The World

Khmers, Hohenstaufen and Polos

JAYAVARMAN OF ANGKOR AND THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

Many children would have been overwhelmed by Frederick’s inheritance. He was the grandson of Roger II of Sicily and Frederick Barbarossa, half Hauteville, half Staufen – the Germanic rulers of Swabia, descended from Charlemagne. Frederick was singular first in his lineage then in his character. His mother Constance, intelligent, resilient and red-blonde, was the posthumously born daughter of Roger II, kept sequestered in the Hauteville court in Palermo until it became clear that she was the heiress to Sicily, whereupon in 1186 her nephew William the Good negotiated a peace crowned with the marriage of Constance, thirty, to Heinrich, son of Frederick Barbarossa. When her nephew died young, she and her husband, who was now German emperor Heinrich VI, had to fight for the kingdom.

Then came unlikely news: Constance was pregnant at forty. Their healthy son, named Frederick Roger after his two storied grandfathers, would be the key player in Europe for the fifty years that saw the rise of Genghis. After the death of her husband, Queen/Empress Constance devoted herself to protecting Sicily for her baby, whom she placed under the protection of the pope. Crowned king of Sicily at the age of three, he was educated by Islamic, Jewish and Greek tutors, guarded by Saracen bodyguards and liberated by a Sicilian informality that allowed him to play with his friends in the streets.

After the death of his mother, and now elected Roman emperor and king of Italy, Frederick, red-haired and green-eyed, grew up fluent in six languages including Arabic. He regarded himself as the universal emperor of Christendom, and he was flamboyant, talented and curious, with the acumen to rule his complex inheritance and fight for it. He wrote a guide to falconry and founded Naples university, but, irritated by Catholic piety, he enjoyed baiting popes and priests, making risqué jokes about Christ, keeping a harem of concubines and writing love poetry to many mistresses. He also relished debating with Arabic and Jewish astronomers and English magicians, and created an Arab town on the mainland where he settled Muslim rebels from Sicily.

Frederick was alarmed by the Mongols’ raid, but their mysterious vanishing allowed him to focus on crusading. Pope Innocent III, having called for crusades in Spain^* and Outremer, ordered Frederick to take the Cross, which would distract him from building power in Italy. Frederick prepared to capture Jerusalem on battlefield and in bed: he recruited a German military-religious order, the Teutonic Knights (in return for his assistance in the other crusade against the pagans of Lithuania and Prussia); and he married Yolande, aged thirteen, nominal queen of Jerusalem, which allowed him to call himself king, though Saladin’s grandson actually ruled the city, the Christians just Acre and a strip of coast. Although the queen of Jerusalem died just two years later while giving birth to a son, Frederick prevaricated about leaving for Outremer, outraging Pope Gregory IX, who called him ‘Precursor of the Anti-Christ’ and excommunicated him. In 1228, when he and his Teutonic Knights at last sailed for Acre, the Mongols were again riding westward.

After seven years at war in the east, Genghis headed home, his ambitions still boundless. India was unconquered, as was Song China. Probing Punjab, where the fugitive prince of Khwarizm was lurking, Genghis sent a warning to the paramount ruler in northern India, a former Turkic slave called Iltutmish, who sensibly appeased the Mongol. Islam had dominated northern India since 1192 when a Muslim Afghan warlord had invaded and defeated the Hindu Rajputs, establishing a sultanate based in Delhi. From then until 1857, Muslim kings ruled; until 1947, India was dominated by foreign conquerors.

Recognized as sultan by the caliph of Baghdad, Iltutmish and his Turks pillaged the ‘idolatrous’ Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas. Religions flourish when they are backed by earthly powers: Islam had a champion in the sultans; Buddhism, already undermined in India by the popularity of Tantric Hinduism, never recovered. The Hindu Chola family had dominated southern India and south-east Asia, and as their last great emperor faced disaster, their Indic influence lived on in the crowning glory of the Indosphere. Now a dynamic Buddhist sovereign was building a Khmer empire across south-east Asia that was based at the resplendent capital, Angkor. Jayavarman VII, a contemporary of Genghis, defeated the Hindu Cham kingdom in southern Vietnam and expanded Angkorian influence as far as Myanmar, Malaya and Yunnan (China).

In 1113, an exuberant warrior god-king, Suryavarman II, had seized the Khmer throne by slaughtering much of his family and then routing all contenders, aided by his ally the Chola emperor of India and appeasing the Chinese emperor, to whom he sent delegations. This contemporary of the Crusader kings was a visionary determined to make Angkor a timeless monument to his greatness by adding an array of astonishing monuments, culminating in the five-towered, multiple-courted temple Angkor Wat dedicated to Vishnu.^* After his death, the Chams raided up the Mekong and sacked Angkor. As a young prince, Jayavarman VII struck back and in a thirty-seven-year reign established an empire from coast to coast. Embracing Buddhism, adapting the existing Hindu temples of Angkor, he made it into one of the world’s biggest and most beautiful cities, its royal-sacred precinct covering almost 500 acres. Greater Angkor with a population of over a million people stretched over 400 square miles of suburbs, lakes and villages, sustained by sophisticated hydraulic systems of canals and barays (reservoirs) that irrigated rice and palm plantations. When Jayavarman, remarkable in many things, died in 1218 aged ninety-five, he was succeeded by a son, Indravarman II, who rededicated many of his father’s temples to celebrate Shiva.

As Indic culture flourished in Angkor, and Iltutmish was promoting Islam in northern India, Genghis galloped home.

GENGHIS AND FREDERICK: SHOWDOWN AT THE DEATHBED

Genghis travelled back to Mongolia with his grandsons, the fifteen-year-old Möngke and the ten-year-old Kublai. He hunted antelope with them and performed the rite of smearing fat and blood as a coming of age. Both these sons of Tolui would rule as khagans. Genghis worried that ‘After us, our race will wear golden garments, eat sweet food, ride splendid horses, kiss the loveliest women – and forget they owe these things to us!’

There was still much to do. The full conquest of China was not possible without the territory of the Tanguts, who had refused to send troops on the Khwarizmian campaign. ‘While we eat,’ Genghis told his courtiers, ‘let’s talk of how we made them die and destroyed them. That was the end, they are no more.’ Genghis devastated their cities. Yet he saved some rare manuscripts and special medicinal drugs, sometimes holding back on his massacres.

‘Are you going to weep for the people again?’ Ögodei teased his father. A general advised Genghis to exterminate the Chinese and rusticate the Central Country as pasture, but his Chinese advisers explained the potential tax revenues. ‘An empire that can be conquered on horseback,’ he mused, ‘can’t be ruled from it.’ Whether or not he really said that, Genghis now commissioned a system of taxation.

As the Tangut emperor was on his way to submit, Genghis, out riding, fell from his horse and that night he was sick. ‘Princes and generals,’ said Khatun Yesui (a khatun was the wife of a khan, or empress), ‘consult each other; last night the khan was feverish.’ The generals proposed a withdrawal.

‘The Tangut will say our hearts are failing,’ Genghis replied, dictating specific orders: Khatun Yesui was to receive Tangut territory; he was to be buried close to his sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun. ‘Don’t let my death be known. Don’t weep or lament but when the Tangut ruler and his people leave the city, kill everyone!’

Genghis was secretly dying as the Tangut ruler arrived at the Golden ordu in August 1227. He presented his gifts – giant golden Buddhas, boys and girls, camels and horses, all in sets of sacred nine – but he was then seized and strangled, his entourage slaughtered. Informed of this, Genghis said, ‘We’ve taken our vengeance. They have vanished.’ Now he could die, leaving an empire four times as big as Alexander’s, twice the size of the Roman imperium – but only half as expansive as it would soon be. The body was borne northwards to be buried secretly on the sacred mountain, accompanied by sacrificed horses and slaves, on a site never yet found. Then the Golden princes led by Tolui, Genghis’s daughters and his generals assembled at a qurultai where, as agreed with their father, Chagatai proposed Ögodei as khagan. Ögodei consulted his brothers and took the decision to resume world conquest, taking command of the campaign to finish off the Jurchen – otherwise ‘People will ask by what ability I’ve succeeded my father.’ In 1231, Ögodei, accompanied by Tolui, took the Jurchen capital of Kaifeng, but fell ill from cirrhosis, caused by alcoholism. Tolui was also addicted, drinking so much kumis that he sometimes just wept publicly, leaving politics to his wife, Sorqaqtani Beki. Ögodei recovered; Tolui died of alcoholism, leaving Sorqaqtani to rule his appanage across northern China. Ögodei respected her, first asking her to marry him, then suggesting his useless son Güyük. But she refused graciously, saying her own four sons were her priority. She was right: she and they were the future. Instead she became Ögodei’s adviser. ‘No turban-wearer [male] could have dealt with these matters with similar brilliance,’ wrote the Persian historian Juvaini. ‘In any business which Ögodei undertook, whether concerning empire or army, he consulted her, changing arrangements according to her recommendations.’

Often soused, Ögodei founded a more permanent capital at Karakorum (Mongolia) and commissioned a family history. Although he sometimes pardoned those sentenced to death, he also ordered the rape of thousands of girls of the conquered Oirat tribe after their ruler, his sister Checheikhen, died. His addictions were so out of control that Chagatai forced him to allow a ‘supervisor’ to limit the number of his drinks, which he got around by quaffing from larger goblets of wine.

As Ögodei declined, his wife Khatun Töregene ran more of the government, appointing Muslim officials, Turks and Persians, to raise Chinese taxes. In 1236 the khagan dispatched an army of 150,000, under his nephews Batu (son of Jochi) and Möngke (son of Tolui) plus his own son Güyük, all commanded by the marshal Subotai, to conquer Europe.

The Wonder of the World, Frederick II, was unprepared. Soon after Genghis’s death, he had arrived in the Holy Land where he negotiated a peace plan with Saladin’s nephew Sultan al-Kamil. Saladin’s heirs had demolished the walls of Jerusalem to avoid it being used by family rivals or Crusaders. Now Frederick and al-Kamil agreed that each religion would control its own shrines, the Muslims the Haram al-Sharif, the Christians the Sepulchre. In Jerusalem, a triumphant Frederick wore his crown as king of the sacred city while also writing love poetry to his ‘Syrian’ mistress: was she Frankish or Arab? By now he was balding and short-sighted. An Arab writer who spotted him in Jerusalem joked, ‘The emperor, covered with red hair, was bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he wouldn’t have fetched 200 dirhams at market.’ Yet Frederick’s visionary compromise was hated by the diehard Crusaders. Back in Acre, butchers pelted him with entrails.

He rushed home to deal with his enemies, first Pope Gregory,^* who sent an army to seize Sicily, then the obstreperous German princes, who were encouraged by his high-handed son Heinrich, king of the Romans. Frederick fought a long war to retake his territories.^* Italy was divided between his own supporters and the pope’s, the two sides having factions in each city, Ghibellines supporting the emperor, Guelphs the pope, in a conflict that lasted for a century. In Germany, Frederick disinherited and imprisoned Heinrich, who died of leprosy in prison, and won back German supporters. One of these was his godson, an aggressive young knight named Rudolf who was expanding his estates around his Swiss castle, Hawk Mountain: Habsburg. Rudolf specialized in switching sides to win concessions, manoeuvres that now laid the foundations for the Habsburg dynasty that would conquer a new continent and rule swathes of Europe until 1918.

Calling himself the count of Habsburg, he proved his martial credentials by leading his own contingent in the northern crusades against the pagans – where, starting in 1237, the emperor was backing his ally, Hermann von Salza, master of the Teutonic Knights, against the pagan Lithuanians, Prussians, Sambians and Semigalians who still ruled much of today’s Germany, Poland, Belarus and the Baltics. It was a chance to kill infidels but also to carve out new territories.

Just as Frederick was winning these wars, Subotai, the one-eyed Mongol marshal, accompanied by Genghis’s grandson Batu Khan, burst into Europe. In 1237, they crossed the Volga, rapidly overrunning what is today Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1239, when they took Vladimir, its prince Yuri II, pre-eminent Rurikovich, was killed and his wife burned to death in church. In 1240, Prince Möngke destroyed Kyiv.

On 9 April, at Legnica, after burning Lublin and Kraków, a Mongol army routed Poles, Bohemians and Saxons, killing the Polish duke whose naked headless body was recognized by his wife only because he had six toes on one foot. Another army under Batu and Subotai rode into Hungary. ‘You dwell in houses and have fixed towns and fortresses,’ Batu said menacingly to Bela IV of Hungary, ‘so how will you escape me?’ A Hungarian-speaking Englishman arrived from Batu to demand submission: Bela refused.

The day after Legnica, Subotai and Batu fought Bela at Mohi, where they killed 65,000 men: they may have deployed gunpowder and naphtha bombs brought from China – if so, the first use of gunpowder in Europe. But Batu was criticized for incompetence by his first cousin Güyük, son of Great Khan Ögodei, who demanded a retreat. Subotai refused and advanced to take and burn Pest on the Danube. Their detachments rode west into Austria where the locals captured eight of their number. One of these turned out to be the Englishman who had offered terms to Bela.^*

Batu Khan crossed the borders into Frederick’s empire. Now thirty-five, the senior grandson of Genghis menaced the grandees of Europe. ‘I am coming to usurp your throne,’ he told Frederick, advising him to abdicate and become a falconer in Karakorum. Frederick, a connoisseur of falconry, laughed that he was well qualified for the job. Even faced with the Mongols, Europe was incapable of unity: emperor and pope declared a crusade but hated each other.

Batu and Subotai were poised to take Europe when dramatic news arrived: Ögodei had died in December 1241, without naming his son Güyük as successor. To elect the new khagan, the princes had to return for the qurultai in Karakorum – where it was the women who dominated for the next decade.

WHEN WOMEN RULED THE WORLD: SORQAQTANI AND RAZIA

After the death of Ögodei, his widow Khatun Töregene ran the empire. Widows ruled until a new khagan was elected. But the senior prince, Batu Khan, known as Agha – Big Brother – refused to come to Karakorum, fearing for his safety, and Töregene was not strong enough to crown her eldest son Güyük. Instead she governed through a most unlikely channel, a female Persian prisoner of war called Fatima who became ‘the sharer of intimate confidences and depository of hidden secrets’, overruling officials, ‘free to issue her own commands’ and earning herself the sarcastic nickname of Khatun. As her rival Sorqaqtani conspired against her, Töregene trusted Fatima totally, but she distrusted Ögedei’s officials, executing one by having stones forced down his throat. But she feared Genghis’s daughters, killing the youngest, Ilalti, ruler of the Uighurs, by framing her for the poisoning of her brother Ögodei.

At Karakorum, Töregene received Seljuks of Rum, Bagrations of Georgia, Rurikovichi princes of Russia and western envoys seeking Mongol backing. An intrepid sexagenarian priest, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, arrived as the legate of Innocent IV. Some princes were feasted and promoted, others feasted and murdered.

Töregene was not the only female potentate. In Delhi, Sultan Iltutmish favoured his eldest daughter Razia: ‘My sons are incapable,’ he said, ‘and for that reason I’ve decided my daughter should reign.’ Instead, on his death, his amirs enthroned his son Ruknuddin Firuz, a playboy who rode drunk on elephants accompanied by a retinue of eunuchs and overpromoted mahouts while his mother, Shahturkhan, ruled, settling scores by blinding and killing one of Iltutmish’s sons. She saw that her stepdaughter Razia was a threat and ordered her assassination. Instead, at Friday prayers Razia appealed to the people, inciting them to storm the palace. When they had done so, she arrested and killed Shahturkhan and Firuz before becoming sultan in her own right. The amirs who backed her had presumed she would be a figurehead; initially she respected Islamic modesty, watching councils from behind a screen, escorted by female bodyguards, but then she started to rule publicly and unveiled, cutting her hair, sporting dashing male gear – breastplates, sword and boots – and riding her own elephant through Delhi.

Her chief adviser was an enslaved Habashi (from Abyssinia) who had risen to general, named Jamaluddin Yaqut, and whom she appointed master of horse, thereby offending her Turkic generals. When she was dismounting from a horse, the courtiers noticed that Yakut slipped his hands under her armpits, a sign of shocking intimacy: they were clearly lovers. The combination of a woman and an African man, her gender, his race, was too much for them.

Razia promoted Yakut to amir al-amira – commander-in-chief. Their enemies conspired against them, assassinating him and then arresting Razia in order to place another half-brother on the throne. When he turned out to be obstreperous, one of the warlords, Altunia, who was Razia’s jailer, fell in love with her and offered marriage in return for a partnership. She agreed, but they were defeated and he was killed. Dressed as a man she sought refuge in a peasant cottage, but when she was asleep her host noticed the jewels under her coat and killed her, burying her in the garden. He was caught trying to sell her gems and revealed his secret. Her domed tomb, Delhi’s Turkman Gate, was long a place of pilgrimage.

In Karakorum, Töregene ruled for five years until in 1246 Baku Khan agreed to send envoys to vote for the unimpressive Güyük, who left most of the decisions to his mother. Güyük, ‘astute and very grave, hardly ever seen to laugh or make merry’, was determined to enforce Genghis’s discipline after the easy-going Ögodei. Now he resented his mother’s power and loathed her factotum, Fatima, finally sending guards to arrest her. Töregene refused to surrender her. Güyük and his khatun Oghul Qaimish publicly tried and tortured Fatima, who, naked, was burned and then had her orifices sewn up before being tossed into a river.

After eighteen months, Güyük marched east to attack Iraq and destroy Batu, who probably poisoned him. His widow took over as regent, negotiating with the French envoy André de Longjumeau, whom she told, ‘Peace is good’ but ‘you can’t have peace until you have peace with us!’ If not, ‘we shall destroy you’. But she united her enemies by fatally alienating Sorqaqtani.

Tolui’s widow was ‘extremely intelligent and able … the most intelligent woman in the world’, according to the historian Rashid al-Din. Carefully bringing up her four able sons, teaching them key languages – Kublai learned Chinese – this Christian, born into royalty, was open-minded, building churches but also a madrasa. Now she sent her shrewd son Möngke to see the Big Brother in Russia. Batu welcomed him warmly, reuniting the winning team that had invaded Hungary. Calling a qurultai far from Karakorum, Batu invited the widows of Genghis and of Ögodei and Sorqaqtani herself, who finessed the deal. In July 1251, Batu was offered the khaganate but refused, proposing the forty-three-year-old Möngke, who was chosen and, after graciously refusing twice, accepted on the third offer. Then they marched on Karakorum. Möngke loathed Oghul Qaimish – ‘more contemptible than a bitch’ – having her tortured just as she had tortured Fatima, naked, her orifices sewn together, then drowned in a sack. Sorqaqtani and Möngke purged the family and ended the reign of the khatuns: no women were to have power again, ordered Möngke, or ‘we shall see what we shall see’ – a euphemism for death. When the purge was at its height, Sorqaqtani fell ill, believing that her Christian God was punishing her for the killings, which she now tried to stop before her own death.

Genghis’s Tengri-blessed mission to conquer the world was far from over.

ALEXANDER NEVSKY AND MöNGKE KHAN: WORLD CONQUEST RESTORED

Möngke, who had fought in Hungary and Poland, had the acumen to direct a Eurasian world conquest and govern it – commissioning a tax census in territories from Korea to Ukraine. At the centre, Karakorum, he held court in a basic palace, hung with gold cloth, warmed by a brazier burning wormwood roots and cattle dung. He would be ‘seated on a little bed dressed in a rich furred robe which glistened like the skin of a seal’ while showing off his gyrfalcons.

Still obsessed with the loss of Jerusalem, and the fantasy of Prester John, European potentates sent envoys to Karakorum: Willem van Ruysbroeck, Flemish envoy of Louis IX of France, arrived to convert Möngke to Christianity or at least to negotiate an alliance between the Mongols and the Crusaders against Islam.

Möngke was the son of a Christian married to a Christian wife whom he sometimes accompanied to chapel, reclining during the service on a golden bed. ‘We Mongols believe in one God,’ he told Willem. ‘Just as God gave different fingers to my hand, he’s given different ways to men.’ But when it came to sacred power he was as severe as his grandfather: ‘If, when you hear the decree of the eternal God, you’re unwilling to pay attention and send an army against us, we know what we can do.’ The world was now about to see what he meant.

Möngke ruled in partnership with Big Brother Batu, whose khanate, known as the Golden Horde and based at Sarai on the Volga, covered much of European Russia and Ukraine. Batu was ‘genial and good-natured’ but ‘cruel in war’. He used the Rurikovichi as enforcers. The ablest of his Mongol vassals was the twenty-five-year-old Alexander, son of the prince of Vladimir, who understood the benefits of appeasement. His father Yaroslav II had been poisoned in Karakorum by Khatun Töregene, after which Alexander travelled there, bent the knee to his father’s murderers and was granted Kyiv. Now Batu was in charge, he often visited Big Brother and his son Sartuq at Sarai to bend the knee. Strapping and shrewd with a voice like a trumpet, Alexander impressed Sartuq so much that they became blood brothers. He needed the Mongols: Novgorod, a mercantile republic,^* was under attack from the west. A new rising power, the pagan duchy of Lithuania, was expanding into Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Sweden threatened Novgorod, which invited Alexander to defend it. In 1240 he defeated the Swedes on the Neva River (much later earning the sobriquet Nevsky). Then he faced the Teutonic Knights and other Germanic crusaders who had taken Prussia, Livonia and Semigalia before turning on the Orthodox Russians. In 1242, Alexander’s cavalry charging across the ice of Lake Peipus defeated the Livonian Brothers of the Sword.

In 1252, threatened by his rebellious brothers, Alexander won Batu’s backing to defeat his own blood and was appointed paramount prince of Vladimir; in return he enforced Mongol control and collected the khagan’s taxes. When in 1258 Novgorod and other Russian cities rebelled, Alexander gouged out the eyes and cut off the noses of the rebels, riding into the city accompanied by Mongols: his status as patriotic Russian hero is thus dubious. For reasons unknown, the khans became displeased. In 1263, Nevsky, still only forty-three, died while under arrest in Sarai, probably poisoned. His brothers and sons bid for the succession, the start of almost two centuries of submission to the Golden Horde.

Daniel, Alexander’s youngest and weakest son, was left the most meagre portion – Moscow^* – but it was from him and the princes of Muscovy that the tsars and Russia would descend.

As Batu secured Russia, Möngke ordered his brothers to continue their world conquest – Kublai to take Song China, and Hulagu to suppress Persia, then conquer Iraq, Israel and Egypt. Kublai, viceroy of northern China, was already at war. A frontal assault on the Song was perilous, so Möngke ordered him to encircle the empire by conquering the independent kingdom to its south, Dali. As Kublai prepared a multipronged assault on the Song, Möngke, learning that an Assassin hit squad was on its way to kill him, ordered Hulagu to destroy the Assassins and then the caliphate of Baghdad: ‘Establish the laws of Genghis Khan from the banks of the Amu Darya [central Asia] to Egypt. Those who submit, treat gently; those who resist, exterminate.’

HULAGU AND SAADI: ENTERTAINING AN ELEPHANT, SLAUGHTERING A CITY

Hulagu marched west with 100,000 men (each with two slaves, five horses and thirty sheep), a corps of Chinese siege engineers with 1,000 mangonels, possibly gunpowder bombardiers with thundercrash bombs – and new allies, Christian princes and knights from Antioch, Georgia and Armenia, eager to destroy the caliphate. This horde of men was accompanied by a horde of pathogens. Hulagu brought his own food supplies – huge quantities of grain, escorted by rats, and dried meats, including cured marmot. New research suggests that this was the moment the Black Death transferred from the east, a century earlier than the previously accepted date.

The khan crushed Transoxiana, then besieged the Assassins in their eyrie of Alamut. In November 1256, the Assassin imam, Rukn ad-Din, surrendered. One of Hulagu’s Persian aides, Ata-Malik Juvaini, whose father had served the Khwarizmian shah and then Genghis, encouraged the burning of the library, but the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi explained that Assassin theology did not depend on books. Hulagu spared the library. As for Rukn, he was wrapped in a carpet, then hoof-stomped to pulp. Hulagu concluded by ordering the assassination of 12,000 Assassins.^*

On 22 January 1258, Hulagu encircled Baghdad, having warned the caliph that ‘Humiliation by the grace of Tengri has overtaken the dynasties of Khwarizm, Seljuk, Daylam [Assassins], yet the gates of Baghdad were never closed to them. How then should entry be closed to us who possess such power? Once I lead my forces to Baghdad in righteous anger … I will bring you crashing down from the summit of the sky. I won’t leave a single person alive.’

‘Young man,’ retorted the Abbasiya caliph al-Musta’sim (who was forty-five to Hulagu’s thirty-eight, ‘you who have barely started your career and are drunk on a ten-day success, believing yourself ruler of the world, don’t you know that from the east to the Maghreb all worshippers of Allah are slaves to my court?’ Hulagu ordered his paladin, Kitbuqa, a Christian, to rain rocks, bombs and naphtha on to Baghdad, which was soon blazing, while they destroyed the dykes, flooding the countryside. When the city fell, Hulagu’s Christian wife Doquz, cousin of his mother Sorqaqtani, persuaded him to spare Christians, but his allies the Georgians took special pleasure in killing Muslims.

On 10 February 1258, the caliph arrived at Hulagu’s ordu to surrender. Hulagu drove out all Baghdad’s inhabitants. Outside the wall, Baghdadis were slaughtered – some sources claim 800,000 were killed; Hulagu himself boasted of 200,000 – and the Mongols looted Baghdad ‘like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves or raging wolves attacking sheep, with loose reins and shameless faces, cutting with knives any cushions and beds of gold encrusted with jewels, dragging veiled girls from the harem through the streets to become their playthings’, burning mosques and hospitals, shattering the Abbasiya tombs, though much of al-Mamun’s library was saved by the bibliophile hero Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Hulagu held court in the Octagon Palace where at a victory banquet he menaced the broken caliph: ‘You’re the host, we’re your guests. Bring us whatever you have.’ Al-Musta’sim opened his treasure chests. ‘Now tell my servants,’ ordered Hulagu ‘where your hidden treasures are.’ Al-Musta’sim revealed gold hidden in an ornamental pool. Then the caliph and his sons were rolled up in carpets and stomped to death by horses.^* It was not only Hulagu killing people. His camp in Baghdad was now hit by a mysterious epidemic, scarcely recorded amid the murderous mayhem, but it flared up too at his other sieges.

Leaving his Iranian epigone Juvaini to rebuild Baghdad, Hulagu galloped into Syria, meeting his Hauteville ally Bohemond VI le Beau, the twenty-one-year-old prince of Antioch, and his father-in-law King Hethum of Cilician Armenia, a small Christian kingdom, who joined his horde and helped capture Aleppo and Homs. Inspired by his Frankish friends, Hulagu punished a Turkish warlord who had crucified a Christian: the man was bisected while being forced to eat his own body.

It is hard to grasp the tragedy of Hulagu’s depredations, but a witness, a Persian poet called Saadi, talked to Arab soldiers and recorded in his masterpiece Bustan what it was like to fight the khan: ‘From the raining of arrows descending like hail, the storm of death arose on all sides,’ unleashed by the attacking Mongols, who resembled ‘a pack of leopards, as strong as elephants. The heads of the warriors were encased in iron, so were the horses’ hoofs.’^*

In March 1260, Mongol marshal Kitbuqa rode into Damascus, accompanied by Beau Bohemond and King Hethum, who joyously held mass in the former St John’s, now Great Mosque. As Hulagu’s cavalry took Nablus and reached Gaza, the fulfilment of the Crusader dream of Christian Jerusalem and the Mongol conquest of Egypt seemed inevitable.

I WISH I WERE DUST: THE SLAVE KING AND THE LAST HAUTEVILLE

Hulagu demanded that Egypt surrender, but on 11 August 1259, far away to the east, Möngke, who was accompanying Kublai in the war against Song China, died of dysentery. Hulagu moved back into Iran, leaving Kitbuqa in charge. Franks clashed with the Mongols, who favoured the Orthodox or Nestorians instead of the Catholics, while the Egyptians beheaded Hulagu’s envoys. Kitbuqa could not ignore such a slight. The Egyptians marched to stop him.

The new Egyptian rulers were tough soldiers who had started as slaves – Mamluks. They were Russians and Turks, Georgians and Circassians, blue-eyed blonds being specially prized, stolen or bought from their villages, sold in the Genoan slave markets of Crimea and bought by Saladin and his family. Converted to Islam, trained as soldiers and then manumitted, they became ferocious paladins, united by Islamic fervour and esprit de corps, who dominated then destroyed the Saladin dynasty.

Their rise was accelerated by a new crusade. In 1249, Louis IX of France landed with an army that nearly conquered a chaotic Egypt, which was saved only by a blond Turkish Mamluk of Pantagruelian proportions with one blue eye, one totally white, named Baibars. A junta of Mamluk amirs murdered the young sultan and replaced the Saladin family^* as Baibars advanced against the thinly spread Mongols. At Ain Julut (Goliath’s Spring) near Nablus, Baibars’s 15,000 Mamluks, on bigger warhorses than the Mongols, ambushed Kitbuqa’s forces, who fought to the last man. ‘It’s here that I must die,’ the marshal said. ‘Some soldier will reach the khan and tell him Kitbuqa refused to retreat. Happy life to the khan!’ When finally his horse was brought down, he was taken before the Mamluks.

‘After overthrowing so many dynasties,’ teased the Mamluks, ‘look at you now!’

‘Don’t be intoxicated by a moment’s success,’ replied Kitbuqa, the conqueror of Iran and Iraq unexpectedly defeated by ex-slaves. ‘When the news of my death reaches the khan, Egypt will be crushed beneath Mongol hooves.’ As the sword swung, he ended with ‘I was the khan’s slave. I am not – like you – the murderer of my master.’

Baibars – who called himself the Panther, leaving his insignia all over the region – made himself sultan. Gleefully bloodthirsty and demonically energetic, he campaigned for seventeen years, holding the Mongols at bay, darting down the Nile against the Nubian kingdom of Makuria, then launching an onslaught against all Christians, taking Caesarea and Jaffa, then in 1268 storming Antioch, seat of the Hautevilles. He wrote to Bohemond le Beau, ‘You’d have seen your knights prostrate beneath horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers, your wealth weighted by the quintal, your girls sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money!’ In 1277, while poisoning an enemy, Baibars absent-mindedly swallowed the wrong glass, an occupational hazard for those who become blasé about murdering guests. He was succeeded by a veteran amir, Qalawun, who with his sons and grandsons conquered Israel and Syria^* while the Mongols were busy in China.

When Möngke died, Kublai, laying siege to Wuchow, raced northwards to his summer palace Xanadu (Shangdu) and proclaimed himself khagan, brushing off the challenge of his youngest brother, Ariq-boga. Kublai abandoned Karakorum to found a new winter capital known as Dadu in Chinese (Great Capital) or Khanbalic in Mongolian (Khan’s City; later Beijing), which he had designed by an Arab architect, Iktiyar al-Din. Its only surviving building, the White Pagoda, was the work of Arniko, a Nepalese. Dadu was thus a carefully created Chinese city built for a Mongol by an Arab and a Nepalese.

Encouraged by his influential favourite wife, Chabi,^* the Buddhist Kublai tolerated all. ‘I’m interested not in the stones that make the bridge,’ he said, ‘but in the arch that supports it.’ He protected Buddhists. Speaking Chinese, he was keen to advertise his Mandate of Heaven and raise Chinese taxes, recruiting a Golden Lotus Advisory Group – a think tank of Chinese advisers.

He was still a Mongol, often reclining in a ger next to his palaces or leading hunts accompanied by 14,000 huntsmen, 2,000 hounds with their dog handlers, 10,000 falconers, trained Siberian tigers and African cheetahs, eagles and thousands of troops who helpfully trapped hundreds of animals that were shot by the portly, gout-ridden khagan from a mega-howdah atop four elephants lashed together.

In 1264, Kublai would receive Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, two young Venetian merchants specializing in Constantinopolitan trade. Their expertise was jewellery and their biggest client would be Kublai.

KUBLAI AND THE POLO BROTHERS

In 1259, leaving Niccolò’s pregnant wife behind in Venice, the Polos arrived in Constantinople, which had been dominated by Venice ever since Dandalo’s conquest but would not be so for much longer. They left just as it was about to fall.^*

The Polos invested in jewels then crossed the Black Sea, going straight to Sarai, capital of Berke, khan of the Golden Horde, brother of Batu, to whom they ‘gave freely of all their jewels’. The Polos always thought big and went to the top: Berke ‘directed that they should receive double the value of the jewels’. The Polos must have been charmers, for wherever they went grizzled khans welcomed them. Berke even appointed them as his fixers.

In 1252 Berke converted to Islam – the first of the family to do so – and was disgusted by cousin Hulagu’s butchery at Baghdad: ‘He must pay for killing the caliph.’ The Golden clan was turning on itself. Three of his family were killed by Hulagu – ‘Mongols killed by Mongol swords’. They clashed in the Caucasus; yet, even when the khans fought, a Mongolsphere – every bit as influential and pervasive as the power of the Angloworld of the last two centuries – extended from Korea to Novgorod for 200 years. In 1262, Berke allied with Hulagu’s chief enemy Baibars, not without reflecting that ‘If we’d been united, we’d have conquered the whole world.’

If there ever was a Pax Mongolica, it was sporadic, as the Polos found. ‘The roads being rendered unsafe, the brothers couldn’t return’ to Venice, and were stranded for three years in Bukhara, learning Mongolian, before charming an envoy of Hulagu on his way to Kublai – who, he explained, was fascinated by Europe and Christianity. After all, his mother was Christian. The Polos joined the caravan.

* In 1212, Innocent encouraged the three Christian potentates, Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarre and Pedro II of Aragon, to unite to fight the Berber rulers of al-Andalus. At Las Navas de Tolosa, the Christians routed them, trapping Caliph al-Nasir, who ran for his life but fell into a trench. Ferried back to Marrakesh, he died of his wounds. The Berbers’ victorious aura was broken: Yusuf II was gored while playing with one of his pet cows – not a death fit for a caliph. Several Islamic cities fell to Alfonso, who boasted that at Ubeda he had killed 60,000 Muslims, men, women and children, a crime worse than Jerusalem in 1099. His grandson Fernando III mopped up Cordoba and Seville. By the time of his death, Granada was the last Islamic kingdom in Spain.

* By some calculations, it is the largest religious building in world history and is certainly the biggest Hindu temple ever built. Five-towered (in honour of the five peaks of the mythical Mount Meru), built around courtyards, it remains a wonder to behold, decorated with over a thousand bare-breasted dancing girls, goblins and yogis, lions and elephants, its friezes depicting Suryavarman himself along with war elephants and his court of Brahmins and courtiers bearing palanquins and parasols.

* Gregory IX created the Papal Inquisition to prevent local rulers or mobs taking on supposed heretics without papal supervision. He burned copies of the Jewish Talmud and ordered that all Jews should be regarded as perpetuam servitus judaeorum – in servitude until Judgement Day.

* Frederick’s third wife was Isabella, daughter of the late King John of England. As part of an alliance with her young brother Henry III against France, Frederick married her in 1235. The emperor was often away fighting for years on end, leaving Isabella sometimes pregnant and always guarded by African eunuchs. She corresponded with Henry III while Frederick continued to enjoy his big love affair with his Sicilian mistress Bianca Lancia, with whom he had children, and his Arab harem. The English empress of Germany, queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, died in childbirth like his second wife, aged only twenty-five. Frederick later married Bianca on her deathbed. In this period, German sovereigns were elected as king of Germany but only enjoyed the title Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or Caesar (kaiser in German) if they were crowned by the pope. Their heir was entitled king of the Romans.

* Probably named Robert, it is plausible that the Englishman was the chaplain of the barons who in 1215 had rebelled against King John and who forced him to concede a charter of noble privileges, Magna Carta. Taking service on the continent he had been captured by Batu Khan, whom he served for twenty years – one of those characters whose bizarre trajectory illustrates the surprising flows of history.

* Novgorod, founded by the Rurikovichi or other Nordic trader-raiders, had developed into an oligarchical republic, not dissimilar to Venice and Genoa. Ruling from the Baltic to the Urals, its exact constitution is unclear but there was an assembly – the Veche – that elected a leader known as the posadnik who ruled somehow with a council of grandees and the archbishop, who in turn often chose a Rurikovich prince to lead the republic when it was in peril. It proves there were traditions in medieval Russia other than autocracy.

* In 1156 Prince Yuri ‘Long-Arm’ Dolgoruky, whose mother was Gytha of Wessex, daughter of King Harold, built a stronghold on a hill overlooking the Moskva River. At times he was grand prince of Kyiv, then of Vladimir-Suzdal. It was the Mongol invasions that ultimately made this fortress, Moscow, the pre-eminent principality of the Rurikovichi and future fulcrum of Russian empire.

* But the Assassins still controlled castles in Syria and Lebanon. In 1271, they attempted to assassinate Prince Edward of England who was on Crusade in Acre: the future Edward I survived to hammer the Scots. After the destruction of the last Assassin castles, the Nizaris split once again, with one branch continuing the sacred succession. In the nineteenth century, their imam was appointed governor of Qom by the Persian shah who granted him the title Aga Khan before he moved to British India, flourishing as a British client. In the twenty-first century, the Aga Khans are still imams of fifteen million Nizaris.

* A cousin of the last caliph escaped to Cairo where he was set up as honorary caliph, a lineage maintained by the Mamluk sultans there until 1517, when the Ottomans took the last of the family to Istanbul and, after almost a thousand years of greatness, into obscurity.

* When Genghis took Persia, Saadi became a Sufi pilgrim – Sufism being Islamic mysticism. Saadi studied in Baghdad and Cairo, visited Mecca and Jerusalem until he was captured and enslaved by the Crusaders in Acre for seven years and then ransomed by the Egyptians. After fifty years of wandering, Saadi went home and wrote his masterpieces. The wars inspired his love of humanity: ‘All human beings are members of one frame, / Since all, at first, from the same essence came,’ he wrote in Bani Adam. ‘If you feel not for others’ misery, / A human being is no name for you.’ But his aphorisms are sharp: ‘Don’t make friends with an elephant keeper if you have no room to entertain an elephant.’ On war, he advised: ‘Before drawing your weapons for battle take care / That the pathway to peace is discreetly cleared.’ He lived into his nineties.

* The sultan was replaced by his widow, Shajar al-Durr, a former slave who now ruled as sultan, like Razia in Delhi – a rare thing in Islamic history, a woman ruling in her own right as Malikat al-Muslimin (Queen of the Muslims). But when her rule was challenged she was forced to marry a Mamluk general. She later had him murdered in his bath, a deed that infuriated the guards and led to her, naked except for a diamond-encrusted shawl, being beaten to death by the shoes of his palace-slaves: death by stiletto.

* After losing Antioch in 1268, Bohemond VI kept the Lebanese port of Tripoli, which was inherited by his sister Lucia. Sultan Qalawun took the port in 1289. Lucia, countess of Tripoli, the last Hauteville, may have perished in the ruins.

* In addition to his four wives, each with a court of several hundred, Kublai’s favourite concubines, were ‘very beautiful fair-skinned girls’ from Afghanistan. All his concubines were were trained by experienced Mongol women.

* The Great City was retaken by the Greek prince Michael VIII Palaiologos, whose family would rule the restored Basileia Romaion for the next two centuries. The Romaioi celebrated by burning Venetian ships, blinding Venetian merchants and promoting the Genoese, who received their own quarter, Galata, where they built the Tower of Christ, the watchtower that still stands there.