was the first of a line of Jewish converts who served as viziers. Egyptian Jews were a powerful and numerous community, led by the family of Rais al-Yahud – chief of the Jews, appointed by the caliphs – who served as royal doctors as well as advisers. Families of Jewish merchants of Fustat traded across a tricontinental Afro-Eurasian span from Egypt to Seville, Sijilmasa to Samarkand to Constantinople, al-Mahdiya to Kyiv, India and China. Some 400,000 documents, found in the Genizah^* of Fustat’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, reveal a web of Jewish family businesses at the centre of an almost global market. Jewish as well as Coptic merchants became vastly rich.

Loathing the Sunni Abbasiya even more than the Christians, al-Muizz and Ibn Killis invaded Syria, capturing Jerusalem and Damascus, bringing them to the Roman border. But here Ibn Killis encountered the ferocious energy of Basil the Bulgar Slayer. The Shiites so hated the Sunnis that in 987 the vizier signed a truce with Roman Emperor Basil II to allow him to destroy Baghdad. The Round City temporarily fell to the Shia, but not for long.

When Ibn Killis was ailing, al-Aziz cried, ‘O Yakub! If you’d recover, I’d sacrifice my son.’ In 991, Ibn Killis died and al-Aziz turned his jihad against Constantinople’s ally Aleppo. In April 995, Basil halted his advance. In 996, al-Aziz, now forty, collapsed near the front and summoned his eleven-year-old son al-Hakim. The boy recalled, ‘I kissed him, and he pressed me to his bosom, exclaiming: “How I grieve for you … beloved of my heart. Go and play; I’m fine.”’ Al-Hakim was climbing a sycamore when he heard his father’s wasita (minister), a eunuch called Barjawan, shouting, ‘Come down, my boy.’

‘When I descended,’ recalled al-Hakim, ‘he [Barjawan] placed on my head the turban adorned with jewels, kissed the ground before me, and said: “Hail to the Commander of the Believers.” The people kissed the ground before me.’ As he followed his father’s cortège Hakim’s inheritance of sacred omnipotence in a time of feverish millenarian expectation was enough to go to a sensitive boy’s head.

THE CALIGULA OF CAIRO, THE LADY OF POWER AND THE BULGAR BLINDER

Al-Hakim was handsome, strapping and blond, with blue gold-flecked eyes, the son of a Christian concubine. While the boy caliph pursued his studies and adventures in the stews of Cairo, Barjawan, a dandyish connoisseur who owned 1,000 pairs of ornate trousers and cummerbunds, restored order in the empire. They pursued their Syrian war, but in 999 Emperor Basil himself hit back furiously as far as Baalbek (Lebanon), causing a crisis in Cairo. Turkic and Berber troops clashed in the streets in an atmosphere of apocalyptic turbulence, intensified by the approach of the 400th anniversary of Muhammad’s journey to Medina and the resurgence of Christian power in the person of Basil, who was fortunately diverted to Georgia. Al-Hakim negotiated a truce with Basil, who was finally free to strike north. A new Bulgar Caesar, Samuel, had exploited Basil’s Arab wars to re-establish a kingdom from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Now in 1000, Basil stormed into Bulgaria, the start of fourteen atrocious years that culminated in 1014 with victory at Kleidion, where the emperor blinded ninety-nine out of every hundred of his 15,000 prisoners, with each unit led home by their solitary one-eyed guide – a sight that so horrified Samuel that he died of a stroke. There is no reason to doubt the atrocity. Basil had demolished the Bulgar state, re-establishing his empire as an Eurasian power. After a reign of forty-nine years – the longest of any Roman emperor east or west – the titanic but terrifying Bulgar Slayer, died aged sixty-six, hand on sword, planning to reconquer Italy.

Basil’s focus on the Balkans allowed the fourteen-year-old Caliph al-Hakim to concentrate on his own power and salvation. He had promoted Barjawan to vizier, but the eunuch gave him orders and, he heard, nicknamed him the Lizard. Al-Hakim ordered another eunuch to stab Barjawan to death, appeasing the alarmed crowds by claiming that he was a traitor. But Barjawan’s death unleashed more skirmishes between Berber and Turkic troops in Cairo, while the caliph of Baghdad mocked al-Hakim as half-Christian and the Fatimiyya as semi-Jews unrelated to Muhammad.

Al-Hakim was wildly inconsistent, founding a Dar al-Ilm – House of Knowledge – similar to al-Mamun’s House of Wisdom – where not only Ismaili theology but astronomy and philosophy were taught in sessions that he himself often attended. But once Barjawan was gone al-Hakim seems to have believed that tolerance had displeased God. In 1004, noticing rich Christian caravans setting off for Jerusalem, he started executing Christians and converting churches into mosques. On hearing of the frenzied Christian rite of the Holy Fire that took place every Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he banned Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, and wine drinking as well. Then he ordered that Jews and Christians wear distinguishing clothing, a Jew a wooden cow-yoke (and in the baths a cowbell) and Christians a cross. Jews and Christians were ordered to convert or die; many pretended to convert.

Next, in 1009, al-Hakim ordered the Jerusalem basilica of Jesus’ Sepulchre, built by Constantine the Great, to be demolished ‘stone by stone’ – to the horror of Christendom, which began to take a new interest in the Holy City. In Rome, where Pope Sergius IV (nicknamed the Pig’s Mouth either for his good looks or for his greed) and his master John Crescentius proposed an expedition to save Jerusalem. Nothing came of it, but it was the first flicker of a movement that would change the world.

In 1027, Pope John XIX, descendant of Marozia,^* crowned a new German king, Conrad II, as Roman emperor, a coronation attended by King Canute of Denmark and England. The Vikings were no longer just traders and raiders: in Kyiv and Normandy, and now England, Iceland and America, they were settlers and empire builders too.

THE BLUETOOTHS TAKE ENGLAND: UNREADY, IRONSIDE, FORKBEARD AND HAREFOOT

In 1013, Canute’s father Sweyn Forkbeard intensified his raids on a prosperous England, almost united by the family of Alfred the Great. Alfred’s grandson Aethelstan had seized York and Northumbria. In 927 he received the submission of the Scottish and Welsh monarchs of Alba, Strathclyde and Deheubarth, declaring himself King of All Britain, basileus and imperator – the invention of English independence.^*

Needing money to pay off Danish raiders and build ships to repel them, Aethelstan and his family were among the first in Europe to collect an efficient tax on agriculture. But now that the Danes were back in force, King Aethelred the Unready^* was forced to pay Danegeld to new raiders: the Bluetooth family, founded a century earlier by a warlord, Old Gorm, who ruled Jelling in Denmark, a realm expanded by his son Harold Bluetooth (probably named after the pagan fashion for colouring teeth).^* Bluetooth announced his conversion to Christianity in runic inscriptions on the Jelling Stones, but struggled over thirty years to control Jutland and southern Norway. In 986, his son Sweyn Forkbeard deposed Bluetooth, seized Denmark and Norway and started raiding Britain.

On St Brice’s Day 1002 after four years of Forkbeardish raids, Aethelred ordered that ‘All the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amid the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination,’ as he put it a royal charter. In a day of the long knives, Anglo-Saxons murdered Danes, burning many in an Oxford church where thirty-four skeletons, charred and butchered, have been unearthed. Among them was Forkbeard’s own sister Gunhilde, married to a Danish lord at Aethelred’s court. Forkbeard planned revenge, though he had rivals for the English prize: a Danish warlord Thorkel raided on his own account and after a massive tribute payment joined Aethelred.

In 1013 Forkbeard invaded in force and defeated Aethelred, who accompanied by his son Edward fled to Normandy. There he was given asylum by Rollo’s descendant Duke Robert. But it all depended on Forkbeard. When he suddenly died, it all fell apart.

His younger son, the twenty-year-old Canute, ‘exceptionally tall and strong, handsomest of men, all except for his nose, thin and rather hooked’, took control of Norway, then raised a coalition of Scandinavians and Poles, lent by his cousin Bolesław, duke of Poland, which landed at Sandwich in Kent. He devastated England. Canute was joined by an English warlord, Godwin, who became his hatchet man, rewarded with the earldom of Wessex. Canute agreed to divide England with Aethelred’s son Edmund Ironside of Wessex until his death, an occurrence that the Dane surely accelerated: Ironside was murdered defecating in his privy – always a vulnerable moment.

In 1017, Canute was crowned king of England, marrying Aethelred’s widow Emma, daughter of a duke of Normandy. Playing both sides, Emma’s brother protected her sons by Aethelred. Canute killed the one that fell into his hands, while he and Emma had their own son, Harthacnut. Confident of himself as ‘king of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes’, Canute travelled to Rome for the imperial coronation and European summit, where he boasted that ‘I spoke with the Emperor himself and the Lord Pope.’^* But, as with Forkbeard, Canute’s sudden death in 1035 unleashed chaos: Harthacnut was in Scandinavia, so his son by his concubine Aelfgifu, Harold Harefoot, seized England. When Aethelred’s son, Aethling (heir) Alfred, returned, Godwin of Wessex blinded him, then scalped his troops. On Harefoot’s death by elf-shot (a lovely euphemism for natural causes), Harthacnut claimed England^* but was forced to recognize his half-brother Edward as Aethling. A fatal mistake.

The return of House Alfred was backed by Richard III, duke of Normandy, where Rollo’s Vikings were now thoroughly Christian and Frankified. But the Vikings were still raiding and venturing. Now they reached a continent that had been separated from Afro-Eurasia for many millennia: America.

THE AMERICANS: FREYDIS AND FEATHERED SERPENT

Around 960, Thorvald Asvaldsson was exiled from Norway for murder and sent to settle in a new Viking colony far to the north: Iceland. The island, which had only been settled in the 870s by Naddod, a Viking from the Faroes, became a refuge for killers and dissidents. DNA reveals that many of the settlers hailed from Ireland or the Isles, victims of slaving raids. The 10,000 Icelanders founded a ‘domain of our law’ controlled by an althing, an assembly, run by a lawspeaker elected for three years.

A cousin of Naddod, Thorvald arrived with his equally lethal family: his son Eric had murdered someone in Norway and soon killed several more in Iceland. Some time late in the century, unwilling to return to Norway and outlawed in Iceland, Eric the Red (known either for his hair or for his homicidal incontinence) sailed westwards and landed in what, in an early example of branding, he called Greenland because ‘people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name’. Returning there with fourteen ships he built two settlements that were run by an assembly. His wife Thjodhild was a Christian whose piety ‘irritated him greatly’. She built a chapel (where a small cemetery contains bodies probably of the family), but punished him for his paganism by withholding sex, a serious punishment in such a remote place. But perhaps he converted, because they did produce four children.

Their houses were built with turf dung and stone with animals living closely for warmth, while household items were carved from reindeer antler, bone and wood. Greenland was not empty: Inuit tribesmen whom the Vikings called Skraellings lived there in sunken huts, hunting walruses and seals and even whales with harpoons, travelling by kayak. Eric and his family lived by hunting, and it is probable Viking hunters crossed Davis Strait into north America, settling at Kimmirut on Baffin Island (Canada), where whetstones and rat droppings been found. Since rats were not native to America, it is likely they accompanied the Vikings, who soon realized there was another land further west.

Eric’s son Leif the Lucky, a Christian, was encouraged by the king of Norway to convert the Greenland Vikings. Now he joined an expedition to America. Eric wanted to come too but, having fallen off his horse, had shown himself to be too old. Sailing down the coast of Canada, the voyagers (including one of Leif’s brothers, Thorvald) first stopped at Baffin Island, then sailed on to Newfoundland (Markland), where Nordic houses for around 100 have been found and dated to this moment – the arrival of the first Europeans to settle in America. The brothers then sailed on to found a second settlement, at L’Anse aux Meadows, where wooden objects had been carbon-dated by geoscientists to prove that the Vikings were there in 1021. It is unclear if this is the place they called Vinland, where they found vines growing. When they discovered three strangers sleeping under a boat, they encountered Skraellings – native Americans of the Boethuk and Mikmaq tribes – and killed two of them. The tribes hit back, shooting Thorvald with an arrow.

More Vikings arrived, including one, Porfinn, who fell in love with Thorvald’s widow Gudred. Their child together was the first European colonist born in America. Leif’s half-sister Freydis seems to have assumed power. Arguing with another group of settlers, she attacked them, ordering the men to be killed, but when her henchmen refused to kill the women, Freydis took an axe and butchered five women herself – ‘a monstrous deed’. She was forgiven when they were attacked by Skraellings: she rallied the defence by slapping her sword against her breast. L’Anse aux Meadows looks like a halfway point to somewhere else – but where?

Some historians have claimed that the Vikings made contact with other Skraellings. Far to the south, in Mexico, the Maya city at Chichen Itza, built around a pyramid 100 feet high, was now home to 40,000 – larger than London. In a 200-columned temple to war, paintings show prisoners with fair hair, light eyes and pale skin being killed. ‘The timing coincides perfectly with the Norse voyages,’ speculates Valerie Hansen; ‘ … the Vikings could have arrived in the Yucatán.’ If so, the adventure was disastrous – and left no other trace.

The Maya did not trade directly with north American peoples but there was indirect movement in goods and ideas: in the Mississippi Valley, the cultivation of maize and beans fuelled the building of small feuding towns, the largest of which was Cahokia in Illinois, whose population around 1050 seems to have expanded from 10,000 to 40,000, nourished by maize growing. A hundred mounds, still to be seen today, the remains of earthen pyramids that held ritual sweat lodges, charnel houses and temples, were centred around the original 100-foot mound and a giant plaza used for rituals. Cahokia was ruled by a family in which succession may have descended through the female line. Its elite played a game, chunkey, employing stones and linked to war and mythology. The losers were sometimes killed. Top men and women were buried together with beaded capes and shells, alongside hundreds of sacrificed victims, beheaded, dismembered or buried alive. Four mass graves contain fifty sacrificed young women.^*

The Viking colonies in America did not endure. Leif returned to Greenland, where his son Thorkell succeeded him as chieftain; Gudred made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ended as a nun on Iceland, where her American son became the forefather of many Icelanders. Their American adventure did not change the world – the colonists were too few and the European prizes were too rich. Yet, as a newly discovered Milanese document reveals, knowledge of the continent’s existence was passed down by Nordic sailors.^*

A Danish king Harthacnut still ruled England, recognizing as his heir the Aethling Edward, son of Aethelred, later celebrated for saintly piety as the Confessor. But on 8 June 1042 Harthacnut, attending a wedding in London, raised a toast to the bride and ‘suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion’. The saintly Edward probably poisoned him. Edward was supported by the prince blinder, mass-scalper and kingmaker Godwin of Wessex, who, married to Canute’s sister-in-law, had helped destroy his father and killed at least one brother. But now they soothed these crimes with marriage: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith and raised his son Harold to earl. When Godwin died, Harold, half Anglo-Saxon, half Dane, succeeded as the first potentate of the kingdom, earl of Wessex. Since Edward had no children, who would inherit England?

The island was on the edge of Europe, but Canute’s Roman trip showed how this Scando-Britannic empire was now linked by Mediterranean trade routes to Asia. Two coins from a resurgent China have been found in Edward’s England, while in Egypt the Mad Caliph, al-Hakim, had gone much further, contacting the new Chinese emperor.

But in Cairo this Arab Caligula turned on his entourage. Once, passing a butcher’s shop, he just took a cleaver and killed one of his courtiers without even stopping. Then he cancelled his anti-Jewish, anti-Christian decrees and enforced a new puritanism on the Cairenes. All women had to wear veils and alcohol was banned – a sign of how lax society had become in Cairo. He beheaded many of his own concubines, banned all singing and dancing, then forbade women from going out at all, even to shop. When they ignored his orders, they were killed. When they protested that they had to go out shopping, al-Hakim told them to order deliveries to the home – a caliphal version of Amazon. Other strange measures followed: his wasita (chief minister) and generals were frequently executed; cats and dogs were destroyed; eating watercress, grapes and fish without scales was banned.

Touched by the sanctity of the imamate and the young caliph’s wild charisma, some Ismaili sectarians believed that al-Hakim ‘personified God within him’ and hailed him as divine, an idea that appealed to the caliph, who now wandered Cairo streets in drug-fuelled trances. But the grandees were worried.

Al-Hakim was close to his sister Sitt al-Mulk – a title that meant Lady of Power. She was fearless, fortyish, as blonde and blue-eyed as the caliph. But he now became paranoid about her intrigues. Some of his suspicions were correct. Sitt al-Mulk lived in splendour in her own palace where she dared to hide potential victims of her brother’s insanity. Al-Hakim accused her of ‘fornication’ with generals and viziers, executing one who may have been her lover. Sitt al-Mulk realized she was in peril and made her plans.

When al-Hakim nominated a cousin, not his young son al-Zahir, as heir, Sitt al-Mulk protected the child and wrote to a general called Ibn Daws to tell him that the caliph accused the two of them of having an affair. It was either kill or be killed.

In 1021, al-Hakim, now thirty-six, rode out of Cairo to meditate and never came back. His body was never found, just bloodied rags.

Yet his influence has endured to this day.^* Al-Hakim, whose ports in Arabia and the Red Sea regularly traded with India and China, learned from these seafarers that something had changed in China. In 1008, he sent a sea captain, Domiyat, to China to deliver gifts and letters to Zhenzong, emperor of a new dynasty – the Song – that had opened a new act and made the Central Country the most dynamic, prosperous, sophisticated and technologically innovative empire on earth. As if inventing gunpowder, printing and the compass was not enough, its founder may have invented football.

* The split between Sunni and Shia was the schism within the House of Muhammad. Ever since the assassination of Ali, the faction – Shia – of Islam had regarded the Umayya and Abbasiya caliphs as impostors, revering the descent of the People of the House of Muhammad as sacred imams. Different Shiite sects followed the descent of different imams, but the Fatimiyya claimed descent from the mysterious seventh Imam Ismaili – hence known as Ismailis – who had occulted or vanished around 762 and now they awaited the Mahdi – Messiah – a member of the family. The Mahdi would restore the unity of Islam before the End of Days, the apocalypse that thanks to chaos of the Baghdad caliphate was believed to be imminent. Al-Mahdi Billal claimed to be the eleventh imam.

* Muslim, Jewish and Christian potentates vied for power. Both Jews and Christians in Ethiopia claimed mythical descent from Solomon and Sheba, but there were ancient links between Arabia and Ethiopia and it is likely these Jews were connected to the interactions between the kingdom of Axum and the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (Yemen). Himyar was Jewish from around the fourth century to its conquest by Axum in the sixth. A significant Jewish community remained in Ethiopia known as the Beta (House of) Israel. At some point, the kings of Axum tried to convert the Jews of the kingdom of Simien situated in north Ethiopia. A Jewish king, Gideon IV, was killed in the fighting, but just around this time, 960, his daughter Queen Gudit (Judith) hit back, destroying Axum and establishing a Jewish kingdom that endured for several centuries alongside Muslim and Christian realms. Historians debate all this; much of it is based on Beta Israel tradition; but it is likely that these Gideonites were the ancestors of today’s Beta Israel (Falashas). Makuria continued to thrive after repelling the Arab armies in 652, enduring until around 1000 when it merged with Christian Dotawo, a regional power until the sixteenth century.

* Madagascar became a uniquely Afro-Polynesian society, where the Merina, a Malay elite, crushed earlier settlers, the Vazimba, hunted to extinction the giant animals (including lemurs the size of gorillas) and imported African slaves to work for them there in a singular caste system that lasted into the late nineteenth century.

* A Christian Arab doctor, Ibn Butlan of Baghdad, wrote a guide to slaves in the 1050s. He flaunted racial stereotypes, but colour was not the ideological basis for slavery. Like most medieval people he regarded race ‘not in binary terms’, writes Hannah Barker, ‘but as a profusion of human diversity signifying the endlessly fertile creativity of God’. The best slaves he claimed were from India and Afghanistan. Those from Syria and Maghreb were inferior; Rus and Slavs were strong. ‘Were a Zanj (east African) slave to fall from sky to earth, the one quality he’d possess would be rhythm.’ The doctor warned against the customs in Bagawi (Sudan/Ethiopia) where ‘they practice excision. Using a razor they completely remove external skin on top of the vulva.’ His conclusion: ‘Armenian slaves are the worst of the whites; Zanj worst of the blacks.’

* A fifth of slaves may have died on the nightmarish journeys across the desert, where their bones were a well-known sight. Between 700 and the abolition of slavery, it is likely that as many slaves were traded from east Africa as in the Atlantic trade. Ralph A. Austen estimates 11.75 million were traded – but the numbers are educated guesses.

* As he fled Egypt, Mutanabbi, the whole white man, flung this at the black eunuch:

A well-hung, well-heeled white man’s sense of gratitude soon palls;

What thanks can be expected from a black man with no balls?

* Al-Muizz was also the inventor or commissioner of the fountain pen, telling his scribe: ‘We wish to construct a pen which can be used for writing without dipping it in an inkbottle, whose ink will be contained inside it … and it will not stain nor will any drop of ink leak out of it.’

* The Genizah was an accidental archive since it was the rubbish dump of the Jews there who believed that God’s words in Hebrew should never be burned, only buried.

* John Crescentius was the last of the Crescentii but the other Marozian line, the counts of Tusculum, controlled the papacy until 1049. Nor was this the end of the family: the Colonna princes, potentates for centuries to come, were and are descended from the Tusculum counts.

* Yet the Anglo-Saxons were already a hybrid of English and Viking. DNA shows that Vikings may have started with murder and rape but ultimately settled and intermarried with Celts and Anglo-Saxons.

* It was the age of eponyms that defined men by their looks and actions instead of their birth. Aethelred’s was a (rather bad) joke. His name meant Well Advised. Unready meant Badly Advised. So he was Well Advised the Badly Advised.

* In 1997, a computer engineer in California, a Viking-history buff, chose the name Bluetooth for short-duration communications as a tribute to the king’s uniting of Scandinavian peoples.

* Canute negotiated free trade and free movement with European leaders, announcing, with echoes of today’s Brexit negotiations, he had ensured that ‘a juster law and securer peace might be granted to them on the road to Rome and that they should not be straitened by so many barriers along the road, and harassed by unjust tolls’. Canute’s noble humility and ecological sensitivity was illustrated by his placing his throne on the beach saying, ‘Let all see how empty is the power of kings.’ This story was later recast to illustrate the exact opposite of the original, that Canute’s humiliation by the defiant waves symbolized the arrogance of kings.

* Scotland shook off Bluetooth empire. In 1031, Canute had invaded Scotland and forced High King Malcolm II and a kinglet, Mac Bethad of Moray, to submit. In 1039, Scottish king Donnchad the Sick, grandson of Malcolm II, ineptly raided England, a disaster that led to a rebellion by his magnate the dux and mormaer of Moray, Mac Bethad, who killed him in battle and ruled as king for seventeen years with his queen Gruoch. Gruoch’s first husband had been burned to death, probably by Mac Bethad, whom she then married. In 1057 Donnchad’s son Malcolm III invaded and killed Mac Bethad with English help. In 1606 Shakespeare premiered a play about these characters. Mac Bethad became Macbeth – though Shakespeare missed a trick in not using the name Gruoch.

* The Cahokians were in contact with the north, where turquoise was acquired from Utah, and with the south, bringing jade and obsidian from Mexico. They filed their front teeth and ate chocolate as Maya did, using Mesoamerican cacao. One of the technologies they sent south was the bow and arrow, which had spread southwards from the Arctic peoples, reaching the south-west around 500 and then on to Mexico. In New Mexico, at Chaco Canyon, other peoples, known as Pueblans, built villages with houses (one complex had 800 rooms), underground storage rooms and squares, along with a road system that had mysterious ritual purposes. They too drank chocolate, lived off domesticated turkeys and wore turquoise and macaw feathers from the south.

* Iceland stayed inhabited, and was visited by English seamen, but the ancient Norse settlements in Greenland did not last, suffering as they did from falling temperatures, Inuit attacks and starvation. Bones discovered record their malnourishment, while Icelandic sagas recount that ‘the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs’.

* This occulted vanishing only added to al-Hakim’s mystique among his disciples, who were massacred on his sister’s orders. Some of them escaped: today two million Druze in Israel, Lebanon and Syria still revere his divinity. Sitt al-Mulk covered her own traces, executed Ibn Daws and ruled the Fatimiyya empire as princess-aunt, reversing al-Hakim’s bans: wine drinking and music playing were restored, women were allowed to dress as they wished and to shop; Jews and Christians could return to their faiths and stop wearing distinguishing clothes; Easter and Christmas were back.