The World

The Keitas of Mali and the Habsburgs of Austria

RAPACIOUS RUDOLF AND MARCO MILLION

At Dadu, around 1271, Kublai received the Polos, interrogating them genially about the two Christian emperors, then ordering them to take a letter to Pope Clement IV requesting 100 scholars to teach Mongols as well as some oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Polos were dazzled by Kublai’s eight palaces, their ‘rooftops of green, azure peacock-blue, bright as crystal’, and a banqueting hall that seated 6,000.

Armed with an imperial pass,^* the Polos set off back to Venice, but when they arrived Niccolò ‘discovered his wife was dead, and that she had left behind her a son of fifteen years of age, whose name was Marco’ – as Marco himself put it. The Polos found a Europe in chaos – Clement was dead, the heirs of Frederick had been murdered,^* Ghibellines and Guelphs fought for Italian power. But one family thrived: the Habsburgs.

No one could agree who should be emperor of Germany, but Rudolf of Habsburg aspired to the crown as the godson of Frederick and grandson of a Staufen princess. Tall, swaggering, greedy, vicious and long-nosed, he was in his own words ‘an insatiable warrior’, burning monasteries, razing villages, hanging bandits and slaughtering Baltic pagans. But in 1273, now old (fifty-five), he was elected king of Germany.^* He began by announcing sanctimoniously that ‘Today I forgive all those wrongs done to me and I promise to be a defender of peace just as I was formerly a rapacious man of war.’

His rival was the flashy Czech king of Bohemia, Ottokar the Golden, whose silver mines made him Europe’s richest sovereign with the blingiest court.^* Ottokar and Rudolf knew each other well, having crusaded together against the Lithuanian pagans: Königsberg (King’s City, today Kaliningrad) was founded in Ottokar’s honour. But they loathed each other. When the rightful duke of Austria died, the auric Czech king married his sister Margaret who was thirty years older, grabbed Vienna and then claimed the imperial throne, mocking Rudolf Habsburg for his dour ‘grey mantle’.

Kaiser Rudolf won over five princes by marrying daughters to them: marriage not war would make the Habsburgs. Then, granting Austria to himself, he attacked Ottokar, who effulgent in his golden glamour prostrated himself. Rudolf deliberately sat low on a stool. ‘He mocked my grey mantle,’ he growled. ‘Let him mock it now.’ When Ottokar, craving revenge and Austria, broke his word, Rudolf defeated him at Dürnkrut near Vienna. The Golden was stripped naked, then his genitals were sliced off and stuffed in his mouth. Rudolf eviscerated him, displaying him gutless and memberless in Vienna, and made his son Albert ‘One-Eye’ the duke of Austria.^*

On Rudolf’s death, the electors, fearing Habsburg power, elected another prince as king of Germany. One-Eye finessed his own election and cut his rival’s throat. His ‘looks that made you sick’ were not improved by the empty eye socket caused by his doctors trying to cure a case of poisoning by hanging him upside down too long. Right up until the middle of the eighteenth century, doctors were so destructive that it is likely that aristocrats with access to expensive medics lived less long than peasants with none. Ultimately One-Eye was undone by his own avarice, failing to share his father’s inheritance with a nephew who suffered under the nickname John NoLand. After rejecting a disdainful bouquet from One-Eye, NoLand and his henchmen ambushed the king, cleaving his skull with a mace. Habsburgian revenge was atrocious: Albert’s children Leopold, duke of Austria, and Agnes, queen of Hungary, sat on a dais as sixty-nine innocent retainers of John’s hitmen were beheaded one by one, their headless bodies laid out in rows. As blood spurted, Agnes supposedly sighed, ‘I am bathed in May dew.’

The Habsburgs were now the House of Austria – and the Polos were on their way back to Kublai Khan, now joined by Niccolò’s teenaged son Marco. The Venetians travelled via the Crusader capital Acre, where they enjoyed a stroke of luck: a friend was elected pope and they headed for China bearing papal letters and the sacred Jerusalem oil – though it seems they forgot the hundred scholars.

After an exciting journey, during which Marco was fascinated by the sexual libertinism of Tangut girls, whom he found ‘beautiful, vivacious and always ready to oblige’,^* the Polos arrived in Dadu, prostrated themselves before Kublai and presented Marco: ‘Sire,’ said Niccolò, ‘my son and your man, the dearest thing in the world brought with great peril.’ Kublai was charmed by the dashing Italian teenager, enjoying his lively stories and ‘noble aspect’. As Marco boasted, ‘This noble youth seemed to have divine rather than human understanding.’ Mongol courtiers could scarcely conceal their ‘great vexation’ at this popinjay, later nicknamed Marco Million for his bumptious grandiloquence.

As papal envoys, the Polos tried to convert Kublai to Catholicism, but his heterodoxy was impregnable.^* Yet Marco was delighted by Kublai’s jovial grandeur. While the older Polos traded, Kublai sent Marco on international missions, though he exaggerated his importance. The truth was extraordinary enough: no westerner ever got so close to Kublai. Polo claimed he was appointed a governor; more likely he operated as a tax collector, among many other exploits during his seventeen years serving Kublai. If the khagan was curious about the Polos’ stories and jewels, he was now most interested in the conquest of Song China. Marco claimed that his father and uncle advised on developing his cannon to breach the walls of Song cities. The Mongols had brought Chinese gunpowder weaponry to Europe, but no technology spreads so fast, nor is improvised faster, than the technology of killing. Europeans were already improving Chinese designs. It is likely that Kublai was manufacturing the first iron cannon,^* and this was the first full gunpowder war.

Kublai sent his generals Bayan (nicknamed Hundred Eyes) and Achu (grandson of Subotai) with huge Chinese and Mongol armies to take the great cities of the Song heartland. After Achu had failed to advance, Kublai asked his cousins in Iraq to send him Arab engineers to build trebuchets, copied from Frankish designs, that he combined with Chinese thundercrash bombs; the Song fired back. The fighting was slow and ferocious, on land, in sieges and by river. In 1275, Hundred Eyes slaughtered all the 250,000 inhabitants of Changzhou; the next year the entire population of Changsha committed suicide; finally, after fifty years of war, the capital Linan (Hangzhou) surrendered. It was the first time a nomadic invader had conquered all China and the first time, since the downfall of the Tang, that all of China was united under one ruler. Now Kublai, khagan of all the Golden realms,^* and founder of the Yuan dynasty of China, ruled the greatest empire in span and population, the largest that would ever exist. Seeing himself as Universal Emperor, it was just a matter of conquering the last independent powers of Asia.

KUBLAI’S INVASION OF JAPAN

‘We think all countries belong to our family,’ Kublai told the Japanese regent menacingly. ‘No one would want to resort to war.’ Tibet^* and Korea had been subjugated, leading Kublai to reach fifty miles across the sea to Japan, still ruled from Kyoto by nominal emperors directed by hereditary regents. The regent rejected his demand for submission.

In 1274, Kublai sent 150 ships to conquer Japan, landing in Hakata, where they were to their surprise repelled by a tiny Japanese army. But this was just one of Kublai’s multi-front wars. In the south, he turned to the kingdoms of the Indosphere, sending Marco Polo on delegations to Burma and Vietnam. His son Toghon invaded Annam then Champa (northern and southern Vietnam), but the Vietnamese, using guerrilla warfare, defeated him and, thus humiliated, he found himself rejected by his father: Mongols don’t lose. Angkor, further inland, avoided submission, but Burma, based in its red-pagodaed capital Pagan, and the two Thai kingdoms, Chiangmai and Sukhothai, were obliged to yield. With south-east Asia secured, Kublai’s fleet landed 30,000 men in Java and smashed the Indianized trading empire of Singhasari with the help of a Javanese ally, Raden Wijaya, who then double-crossed and expelled the Mongols.^*

The failure in Japan rankled. In 1281, the sixty-five-year-old Kublai commissioned two armadas at breakneck speed and sent 45,000 Mongols and 120,000 Chinese-Koreans, accompanied by thousands of horses and armed with firebombs, to invade Japan. The fleets failed to meet as planned. But in August 1281 Kublai’s southern fleet landed at Kyushu, where Japanese nobles used small fireships to create havoc among the gargantuan Mongol vessels and defeated the invaders, aided by the Sacred Wind (kamikaze) of a fortuitous typhoon. Shipwrecked Mongol vessels, discovered by naufragiologists, were enormous – one was 230 feet long with watertight compartments and colossal anchors – but their shoddy workmanship explains their failure. The loss of life was eyewatering, perhaps the most lethal day of naval warfare ever.

As the obese Kublai, in his mid-seventies, deteriorated, gorging on immortality elixirs and food, his heir died of the family disease – booze – and even old Hundred Eyes who sat with him reminiscing about their triumphs could not cheer him up. The three Polos were still at court, twenty-five years older and considerably richer, but Kublai refused to let them go home – the problem with befriending capricious autocrats. They begged to leave.

‘Why do you wish to die on the road?’ asked Kublai. ‘Tell me. If you need gold, I’ll give you more.’

Niccolò Polo fell to his knees. ‘I have a wife at home and I can’t forsake her in our Christian faith.’

‘On no condition can you leave.’ They feared they would never see Serenissima again.

THE POLOS ESCAPE AND THE IL -KHANS’ HISTORIAN

In 1291, Kublai was sending a young Golden bride, Kököchin (Blue Like Heaven), to marry his great-nephew, Arghun, Il-Khan of Persia. Kököchin needed an experienced traveller as her guardian and her retainers suggested the thirty-eight-year-old Marco Million. After a touching goodbye in which they received jewels and agreed ‘one day’ to return, Kublai ordered the Polos to accompany her, giving them letters to all the kings of Christendom. The bride, aged seventeen, was ‘very pretty and amiable’, wearing a bejewelled bochta headdress as they made the journey by sea in fifteen ships with 600 courtiers. After a hellish voyage in which everyone died – probably of the plague – except eighteen who included Kököchin, the three Polos and their Mongol slave Peter, they landed at Hormuz.

Arghun, grandson of Hulagu, was negotiating with the pope to lead a crusade against the Mamluks of Egypt, an enterprise just agreed when he started to sicken. Arghun sent a Genoese envoy westwards to offer Jerusalem to Edward I of England and Philippe of France in return for Frankish help.^* But they were too late. In apocalyptic scenes, Acre fell to the Mamluks.

Arghun, already an alcoholic addicted to immortality elixirs, was about to marry Kököchin when he overdosed. Most Il-Khans died so young of booze and drugs that no royal death was complete without accusations of a poisoning. The Polos were detained. Kököchin did not want Marco to leave, but fortunately Arghun’s son, Il-Khan Ghazan, married her instead. She too died young – either by poison or the plague.

Diminutive and ‘uglier than the ugliest trooper in his army’, Ghazan, secretive, cunning and cultured, speaking Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Tibetan, Frankish and Chinese, was an authority on Mongol history, a ferocious commander and a maestro of bloody intrigues. Raised in a mixture of Christianity, Buddhism and Tengrism, he converted to Islam to link the dynasty to his people. He was soon therefore persecuting Buddhists, Christians and Jews, but he continued to seek a joint offensive with Christian powers against the Mamluks. In 1300, his cavalry and his Armenian allies took Damascus and Israel, galloping through the unwalled Jerusalem to reach Gaza. The outstanding personality of the Il-Khanate was Ghazan’s vizier, his Persian-Jewish doctor Rashid el-Din, son of Arghun’s apothecary, who, after converting to Islam, ruled for almost twenty years. Ghazan commissioned him to write his Universal History, collecting many of the family stories from a lost work, The Golden Book, and from the Il-Khan himself. When Ghazan died at the height of the khanate, his brother Öljaitü reappointed Rashid. While Öljaitü could not sustain Ghazan’s conquests he shared his cultural tolerance and ambitions, and started a new sacred metropolis, Soltaniyeh.^* But in 1316 the death of Öljaitü from booze destroyed Rashid, who was accused of poisoning him. ‘Here’s the head of the Jew!’ his enemies cried, parading his detached head. ‘God curse him!’

After nine months in Tabriz, the Il-Khan capital, the three Polos finally escaped. As they approached Venice, they heard that their patron Kublai had died. The Polos fascinated Venetians with their stories, their Mongol slave Peter, their Chinese inventions – paper money, eyeglasses and a fortune that paid for their palazzo. At a dinner, the three sported their shabby Mongol fur coats, then suddenly cut open the lining, out of which flowed hidden jewels.

SUNDIATA THE LION KING: THE MANSAS OF MALI AND THE MEXICA OF THE ISLAND CITY

Marco now became embroiled in the bloody rivalry of Genoa and Venice as they fought for the prizes of trade in spices and slaves from Black Sea to Atlantic shores. The maritime cities also traded wool from England, which was often treated and finished by an inland city, Florence, that was thriving as a leather-manufacturing, textile-processing and banking centre, propelled by its own gold currency the florin and its pioneering use of bills of exchange and joint-stock companies.

Both Genoa and Venice became rich by trading slaves. The beleaguered emperor of the Romaioi, Michael VIII Palaiologos, granted the two cities and the Mamluks rights to the Black Sea slave trade. The Genoese entrepôt Kaffa was the capital of its territory Gazaria in Crimea, governed from 1281 by a Genoese consul and later by special government offices – the greatest slave market in Europe. The Venetians used Tana, a Mongol port in Crimea. Italians bought mainly female slaves for service, personal and sexual; as we will see, the Medici owned both white and black female slaves. The identity of the slaves depended on the wars being fought at any given time: the Mongol wars generated incalculable numbers of slaves, as every Mongol soldier was expected to own two as part of his equipage. Enslaved Turks, Russians, Circassians and Georgians poured into Europe and Egypt. The greatest demand for male slaves came from the military commandos of Egypt: Sultan Qalawun, himself formerly enslaved, promised Italian traders to pay over the market price, and his household contained as many as 12,000 Mamluks. Later sultans owned 25,000, but they were ultimately manumitted and could rise to be generals if not monarchs.

The Genoese were more adventurous than the Venetians, paying for their Asian goods in bullion, which originated in western Africa at a time when Genoese and Catalan sailors began to venture down the Moroccan coast. In 1291, two Genoese brothers, the Vivaldis, tried to find a route ‘by the Ocean Sea’ to India, sailing down the Moroccan coast and then out in the unknown, whence they never returned. Later, another Genoese, Lancelotto Malocello, set off to find the Vivaldis. The Venetians meanwhile concentrated on their Mediterranean empire and the Egyptian trade.

The gold that lubricated all this trade was now in the hands of a powerful African dynasty. Just at the time of Marco’s return, a mysterious African potentate named Sakura emerged out of the Sahara and arrived in Cairo on his way to make the hajj. Sakura was mansa – emperor – of a rich new realm built on military conquests and gold trading on the ruins of Wagadu.

Its founder, Sundiata Keita,^* was the outcast son of a Mandinke farma or king, Naré Maghann Konaté, who was told in a vision that he would marry an ugly woman who would deliver a great king. Instead this junior wife, Sogolon, gave birth to a cripple, Sundiata; mother and son were mocked by the king’s senior wife, Sassouma Bereté, and the crown prince, Dankaran. Sundiata did not walk until he was seven. When Naré died, Dankaran ordered Sundiata’s killing. Mother and son fled to the court of the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté, encouraging him to expel the vicious Dankaran, but the Sosso instead occupied the kingdom. The Mandinke elders then invited Sundiata to return. Around 1235, he raised an army and at Kirina defeated the Sosso, after which the Gbara assembly, made up of grandees, sorcerers and Islamic holy men (marabouts), chose him as mansa in return for his recognition of an oral law code^* and agreed that mansas would be chosen from the Keita family – which ruled until 1610.

Basing himself at a new capital Niani (Mali), Sundiata – known as the Lion King – expanded to Senegal and Gambia on the Atlantic and along the Niger River to northern Nigeria, co-opting conquered princes. The mansa controlled the supply of gold from the Bamaka and Bure mines worked by Akan people (Ghana), the ultimate source of their wealth, but as the Lion King’s descendant Musa explained, they did not own the mines; instead they procured the gold by trade or tribute: ‘If we conquer them and take it, it won’t yield anything.’ But the gold was all-important. Indeed, one of Sundiata’s titles was Lord of the Mines of Wangara.

Islam had been brought across the desert by Berbers and Arab traders. Sundiata claimed descent from the Abyssinian freedman Bilal, Muhammad’s first muezzin, but he was also described as a Mandinke magician. This empire was fuelled not just by gold but by textiles and slaves, the latter usually pagans captured in Sundiata’s endless wars who served as labourers, servants and concubines.^*

Around 1255, Sundiata somehow drowned in the Sankarani River – at a place still called Sundiatadun (Sundiata’s Depths) – but his son, Uli (Yérélinkon), continued the expansion, making the first mansal pilgrimage to Mecca. But when two Keita brothers fought for the throne, Sakura, a freedman general, seized power, rebuilt the realm and set off to Mecca, only to be killed on the way home, at which the Keitas were restored.

The Genoans were not the only ones lured by the Atlantic: Mansa Abubakr II, grandson of Sundiata, ‘didn’t believe it was impossible to discover the furthest limits of the Atlantic Ocean and wished vehemently to do so’, explained his successor, Musa, ‘so he equipped 300 ships filled with men, gold, water, provisions to last years’ and dispatched them. Only one ship returned, so the mansa ‘got ready 2,000 ships – 1,000 for himself and his men, 1,000 for water and provisions – and left me to deputize for him’ as he embarked on the Atlantic. The fleet is be exaggerated, but why should not African kings crave exploration any less than Genoese: did the mansa sail for America?

The American south-west was in turmoil. Just around this time, something terrible happened to Cahokia and the other Mississippi kingdoms. Drought, disease or war broke these settlements, which were then abandoned. Mass graves of dismembered, sometimes cannibalized, bodies suggest a violent cleansing, and a stampede migration. Out of this mayhem, in ways we may never understand, came a realignment of the peoples of north America and the migration southwards of the people who would found the Mexica empire. The Cahokians were pressured by migrations of other tribes, which the survivors probably joined; some may have continued to grow maize but most lived as both hunter-foragers and planters of maize and beans. After the downfall of the Mississippian kings, these tribes were probably governed by assemblies in which respected elders debated decisions with the entire tribe including women, choosing leaders for wars or special hunts. But their world was not peaceful. They constantly fought each other; no tribe was dominant; power politics among the peoples of the vastness of North America were for the next two centuries in constant flux.

The advancing tribes who may have pressured Cahokia or exploited the chaos were peoples speaking Uto-Nahuatl or Uto-Aztecan languages moving eastwards from California. Some stayed in the north – later they became the Comanche and Shoshane peoples – but many others, gradually over centuries, were drawn to the rich cities and fecund land of the Valley of Mexico and migrated south. They all came from a semi-mythical land they called Aztlan – origin of the word Aztec. In around 1300, one of the poorest and latest to arrive were the Mexica (pronounced me-sheek-a), who were treated as outcasts and driven on to the least desirable land.

The Mexica arrived in a land of powerful cities, Texcoco and Azcapotzalco, where peoples lived on maize and beans, cooking tamales and tortillas, drinking alcoholic pulque made from the agave cactus (much weaker than tequila and fermented rather than distilled). Women spun cotton textiles; men farmed and fought – they deployed neither metal nor the wheel but their children’s toys had wheels; they used rubber mixed with the sap of morning glory (a process not discovered in the west until the nineteenth century) to make balls for their games. In the absence of metal, they crafted obsidian volcanic glass for their weapons.^*

The Mexica were inspired not only by the existing cities but also by the astonishing ruins of the mysterious city that they called Teotihuacan – Home of the Gods – and Tula – Place of Reeds. In 1325, the supreme god of the Mexica chose a marshy island site by killing his nephew Copil, throwing the heart into Lake Texcoco and telling the Mexica to build their city where they found an eagle eating a snake. They built Tenochtitlan there because no one else wanted this swampy place, but, like Venice, once the drainage was solved, it would become a defensible, almost impregnable city linked to the mainland by a causeway.

At first the Mexica served as soldiers for the nearby city state of Azcapotzalco, home of the Tepanecs, fellow Nahuatl-speakers from north America, ruled by a family descended from the Toltec kings, but they established relationships with many of the local cities. Around this time they decided to choose a monarch – tlatoani, which means Speaker – marrying their leader Acamapichtli to a Tepanec princess. Chosen from the family by a council of grandees, the new Speaker stood naked before their patron god, then led a military expedition to capture prisoners for sacrifice before the installation ceremony of pageantry, dancing and human sacrifice. His son Huitzilihuitl (Hummingbird Feather) expanded city and territory while building alliances through marriages to princesses from kingdoms outside the Valley. He backed the victorious Tepanecs, who allowed the Mexica to build their own relationship with nearby Texcoco. Formally just the first among equals in an oligarchy of aristocrats, the Speaker technically owned all land, which he assigned to his nobles, an elite served by slaves. When a ruler died, his slaves were killed with him. The Mexica were established at their island city – but it would take a conqueror to win them an empire.

THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN – MUSA IN CAIRO

Abubakr, mansa of Mali, probably never reached America.^* ‘That was the last we saw of him,’ said his nephew Musa, ‘and so I became king in my own right.’ The twenty-five-year-old Musa, great-nephew of Sundiata, now mansa, may have assassinated his uncle; but, whatever happened, he started to expand, conquering ‘twenty-four towns’. As a devout Muslim the enslavement of fellow Muslims was banned. Instead the mansa ‘wages a permanent holy war against the pagans of Sudan who are his neighbours’, capturing numerous prisoners who were promptly enslaved. There were hints that Musa may have killed his own mother, perhaps an accident which encouraged him to make a hajj: he asked his lawyers what he could do to earn Allah’s forgiveness. Musa planned a grandiose pilgrimage to Mecca via the greatest city of Islam, Cairo, setting off with an entourage of 20,000 courtiers (some sources claim 60,000), numerous soldiers, 14,000 female slaves and 500 male slaves. ‘Each of the slaves,’ wrote al-Sadi of Timbuktu, ‘bore in his hand a staff fashioned from 500 mithqals of gold [five pounds].’ Camels carried ‘100 loads of gold’. While north Africa was in chaos, the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad, son of Qalawun, was at the height of his prestige, ruler of Egypt, Israel, Syria, Mecca and Medina, yet even the Cairenes were dazzled by the splendours of Musa – and could not wait to relieve him of as much gold as possible. As he approached, Musa sent 50,000 dinars of gold as a present to al-Nasir, who then received him in his palace in Saladin’s Citadel where the mansa ‘refused to kiss the ground’.

‘I don’t prostrate myself before anyone but God,’ Musa said, at which al-Nasir ‘excused him’ and they sat together as equals – the greatest of sultans and the greatest of mansas, the former the son of a slave, the latter a descendant of kings.

Spending a year in Cairo, Musa ‘and his followers bought all kinds of things, they thought their money was inexhaustible’. But the Egyptians systematically bilked the Malians. Musa spent such quantities that the gold market collapsed. During conversations with Egyptian luminaries, he discussed the strange oceanic death of his predecessor and the source of his family’s incredible wealth. After making the hajj, Musa had to borrow to maintain his style on the way home. Most of his slaves died en route, so he bought Turkic, Slavic and Ethiopian replacements, 12,000 of them, whom he took back to west Africa.

Back home, Musa annexed the ancient trading cities of Jenne, Gao and Timbuktu. In the latter city he used his new Andalusian architect al-Sahali to build the Djinguereber Mosque (made of earth) and the Sankoré madrasa (both still stand), as well as the mansa’s palace. Musa and his successors held court in a domed pavilion, guarded by 300 archers and lancers, announced by trumpets and drums. All of this was observed by the sharp eye of a pilgrim from Morocco who made his hajj, passing through Cairo around the same time as Musa: Ibn Battuta then embarked on an incredible journey that saw him meeting the khan of the Golden Horde, serving a psychopathic sultan of Delhi^* and bumping into Moroccan friends in Mongol China. After narrowly surviving robberies, tragedies and assassinations, he helped rule the Maldives, where he got married. Everywhere in Asia and Africa, he encountered slavery and enjoyed its benefits – collecting and jettisoning slaves, wives, lovers, their qualities lovingly chronicled.^*

When he visited Mali under the Keita dynasty, he was impressed by the magnificence of the mansas, yet ready to lecture the Malians on their relaxed approach to female freedom: women sat chatting freely without confinement to any harem or face covering, while their slave girls and daughters ‘appear naked before them, exposing their genitals’.

On his return, the king of Fez ordered him to write his memoirs. Perhaps the greatest travel book, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling is an account of the 117,000 miles he had travelled. Marco Polo had managed only 12,000 but he was about to write the other great travel book of its time.

Marco Million had never fought, but Venice and Genoa were now at war. Marco fitted out his own galley and joined the fleet commanded by Andrea Dandola, the doge’s son and descendant of the blind conqueror of Constantinople. But in September 1298 it was routed off Dalmatia; Venice lost eighty-three of ninety-five ships and over 5,000 sailors (many of them galley slaves), Dandolo dashed out his brains against a mast, and Marco was captured. Imprisoned in Genoa, Marco was soon recounting his exploits to captivated jailers and prisoners including a writer of Arthurian romances, Rustichello, who decided to write Marco’s over-egged but delicious Travels, which were now read by everyone and introduced China, India and Persia to people who had never left their home towns. When he was released, Marco finally married, but he had developed into a rich, mean-spirited and litigious oligarch. In the streets, children called out, ‘Tell us another lie, Marco!’ but he always kept a copy of the Travels in his pocket to read out. As he was dying in 1324, the contents of his will – manumitting his Mongol slave Peter and leaving Kököchin’s headdress and Kublai’s paiza to his daughters – revealed that Xanadu was always on his mind.

Polo and Ibn Battuta were unicorns of adventure. Although most people stayed in their towns and villages, more were travelling or connecting to different worlds and much of this was due to the Mongolsphere of the Golden Family, whose armies and connections had linked east and west more than ever before. But that could be a mixed blessing: the plague would accelerate their downfall as it mutated into a much more contagious pneumatic strain.

In 1347, the swollen and decaying bodies of dead soldiers started to rain down on the besieged Genoese slave-trading merchants of Kaffa.

THE DESTRUCTIVE DEATH: FOUR WRITERS IN THE GREAT MORTALITY

Janibeg, the khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of Russia, ordered plague-ridden bodies to be catapulted into Kaffa to accelerate its surrender. Often cited as the moment when the plague transferred from the Mongolian empire to western Europe, it is more likely the pathogens were already over the walls.

Just as the plague had travelled west, it had simultaneously travelled east, starting in the centre: Nestorian gravestones near Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan mention the plague in 1338–9. As Kublai’s feckless descendants fought for power, natural disasters – flood and famines – combined with a wave of peasant rebellions to spread the disease through China and undermined the dynasty. China’s population of 120 million may have halved. It also travelled west along the Mongol trade routes to the Il-Khanate, now ruled by the young Abu Said, described by Ibn Battuta as ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’. But the Il-Khan was at war with his cousin, Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, who in 1335 invaded the Caucasus. Abu Said, thirty years old, rushed to repel Özbeg, but died of the plague with six of his sons. The sudden deaths led to the disintegration of the Il-Khanate, the second Golden kingdom to be ravaged.

Somewhere during their clashes, the pathogen was transferred to the third khanate. Özbeg had expanded into Europe, attacking Thrace and forcing Emperor Andronikos III to give him a daughter as a wife. In Russia, he murdered at least four Rurikovichi and promoted as chief Mongol enforcer Yuri of Moscow, to whom he married his sister. Moscow became so rich that Yuri’s son was nicknamed Ivan Moneybags.^* In Crimea, Özbeg confirmed Kaffa as Genoese and Tana as Venetian, but in 1343, after his death, it was the Genoese killing of a Muslim that provoked his son Janibeg to besiege Kaffa. In 1346, as Janibeg returned with forces including his Muscovite allies, the plague struck his camp; ultimately 25 per cent of the population of the Golden Horde would die – and whether or not he fired infected bodies into Kaffa, the Genoese caught the disease.

Janibeg broke camp, his troops thus spreading the disease through Russia and Scandinavia. A Genoese slave ship sailing from Crimea to Alexandria was struck so badly that, of 300 passengers, only forty-five were alive when it docked, and they all died too. In October 1347, twelve Genoese ships docked at Messina in Sicily with a gruesome cargo: dead and dying people, covered in black, blood-filled, egg-sized, pus-seeping swellings. As we have seen, the fleas of marmots, delicacy of nomadic horsemen, then of rats, lurking in the fetid camps of armies, the alleyways of docks and the holds of ships, proved relentlessly efficient vectors of death. Europe was already weakened by a great famine: malnutrition diminishes resistance to illness. The best way to grasp the course of the pandemic – the Great Mortality – is through four of the most refined men of their age, writers in different worlds who, faced with the utterly unbearable and unthinkable, did what writers do: write.

In Aleppo, ruled by the Mamluk sultans, al-Wardi, a world historian and author of the geographical treatise The Uniqueness of Strange Things, was one of the first to understand the strangeness of a global pandemic. ‘The Plague began,’ he declared, ‘in the land of darkness.’ Even in the face of horror, al-Wardi wrote with dark wit:

Ah, woe to him on whom it calls!

It found the chink in China’s walls –

they had no chance against its advance.

It sashayed into Cathay, made hay in Hind

and sundered souls in Sind.

It put the Golden Horde to the sword, transfixed Transoxiana and pierced Persia.

Crimea cringed and crumpled.

But now it was getting closer: ‘It destroyed mankind in Cairo … stilled all movement in Alexandria, attacked Gaza, trapped Sidon, and Beirut; fired its arrows into Damascus. There, the plague sat like a lion on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more.’ Finally it arrived in Aleppo.

At the same moment, down the African coast in Tunis, the capital of a Maghreb kingdom, a seventeen-year-old named Ibn Khaldun and his brother Yaha were studying philosophy, mathematics and history with famous scholars. Their family were Andalusian aristocrats who had escaped Spain. But now the plague hit Tunis.

Across the Mediterranean in Italy, a Florentine poet, Francesco Petracco – which he latinized to Petrarca – was at the height of his fame. Petrarch’s poetry-loving Italy was beset with wars, the arena for conflict between German emperors and French kings, who established their own papacy in Avignon. Florentine politics was typically vicious: Petrarch’s father, a politician, was exiled from Florence, as was another Florentine, Dante Alighieri, who in the 1320s finished the epic poem Commedia, which deeply influenced Petrarch. The boy trained as a cleric and notary, serving as secretary to a cardinal in Avignon, but sought illumination in the classical world, studying Cicero’s letters, and he wished only to be a poet. He also did a peculiar thing that would become part of European civilization: communing with nature and walking up a mountain just for the fun of it.

His epic Africa – about Scipio – made his name as a young man. In 1327, when he was twenty-three, his life changed when he saw a married woman in church. ‘I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair,’ he wrote, ‘my only one.’ But it inspired his Songbook of love sonnets that made him famous.

As a priest he was not allowed to marry or have lovers, but he had a son and a daughter with a paramour. In 1341, his poetry won him the honour of being crowned poet laureate in Rome. Now, he was in Verona, his career was at its height, when he witnessed the arrival of the ‘death-dealing scythe’. His brother, a Carthusian monk, saw thirty-four of his fellow monks perish. ‘Oh my brother!’ lamented Petrarch. But worse was to come. He lost two of his dearest – his son and his mysterious muse:

Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth … but in the year 1348 withdrew from life, while I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss … Her chaste and lovely body was interred the same day: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came. To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness …

In Aleppo, al-Wardi observed the desperate measures being taken against the Mortality: ‘Oh, if you could see the nobles of Aleppo studying their books of medicine. They follow its remedies by eating dried and sour foods. The buboes which disturb men’s lives are smeared with Armenian clay.’ But still it came. In Verona, Petrarch watched his loved ones die – ‘Where are now our sweet friends, where their beloved faces, their soothing words, their mild and pleasing company?’ – while he corresponded with a new, younger fan, Giovanni Boccaccio. His fellow Florentine, whose father worked for the banking Bardis, disliked banking. Dispatched by his father to the louche Neapolitan court, young Boccaccio fell in love with a muse, whom he called Fiammetta, and it was she who inspired his own early poetry.^* When Boccaccio tried the law, he loathed that too. Dreaming of literature, he longed to meet Petrarch.

As 100,000 Florentines died in three months, Boccaccio fled to the countryside. He was able to witness how ‘At the start, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, grew to the size of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more, some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.’^* No one understood how it spread, but they sensed it was through a ‘miasma’. Their suspicions were not completely wrong for the pneumonic mutation passed in breath, in furs, in food. ‘Some said: the air’s corruption kills. I said: the love of corruption kills,’ wrote al-Wardi, laughing at the way ‘they perfumed their homes with camphor, flowers and sandalwood, wore ruby-rings, ate onions, vinegar and sardines’. Boccaccio noted that ‘The mere touching of the clothes appeared by itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.’ Many believed it had a divine origin: ‘Oh God, it is acting by Your command,’ as Al-Wardi put it. ‘Deliver us from this … We ask God’s forgiveness for our bad souls …’

Then the plague killed its witty chronicler al-Wardi. In Tunis, Ibn Khaldun watched his mother and father die of the Mortality along with many of his teachers; he and his brother survived and watched as ‘Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads obliterated, mansions emptied, dynasties and tribes weakened. The entire inhabited world changed.’

Feelings of impotence, fear, loathing and suspicion ran wild. In Germany and Austria, Jews, the outsiders within, were accused of poisoning wells and burned alive. Flagellants travelled from town to town whipping themselves in displays of repentance. ‘Fear and fanciful notions’ spread while ‘ignorant men and women set themselves up as doctors’, wrote Boccaccio. No treatments worked; lancing the buboes just spread the pathogen; burning spices covered the stench of putrefaction; bleeding, cupping and placing half-dead pigeons on the buboes saved no one.

At dawn bodies were dumped outside the houses, before being tossed on to corpse-heaped carts: ‘A dead man was of no more account than a dead goat.’ Gravediggers got rich and arrogant, supervising mass graves where ‘Bodies were stowed like bales in the hold of a ship.’ Most of the population fled to the countryside, hoping the cleaner air and greater space would alleviate the Mortality, but stories of villages filled with dead and bodies lying beside the roads proved that rusticity was no refuge. Recent research shows it was not the density of people but the density of rats that decided the death rate. Besides, chicken, cows and pigs were also carriers. ‘Some lived in small communities’; others ‘ate and drank immoderately, going from tavern to tavern, satisfying every appetite’. Noblewomen showed their bodies to the servants and slept with them. Then inexplicably the first wave of the Death ebbed.

In October 1350, Florence commissioned Boccaccio to welcome a famous returning son, Petrarch, who stayed in his house. Petrarch was nine years older but the two became friends. Boccaccio called him ‘Master’ and together they watched the Mortality return: ‘We have mourned the year 1348. But now we realize it was only the beginning of mourning and this strange force of evil, unheard of through the ages, has not ceased since then, ready to strike on all sides, to the right and left like a most skilled fighter. So after sweeping across the whole world several times, now that no part is left unharmed, it has struck some regions twice, thrice and four times …’

The death rates were astonishing – 50 per cent of England’s six million people; 75 per cent of Venice’s population; 98 per cent of parts of Egypt – ultimately killing a third to a half of Eurasia and north Africa. Out of seventy-five million Europeans, twenty-five million died. The virus also reached west and central Africa, where villages have been found abandoned. Worldwide, the total number of deaths was somewhere between 75 and 200 million. And nor was this the end: pandemics always return, and the plague struck repeatedly over the next centuries.

Finally in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the Venetian authorities ordered sailors to stay on their ships for thirty days (trentino), later raised to forty (quarantino) – a system that started to work. But, for most, it was too late. The ultimate super-propellent, the Great Mortality changed everything.

* This was a paiza, a golden tablet a foot long and three inches wide, reading: ‘By the power of Eternal Heaven, by order of the Khagan: whoever does not show respect to the bearer will be guilty of an offence punishable by death.’

* Frederick II’s son Conrad by the queen of Jerusalem had been elected king of the Romans in his father’s lifetime and had then inherited Sicily too, but he died in 1254 of malaria. The succession of his half-brother Manfredi, son of the emperor’s favorita Bianca, was shattered by Pope Urban IV’s granting of Sicily to a challenger, Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king, who in 1266 killed Manfredi and then had Conrad’s sixteen-year-old son Conradin, ‘as beautiful as Absalom’, beheaded. But Manfredi’s daughter Constance married King Pedro III of Aragon and retook Sicily. As for Charles, he kept Naples. When his family married into the royal houses of Mitteleuropa, his descendants for a while ruled Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Poland and Romania.

* The German princes who elected the kings of Germany were known as the electors. The kings were crowned in Aachen, Charlemagne’s old capital.

* Ottokar was the greatest so far of the Czech Prˇemyslovci family, who had started as Slavic chieftains around Prague and created a Bohemian kingdom.

* But it was not the end of the Prˇemyslovci: his son Wenceslas II became king of Poland and Bohemia and procured Hungary for his son, ruling a Mitteleuropean empire that fell apart after his death.

* Marco praised the town of Kamul (Hami, Xinjiang) where ‘If a stranger comes to his house, a man receives him with great joy’, ordering ‘daughters, sisters and others to do all that the stranger wishes’, even leaving the house while ‘the stranger stays with his wife, does as he likes and lies in bed with her, continuing in great enjoyment. All the men are thus cuckolded by their wives and not the least ashamed of it … All the women were very fair, exuberant and very wanton, greatly enjoying this custom.’

* Kublai did not just tolerate but celebrated the festivals of ‘the Saracens, Jews and idolaters (Buddhists).’ On being asked the reason, Kublai replied, ‘There are four prophets. The Christians had Jesus, the Saracens Muhammad, the Jews Moses and the idolaters Buddha, who was the first. I reverence all four.’ When the Polos asked him to be baptized, he jovially replied that his shaman, astrologers and sorcerers were much more powerful than Christians: ‘My lords and other believers would demand “What miracles have you seen of Jesus?”’

* The Song manufactured iron bombshells, fire arrows and fire lances, but in 1257 an official who inspected the arsenals concluded that their supplies were totally inadequate ‘in the event of an attack by the barbarians. What chilling indifference!’ The earliest iron cannon that actually exists comes from Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Xanadu, which is dated to 1298.

* Kublai appointed his brother Hulagu the Il-Khan of Persia-Iraq: when he died in 1265, he was buried with the human sacrifice of his favourite slaves. The Golden Horde (Russia) remained the khanate of Batu’s family, now Muslims.

* Kublai invited the young Tibetan lama Phags-pa to join his debates on religion and also to create a new writing based on the Tibetan alphabet. Phags-pa helped him add Tibet to his empire, ruling there as his ‘master of the realm’.

* Raden Wijaya’s Hindu Majapahit kingdom was expanded by his remarkable daughter, Princess Gitarja, who as Rana Tribhuwana – often portrayed as Parvati, goddess of beauty, love and courage – after the murder of her brother the raja in 1328 sometimes commanded her own forces to conquer an empire that extended across Indonesia from Borneo to the Philippines and southern Thailand before her death around the age of forty. The empire controlled the spice trade between China and the Indian Ocean for three centuries.

* The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

* Öljaitü’s mosque complex and tomb with its stunning turquoise double-shell dome still stand. Although textbooks still frame the ‘Renaissance’ as an Italian phenomenon, this Persian-Mongol masterpiece probably inspired Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, which it anticipated by a century. The Il-Khans were allied with the Palaiologoi emperors of Constantinople. To cope with marauding Turkic amirs, led by a warlike family, the Ottomans, operating between their empires, the desperate emperor, Andronikos II, sent a daughter, Eirene, to the khanate; she married first Ghazan and then Öljaitü. These imperial Greek wives were always known as Despina Khatun – despoina being the female for despotes, usually the title of the emperor’s son-in-law. This mixing was now normal: Andronikos gave another daughter Despina Khatun – Maria – to the khan of the Golden Horde.

* The history of Mali is told partly through the observations of Arab scholars – Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, al-Kathir (author of the world history The Beginning and the End), the Egyptian al-Umari (who visited Cairo twelve years later), al-Sadi (scholar of Timbuktu) – and partly through the traditional storytelling of the griot troubadours, the Epic of Sundiata, the research into the stories by French anthropologists in late colonial times, and lastly through the architecture of the Keitas in Timbuktu.

* The Kouroukan Fouga’s approach to women reflected the Mandinke’s matriarchal traditions: ‘Never offend women, our mothers’; ‘Always consult women in government’; ‘Never beat a married woman until her husband has tried to solve the problem.’ Divorce was permitted if the man was impotent or incapable of protecting or if either spouse was insane.

* On slavery the Kouroukan Fouga specified, ‘Do not ill-treat slaves. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries. You should allow them to rest one day per week and to end their working day at a reasonable time.’

* The Mexica had no domesticated pack animals; porters were their only transport. Their most valued material was jade, followed by gold or silver. They traded goods and enslaved people at huge markets where hair was cut, food was served, gold and silver exchanged, using cacao beans and cotton as currency (a fresh avocado was worth three beans, a turkey 100). People were enslaved by virtue of war, debt and punishment, but slavery was not hereditary. Enslaved people worked as servants, the unlucky were sacrificed, the lucky freed.

* Most historians believe that it is impossible that Africans crossed the Atlantic because they lacked the shipbuilding technology. But of course they could have copied Genoese ships that were shipwrecked down the African coast. A Spanish friar who interviewed Yucatán Maya in 1588 was told that ‘in ancient times seventy Moros [black people] reached the coast in a vessel that must have been through a great storm’ led by a ‘xeque’ – a sheikh: all, he claimed, were killed.

* The despot of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, who in 1325 inherited a powerful sultanate of northern India from his Turkish father Ibn Tughluq, expanded southwards, persecuting Hindus. He ordered the evacuation of Delhi and moved his capital to Devagiri in Deccan, executing those who resisted. When Ibn Battuta visited, the sultan appointed him a qadi, Islamic judge, but the traveller noticed pieces of executed men dangling over the streets. Ultimately Muhammad’s eccentricities led to revolts by his generals in the north, while two Hindu brothers – Harihari and Bukka Ray – established a new kingdom, Vijayanagara, in the south. Ibn Battuta was lucky to get away alive.

* On the Mahratta girls of India, Ibn Battuta decides that ‘They have in intercourse a deliciousness and a knowledge of erotic movements beyond that of other women.’ It was not just about sex but also about joyfulness: of one of his wives in the Maldives he wrote, ‘She was one of the best girls and so affectionate that when I married her she used to anoint me with perfume and incense my garments, laughing all the while.’

* The Golden khans deployed the Muscovites not only to police and tax Russia but also to repel the rising power in the north, the pagan dukes of Lithuania. When he died in 1377, Europe’s last great pagan monarch, Algirdas, was cremated on a pyre with human and equine sacrifices.

* The real Fiammetta was Maria d’Aquino, King Robert of Naples’s illegitimate daughter. Petrarch also visited Naples as a papal envoy. Both he and Boccaccio wrote about the lurid court where a young girl, Joanna, succeeded her grandfather Robert. Naples had been ruled by the French princes of Anjou, whose descendant Louis the Great now ruled Hungary and much of eastern Europe, later adding Poland. Louis’s brother Andrew was married to Joanna to bring Naples back into the family. Joanna and many of her court resisted the Anjous. In 1345, Joanna acquiesced in the murder of her husband, aged only seventeen, who was half strangled then tossed screaming out of a window with a rope tied around his genitals. Fiammetta too was said to be party to the conspiracy. In 1347, Louis the Great invaded and seized Naples, but spasms of the plague drove him out of Italy. Joanna was restored, but her lover, Louis of Taranto, whom she married, ruled until his death by plague in 1362. When her cousin Charles of Durozza overthrew her, he had her strangled, and then beheaded Fiammetta for her role in the killing of Andrew. Fortunately Boccaccio did not live to see Fiammetta’s end.

* The bacilli travelled to the lymph glands, which swelled up into buboes – hence the name bubonic – that oozed blood and pus as other organs were infected. Internal haemorrhaging filled bags of skin with blackened blood: the Black Death. Victims experienced fever, blood-vomiting and agony, often going to bed well and dying by morning.