The World

The Tamerlanians, the Ming and the Obas of Benin

THE OTTOMANS ARRIVE IN EUROPE: TWO CASTLES AND A WEDDING

All these acute observers wondered at the horror that had, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘swallowed many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out’. Petrarch asked, ‘How will posterity believe that there has been a time when … well nigh the whole globe remained without inhabitants? Houses vacant, cities deserted, countryside neglected and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth? … Oh happy people of the future, who haven’t known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables.’

The Destructive Death inspired a new sense of God’s higher power, but also an appreciation of the value of humanity itself, God’s greatest creation. Petrarch, looking back at the light of classical culture, called the intervening centuries ‘the Dark Ages’. He was heralding a new lightness – the celebration of learning and beauty, including that of the human body, that became the Renaissance. While praying to God, Petrarch’s later works placed man at the centre of the world. Boccaccio too celebrated the vivacious genius of humanity in the face of catastrophe, imagining seven women and three young men escaping the Mortality to shelter in a rustic villa outside Florence where they tell a hundred stories of love, sex and absurdity over a period of ten days – The Decameron – which would reveal the ‘human comedy’. (It was Boccaccio who called Dante’s masterpiece the Divine Comedy.)

The Mortality changed society and power ‘like a pristine repeated creation’, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘a world brought into existence anew’. Boccaccio noticed the survivors’ exhilaration in ‘the looser morals of the women who survived’. Women became more independent and more pleasure-seeking, which Boccaccio celebrated with the first biographical work on the lives of 106 women, many of them mythical: De mulieribus claris – ‘Of Famous Women’. Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

And of course pandemics change families: ever since Pope Gregory I at the end of the sixth century, the Church had tried to impose its own peculiar anti-kinship marriage policy. Now the Mortality helped it. Young workers, including women, worked for longer and saved more before they married later at around twenty, so that they could afford to live in their own homes, little production units, where they made homespun cloth to sell. In grander families, this concentrated the ownership of land in the eldest legitimate sons. The institution of the nuclear family thrived peculiarly in Europe.

No one expected kings and queens to solve the crisis. While in modern times pandemics empowered governments, then, initially, ‘It overwhelmed the dynasties at the time of their senility,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘and weakened their authority.’ The Mortality killed rulers from Semyon, grand prince of Moscow, to the khans of Asia.

In France, where the kings had seized most of the territories inherited by the English monarchs, half the population perished; order broke down. Insular England held together better: at seventeen, Edward III – one of the few English kings who might deserve the epithet ‘Great’ – had seized power from his mother and her lover in a nocturnal coup that he led personally with a posse of friends. Now he was in the middle of a successful but expensive campaign to seize the French throne, to which he had an excellent claim. Just before the Mortality hit, he defeated the French at Crécy, then captured Calais, threatening to swallow all of France aided by a network of European alliances.

As the plague struck, in 1348, he was dispatching his fourteen-year-old daughter Princess Joan to marry Prince Pedro of Castile, son of Alfonso XI the Avenger. When she landed at Bordeaux, however, the Mortality killed her and most of her retinue. While her body still lay in the castle, the plague raced through the port, killing so many that the mayor burned it down, cremating the body too. ‘See, with what intense bitterness of heart we have to tell you this,’ wrote Edward to Alfonso, ‘the Destructive Death (who seizes young and old alike, sparing no one and reducing rich and poor to the same level) has lamentably snatched from both of us our dearest daughter.’^* As the Destructive Death killed a third of the English population, pushing up wages, Edward tried to limit wages for labourers. Yet England recovered so fast that by 1356 he was again fielding a small army of 6,000 to attack France. At Poitiers, his son the Black Prince routed the French and captured their king, who died in British captivity.

Petrarch lost his son to the Mortality, but after working as a diplomat for a decade he retired with his daughter to Padua. He and Boccaccio, who also served as a diplomat, remained close friends and correspondents. When Petrarch died, he left fifty florins to Boccaccio ‘to buy a warm winter dressing gown’. Ibn Khaldun served kings from Granada to Cairo, but it was the experience of the Mortality that inspired his great project: a world history. In his extraordinary career, he personally witnessed how the fall of dynasties and the Destructive Death opened the World Game for two new Turkic contenders.

Two castles and a wedding marked the arrival of a new power in Europe. The wedding, held in 1346, just as the Mortality was about to hit Constantinople, was between Theodora, the sixteen-year-old daughter of imperial claimant Joannes VI Kantakouzenos, and a Turkish bey – war-band leader – named Orhan, aged sixty-five, whose family would one day dominate south-eastern Europe and western Asia until 1918.

Orhan was the descendant of a warlord, Ertuğrul, granted lands by the Seljuks in north-western Türkiye. Ertuğrul’s son Osman – or Othman, hence the family name Ottoman – had carved out a principality near the Bosphoros by exploiting the civil wars in Constantinople, which was also fatally weakened by the Mortality; the Ottomans were less affected. In 1329, Osman’s son Orhan, a tireless warlord who ruled for almost forty years, defeated Andronikos III, annexed Nicaea and Nicomedia and forced Roman emperors to accompany him, a mere Turkish bey, on campaign. In return for backing a claimant to the throne of Justinian, he won this Roman imperial marriage.

Then, in 1354, the Ottomans made their European debut. The Mortality had scarcely restrained the outbreak of a new war between the rapacious Italian cities Genoa and Venice, fought out in Constantinople. Orhan backed the Genoese and crossed into Europe, where he occupied a fortress, Gallipoli, its walls shattered by a fortuitous earthquake.

It was the beginning. Orhan sent his son Murad, son of a Greek concubine, to take command in Europe, where he later seized Bulgaria, attacked Wallachia (Romania) and invaded Albania, Bosnia and Serbia. Emperor Joannes V appealed to the nearest Christian kings of Serbia and Hungary for aid against the Ottomans. In 1371, Murad smashed the Serbians on the Maritsa River. The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the devshirme, to serve as courtiers and soldiers in his Jeni Ceri – new army – the Janissary corps; the cavalry was still drawn from Turkish levies under Anatolian beys. Those enslaved would number uncountable millions. His harem was simultaneously drawn from girls stolen from Slavic villages or Greek islands, often sold via Mongol khans and Italian slave traders. While Ottomans were Turks from Turkmenistan, Murad’s system meant that the Ottomans were often the sons of Slavic concubines, and viziers were often Slavs too. Declaring himself sultan and appointing the first grand vizier to run the Ottoman state, Murad conquered the Balkans, oblivious to the rise of a ferocious force to the east who would challenge the Ottomans and terrorize the known world from China to Syria.

A master of spectacular violence and connoisseur of exquisite art, he was a collector of writers and female slaves, cities and kingdoms who built both towers of human heads and minarets of surpassing beauty. Borrowing the game of chess from India, and typically developing his own rules, this harsh predator was lame and mutilated – but far from crippled.

THE HEAD TOWERS: TAMERLANE AND THE POET HAFIZ

As a teenager in the 1350s, Timur, son of the chieftain of the Barlas tribe of Turko-Mongols, born at Kesh (Shahrisabz near Samarkand), was raiding a neighbour’s village when a shepherd shot him with arrows that pierced his leg and hand. He lost two fingers, his arm was damaged and his limp must have been marked, yet these injuries neither inhibited his riding or marksmanship nor dampened his astonishing confidence. At forty, tall with a huge head, reddish hair and barrel chest, his encompassing charisma had allowed him to master the chaotic rivalries of the Golden khanates and build a coalition of Mongols, Turks and Persians that would soon dominate western Asia. His contemporaries called him Timur the Lame: Tamerlane.

Only the Golden Family of Genghis could rule as khan, so while he crowned himself amir of Transoxiana, making Samarkand his capital, Tamerlane set up a puppet khan and married a khan’s widow, Saray Mulk Khanum. She was around thirty years old, ‘surpassingly beautiful’ and directly descended from Genghis, allowing Tamerlane to adopt the title gürkan – imperial son-in-law. Constantly at war expanding his territories, he was an emperor in all but name. He had forty-three favoured concubines, but Saray alone was his adviser, serving as his regent in Samarkand when he was away fighting, the chief of his wives. Only four of his many sons made it to adulthood, and his favourite was Jahangir, whom he married to a Golden heiress, Khanzada, granddaughter of Janibeg Khan of the Golden Horde. When Tamerlane had marched against her father in 1374, the latter sent his beautiful daughter out to meet the conqueror at the head of a procession of gifts. Tamerlane made peace immediately and married Khanzada to Jahangir, only for his son to die of illness two years later. The steely Tamerlane was heartbroken, burying the youth in a splendid tomb (still standing) in his home town of Kesh where he planned to be buried himself. ‘Everything then became melancholy to him, his cheeks were almost always bathed in tears.’ As he promoted his sons and family to command the growing empire, he paid special attention to Jahangir’s widow Khanzada and their sons.

Tamerlane was the child of the ferocity of the steppe and of the refinement of urban Persian culture, projecting himself as both connoisseur and butcher. Adoring Persian poetry, the conqueror welcomed the Persian poet Hafiz, a wise, playful chronicler of love, sex, wine and mysticism, who had written a famous ghazal – a poem of love and longing – for a girl:

If that beauty of Shiraz would take my heart in hand,

For the black mole on her cheek

I would give the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Now Tamerlane teased him: ‘By my sword, I’ve conquered the greater part of the world to beautify Samarkand and Bukhara – and you’d exchange them for a girl from Shiraz?’

‘O Sovereign of the world,’ replied Hafiz, ‘it is by such generosity that I have been reduced, as you see, to my present state of poverty.’ Tamerlane laughed and rewarded him. Hafiz’s real view of politicians and paladins was:

Darius, Alexander, their great hullabaloo

Can be summed up simply in a line or two.

^*

Tamerlane’s coalition of Mongols, Turks, Persians and Uzbeks, was held together by constant victory and the delivery of endless plunder to distract and reward his voracious amirs. But the only way to sustain his power was by interminable war, fuelled by ambition so colossal that it exhausted even his paladins, who – like those of Alexander – begged him to rest and let them enjoy their prizes. Embarking on twenty years of inexorable fighting, sacking cities from Bursa and Baghdad to Damascus and Delhi, often having to retake rebellious Khorasan, Tamerlane claimed all the lands of the Golden and Seljuk dynasties, using terror on a Mongol scale, gleefully stacking towers of heads to advertise his ferocity. At Sebzewar in Iran he piled 2,000 living prisoners on top of one another and had them plastered into living towers. At Isfahan, his towers contained by his own boast 70,000 heads. No one knows the numbers of his victims, but one estimate claims he killed 17 million – 5 per cent of the world population.

In the early 1380s, he welcomed as an ally an ambitious Golden khan named Toqtamish. Russian princes led by Dmitri Donskoi of Moscow had just defeated the Horde, but two years later Khan Toqtamish restored Golden power, burning Moscow, and slaughtered half the Muscovites.^* Then Toqtamish challenged Tamerlane himself.

Starting in 1385, in a campaign that lasted for ten years, he gradually defeated Toqtamish in a series of battles – one of which he ‘regarded as his greatest victory’ – sweeping northwards across Russia towards Moscow: headless, handless, footless skeletons tell of his passing. In Crimea, he enslaved Genoese and Venetians at Kaffa and Tana.

As Tamerlane galloped across Russia, the Ottoman sultan Murad and his son ‘Thunderbolt’ Bayezid led a 30,000-strong Ottoman army into Kosovo to face 15,000 Serbs. On 15 June 1389, at the Field of Blackbirds near Pristina, the sixty-three-year-old Murad, commanding the centre amid ‘a circle of chained camels’ while his sons Thunderbolt and Yakub took the right and left, withstood a charge by Christian heavy cavalry. Twelve Serbian knights led by Prince Lazar tried to hack their way to the sultan. One of them, Miloš Obelic´, surrendered but as he prostrated himself before the victor he plunged a hidden dagger into the sultanic belly. Lazar was brought in and beheaded. His father’s body still warm, Thunderbolt, twenty-nine years old, invited his brother Yakub into the grisly sultanic tent and had him strangled – that very inverted compliment of the steppe peoples who never shed royal blood. It was the first Ottoman fratricide, the start of a gruesome institution. After marrying Prince Lazar’s daughter Olivera and defeating the king of Hungary’s crusade to stop him,^* Thunderbolt believed it was time to take Constantinople. He besieged the much diminished Great City, building a castle on the Asian side, Güzelce Hisar, that still stands. With the west secure, Thunderbolt switched eastwards where he encountered a triumphant Tamerlane, ruler now of all the Golden khanates of central Asia, Persia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Georgia, to which he had added a new prize: India.

TAMERLANE TAKES DELHI; THUNDERBOLT IN A CAGE

On 17 December 1398, as Tamerlane approached the great city of Delhi, its sultan confronted him with a huge army of armoured elephants. Tamerlane’s cavalry started to panic at the smell of the pachyderms, but Tamerlane loaded his camels with hay and wood, set their loads alight and drove them towards the Indian lines. The camels, maddened by the fire, shrieking in pain, charged the elephants, which, terrified, stampeded into the Indian army. The Indian sultan – whose northern Indian kingdom had been undermined by the psychotic predations of his grandfather^* – was a fellow Muslim, but Tamerlane claimed that this was a holy war because the Indian rulers were appeasing Hindu idolatry. The sultan fled, leaving tens of thousands of prisoners whom Tamerlane executed en masse. On seizing Delhi, Tamerlane spared the people but looted the city so aggressively that the Indians rebelled. At this his troops went berserk, massacring thousands. Enthroned in Delhi, Tamerlane took the salute from 120 elephants while he slaughtered Hindus and destroyed their temples.

Taking Indian artists to embellish Samarkand and elephants to fortify his army, Tamerlane returned to his capital, knowing that it was time to settle the succession. He chose as heir his eldest grandson Muhammad Shah, son of Jahangir and Khanzada: vigorous and capable, the young man had the blood of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in his veins. But Tamerlane had a family problem in the form of his youngest son Miranshah. Married to Khanzada, Jahangir’s widow, Miranshah was a chubby wife-beating alcoholic who dared to say his father was old and should let the sons rule. Khanzada went to her father-in-law, showed him her blouse bloody from Miranshah’s beatings and reported his treasonable tendencies. Tamerlane, who had wept at Jahangir’s death, now wept again. Miranshah begged for mercy with a rope around his neck and was forgiven, but he was never promoted again. Khanzada joined Tamerlane’s household.

Tamerlane could never rest for long. Thunderbolt was expanding eastwards, adopting the title sultan of Rum which Tamerlane himself claimed. ‘You are but an ant,’ Tamerlane told Thunderbolt; ‘don’t seek to fight the elephants for they’ll crush you under their feet. How can a princelet like you contend with us? But your boastful prattlings aren’t extraordinary: Turks always talk gibberish.’

‘We’ll chase you all the way to Tabriz,’ replied Thunderbolt, who formed an alliance with the Mamluks of Egypt. Tamerlane’s exhausted generals asked for a rest, warning that war against two powerful kingdoms was unwise, but the conqueror, though he was now in his sixties, overruled them. In 1401, he crushed rebellious Baghdad, where each soldier was ordered to deliver two heads to the tower builders, then he advanced towards Thunderbolt. But the Mamluk sultans threatened his flank, so he swerved into Syria.

The Mamluk sultan, a boy of fourteen, headed north accompanied by his long-suffering tutor, Ibn Khaldun, the seventy-year-old celebrity historian.^* Tamerlane made short work of the boy sultan, who fled back to Cairo, leaving Ibn Khaldun to negotiate the surrender of Damascus.

The old historian was lowered from the Damascene walls in a basket and summoned into Tamerlane’s magnificent tent. ‘I found him reclining on his elbow, while platters of food were offered,’ recalled Ibn Khaldun. ‘I bowed. He raised his head and stretched out his hand for me to kiss which I did.’ Then Tamerlane asked him his life story, and the historian recounted his adventures. ‘That isn’t enough,’ said Tamerlane. ‘I want you to write down a detailed description of the Maghreb in such a way that I can see it with my own eyes.’

‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for thirty years,’ said the historian.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You’re the supreme sovereign of the universe. No one’s comparable – not Caesar, Khusrau, Alexander, Nebuchadnezzar … Sultan Timur’s invincible.’

Tamerlane shrugged modestly. ‘Me? I’m just an emperor’s deputy. There’s the sovereign!’ he said, pointing to a gawky Golden princeling, his stepson. Negotiating the surrender of Damascus and inviting the historian to join his council, Tamerlane discussed Babylonian history until an amir whispered that his forces were ready to storm the Damascene citadel that was still holding out.

The conqueror ‘was borne away, because of his bad knee, and mounted on his horse, sat upright and rode towards Damascus, bands playing in a triumphant frenzy’. Then, accompanied by Ibn Khaldun, he unleashed ballista catapults and naphtha flame launchers at the citadel. When it had fallen, Tamerlane ordered the sacking of the city, then the slaughter and burning alive of 30,000 people, their heads immured in the inevitable towers. Ibn Khaldun, chatting genially about history and life with the diabolic conqueror, knew he had to speak carefully to stay alive.

‘Ask for anything,’ Tamerlane said, as the city burned. ‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘My exile has made me forgetful,’ said Ibn Khaldun, an expert at appeasing lethal monarchs. ‘Perhaps you can tell me what I desire.’

‘Stay with me,’ said Tamerlane.

‘Is there any generosity left beyond that which you’ve already shown me? You’ve heaped favours upon me …’

Tamerlane understood. ‘You wish to return to Cairo?’

‘My only desire is to serve you. If my return to Cairo serves you, I’ll go. If not, I’ve no wish to go.’

‘I’ll fulfil your wish,’ said Tamerlane and sent Ibn Khaldun back to Cairo. He then swivelled towards the Ottomans. Thunderbolt now broke off the siege of Constantinople. At Ankara, Tamerlane’s 150,000 men with thirty-two elephants, their mahouts armed with flamethrowers, faced Thunderbolt’s 100,000.^* Thunderbolt was surrounded and his horse was shot from under him, before being captured by Tamerlane’s grandson Muhammad Shah (son of Jahangir and Khanzada), who was wounded and later died. Constantinople submitted to Tamerlane, who advanced to the Aegean, storming Smyrna (I˙zmir). Tamerlane treated Thunderbolt decently, but after he tried to escape he was confined in a barred carriage and died three months later. (His young Bavarian slave, Schiltberger, was inherited by Tamerlane.)

The Ottoman moment was surely finished.

WORLD EMPEROR: TAMERLANE IN SAMARKAND

The world was at Tamerlane’s feet. In Samarkand, he contemplated his next conquests while he supervised his Indian and Arab architects and artists and received an envoy from faraway Spain.^*

‘Samarkand was the most wonderful city in the world,’ reported that Castilian Clavijo who found the grizzled Tamerlane holding court in a paradisiacal garden. He was reclining under a canopy on an embroidered dais, wearing a plain silk coat and a white bejewelled hat, ‘so old and infirm that his eyelids barely stayed open’. The conqueror lived in domed, crimson tents while his wives resided in palaces. Tamerlane, ‘in excellent humour, drank much wine, making all his guests do the same’, as lambs (and criminals) were slaughtered. Every morning he inspected his building sites, ‘spending most of the day there’.

His most important visitors were from China. In 1403, Chinese envoys announced the accession of a new emperor and requested tribute. Tamerlane arrested them. A new emperor had had the impertinence to expel the Golden Family from China. Tamerlane claimed to be their heir and declared jihad against China.

Tamerlane was right to see China as a threat. Its emperor was at that moment preparing an astonishing enterprise – sending a vast fleet to advance Chinese power as far as Persia, right into the conqueror’s sphere. And the new dynasty had been founded by the humblest man who ever created a dynasty, the only emperor who literally started life as a beggar.

BEGGAR EMPEROR: DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS AND EXTERMINATION TO THE NINTH DEGREE

His staring eyes, pointed jutting jaw, bulging forehead, lumpy pockmarked face, brawny build and unusual height did not condemn Zhu Yuanzhang – the future Hongwu Emperor – but instead, in a strange time of millenarian portents and mystical rebellions, his startling ugliness augured a remarkable future for the man of unrestrained violence and boundless vision. In any other era he might have been a village official, but in times of extreme opportunity, extreme characters thrive.

As the Mongol dynasty of Kublai Khan deteriorated, weakened by the plague, Zhu Yuanzhang was born (at almost the same time as Tamerlane) into an itinerant family so poor that his siblings were sold by his parents. At sixteen, his parents and his last brother perished of the plague. No one could afford to bury them nor feed him and he was given to a Buddhist monastery, whose monks sent him out to beg. As China was torn apart by the millenarian rebellions of the Red Turbans (who awaited the coming of Maitreya, the Future Buddha, King of Light), the begging novice joined an insurgent warlord, who promoted him and married him to his daughter.

In 1356, Zhu, now warlord of his own army, crossed the Yangtze and took Nanjing, making it his capital. He started to recruit distinguished literary scribes as his advisers, learning about history and ritual and modelling himself on the founder of the Han dynasty. Next, fighting his way across China, he waged war on a massive scale, using cannon and gunpowder. In 1363, deploying a flotilla of colossal tower ships, bigger than anything even imagined in the west, and an army of around 300,000, he defeated his enemies – 200,000 strong – on Lake Poyang in a battle that is still the biggest marine engagement in history. Some 60,000 enemy sailors were killed.

‘We are the ruler of the Central Country … we stem from the common people of Anhui,’ admitted the ex-beggar in 1368, explaining how the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the family of Kublai Khan to him. ‘Bearing the Mandate of Heaven and the spirits of the ancestors, we took advantage of the “autumn of chasing the deer” [chaos] … Today the great civil and military officers and the masses join in urging our accession.’ Just as Tamerlane emerged as ruler of Central Asia, Zhu declared himself Hongwu (Vastly Military) Emperor of a new Ming (Radiant) dynasty.

Hongwu, ruling from Nanjing, was as remarkable as he looked. After capturing Dadu (Beijing), he restored imperial power and the Confucian civil service exams, and prosecuted corrupt officials, who were flayed alive. But he was increasingly paranoid and murderous, turning on his own friends who had advised him during his rise and unleashing his secret police, the Embroidered Uniform Guard, which had its own torture chambers. He enforced the collective punishment of Nine Familial Exterminations, meaning that the victim’s families were killed to the ninth degree – in effect all relatives. Leaders climbed with their clans and fell with them too; women faced slavery or death. The principals suffered death by a thousand cuts, the ancient lingchi, dismemberment and slicing into four sections while alive, which could be made less painful by opium. Courtiers and ministers were beaten in Hongwu’s presence, sometimes killed. In 1380, he executed his chief adviser and 15,000 members of his family (by his own count); a minister was killed with 30,000 of his clan. Only the mystic signal of a lightning strike on his palace stopped the terror.

‘Countless numbers of people’ were killed, he admitted in his edict of instruction, the Great Warnings, excusing his purges and taking control of the government himself. As denunciations aroused him into homicidal frenzies, he reflected, ‘If I am lenient people say I’m muddle-headed … If harsh, they call me tyrant.’ Sometimes he felt all the killing was futile: ‘The empire was pacified, people were wicked, officials corrupt. Even if ten were executed in the morning, a hundred would be at it again that night.’

His sons, appointed to govern regions, were terrified. When he urgently summoned a son and daughter-in-law, they both committed suicide. Another son overdosed on Taoist elixirs. He appointed his eldest grandson Zhu Yunwen as heir, imposing a rule of primogeniture to avoid the chaos of Mongol successions, but that gravely disappointed his fourth son, the ferociously able Zhu Di (prince of Yan) who had expected the throne.

Zhu Di was appointed guardian of the hottest military sector, the north, where the war against the Genghis family and the Mongols continued. In the south his father campaigned in Yunnan, where among the prisoners taken was a Muslim orphan, Zheng He, who was castrated and given as a present to Prince Zhu Di.

In 1398, as Tamerlane advanced in the west, the old monster Hongwu finally died, buried with thirty-eight sacrificed concubines. His twenty-year-old grandson Zhu Yunwen, gentle and intellectual, became the Jianwen (Establishing Civility) Emperor, cancelling his grandfather’s brutal edicts. He diminished his overmighty uncles, but the strongest – Zhu Di, aged thirty-eight – resisted.

Visionary, flamboyant and arrogant, an energetic warrior as bloodthirsty as his father yet a student of Confucian classics, Zhu Di was a dangerous enemy. Before the emperor could move against him, he marched south with his army. In July 1402, he burst into the Southern Capital – Nanjing. When the palace caught fire, the emperor vanished, but his charred body and those of his empress and eldest son were conveniently found in the ashes and displayed (while a surviving son was imprisoned for fifty-four years). All this, despite romantic tales suggesting that the kind young emperor had escaped, allowed Zhu Di to succeed as the Yongle (Perpetual Happiness) Emperor.

He dealt with the resistance sustained by his nephew’s supporters by dismembering thousands, using his father’s Embroidered Uniform Guard but also creating a secret police of eunuchs, the Eastern Depot. When his nephew’s tutor, Fang Xiaoru, was sentenced to extermination to the ninth degree, he shouted, ‘Never mind nine! Make it ten!’ Yongle agreed. As Fang was bisected at the waist, with 872 relatives waiting to be dismembered, he drew the word usurper in his own blood.

Yongle regarded the Central Country as the world’s paramount power, declaring that his father ‘had received the Mandate of Heaven and became the master of the world’. But one man stood in his way: Tamerlane.

FOLLOW THE CHINESE WAY: THE EUNUCH ADMIRAL AND TAMERLANE’S TOMB

Straight after his accession in 1403, Yongle ordered the thirty-three-year-old Zheng He, his director of palace servants with the rank 4A – the highest rank a eunuch could hold, wearing a red instead of blue robe – to build a massive fleet to project Chinese power into the Indian Ocean, a region familiar to Chinese sailors. There is no record of Yongle’s conversations with Zheng He, but the coming clash with Tamerlane surely played a role. Zheng’s project was not a voyage of exploration or trade or conquest – ‘The four seas are too broad to be governed by one person,’ said Yongle. The armada was designed to overawe local rulers into recognizing Chinese paramountcy and paying tribute, though it could also, if necessary, eliminate pirates and crush resistance.

Given Tamerlane’s jihad, the choice of Zheng He was ironic: he was the great-grandson of Omar of Bukhara, Kublai’s Muslim governor of Yunnan, a descendant of Muhammad, who had converted many in his province to Islam. The boy’s father and grandfather had both made the hajj, but his father had been killed in the Ming invasion after being castrated. Joining Yongle’s entourage, the hulking six-foot-five soldier – ‘cheeks and forehead high, a small nose, glaring eyes, voice loud as a gong’ – won battles in the civil war.

As the fleet was being built, in early 1405 news reached Yongle that Tamerlane was approaching with a vast army. Tamerlane ‘was already weak in health’, Clavijo noted. ‘He could no longer stand for long on his feet, or mount his horse, having always to be carried in a litter.’ But Tamerlane had never lost a war. Frontier defences were tightened and Zheng He’s fleet was almost ready to sail. Yet just after joining the army, Tamerlane, around sixty-eight, died, unleashing war among his sons and grandsons, from which his youngest son Shahrukh emerged as the successor.^* Ruling from Herat (Afghanistan), Shahrukh made peace with Yongle, who in July ordered Zheng to sail, with his fleet of 255 ships each with twenty-four cannon, bearing 27,500 men. The sixty-two nine-masted ‘treasure ships’ were gigantic, 400 feet long and 170 broad.^*

‘Palace Official Zheng He and others,’ reported the Court Chronicle, ‘were sent bearing imperial letters to the countries of the Western Ocean with gifts to their kings of gold, brocade, patterned silks and silk gauze.’ Zheng sailed to Champa, which recognized Chinese overlordship, then to Malaya and Java and on to Sri Lanka and Calicut (India); on the same voyage he defeated a pirate fleet, killing 5,000 pirates. He left inscriptions at various stops, invoking Buddha, Allah, the sea goddess Tianfei and Hindu gods too, combining political mastery with poetical respect for the seas: ‘We have crossed 100,000 li of vast ocean and beheld great ocean waves, rising as high as the sky … Whether in dense fog and drizzling rain or wind-driven waves rising like mountains … we spread our cloudlike sails aloft and sailed.’

Arriving back in Nanjing in 1407, accompanied by a pirate king ready to be beheaded and tribute-bearing envoys from south-east Asia and India, Zheng was commissioned to set off on two more expeditions. On the third, a Sri Lankan king challenged him. Zheng He attacked his capital and captured the king, replacing him with a Chinese nominee. States in Luzon and Sulu (Philippines), Sumatra and Brunei^* exchanged envoys and sent tribute to the Yongle Emperor. ‘From the edge of the sky to the ends of the earth,’ Zheng boasted, ‘there are no peoples who have not become subjects and slaves.’ His mission was most clearly stated in his inscription in Malacca, which declared that ‘its righteous king, paying his respects to imperial suzerainty, wishes his country to be treated as one of our imperial domains and follow the Chinese way’. On 19 December 1416, Yongle celebrated Zheng’s return by receiving eighteen ambassadors of south Asian monarchs who recognized his power. The emperor then commissioned a fifth voyage, to take these envoys home to their kings, and to go much further than before: to Arabia and Africa.

Yongle was tireless, fighting six Mongol and one Vietnamese wars, restoring the Grand Canal and building a new city, Beijing – meaning Northern Capital – where a million labourers, many enslaved, toiled (and many perished) in the construction of vast palaces in the 180 acres of his inner sanctuary, the Forbidden City. Privately Confucian scholar-officials regarded the voyages and palaces as megalomaniacally extravagant. Yongle became addicted to Taoist elixirs containing arsenic, lead and mercury that were slowly poisoning him.

Just as he unveiled his new capital, he was undermined by a humiliating sex scandal that raised an awkward question: Could the greatest warrior emperor on earth be cuckolded by a man without testicles?

MASSACRE OF THE CONCUBINES

Not all eunuchs had suffered amputation of their penises as well as their testicles: sexual liaisons – known as vegetable relationships – with concubines were possible but forbidden. The girls belonged to the emperor. Many concubines enjoyed emotional attachments to eunuchs, some of which led to discreet romances. But courtiers were spied on by the eunuchs of the Eastern Depot secret police.

In 1421, after Yongle had moved into the Forbidden City, a concubine committed suicide after an affair with a eunuch. Yongle, humiliated by being cuckolded by a half-man, ordered the instant slaughter by slicing of 2,800 girls, some as young as twelve, and their eunuchs. The girls were ‘rent, split, ripped and torn to shreds’. A young Korean-born concubine, Lady Cui, survived because she was recovering from illness in Nanjing, and wrote an account that was preserved. She returned to find that her world had been liquidated. ‘There was such deep sorrow in the palace that thunder shook the three great halls,’ she recalled. ‘Lightning struck them and, after all those years of toil, they all burned to the ground.’ The fire chastened the declining emperor.

In 1424, the sixty-four-year-old Yongle dispatched Zheng on a small expedition and then proceeded to the Mongolian front. There he had a stroke caused by overdosing on his immortality elixirs.

Lady Cui, only thirty, and fifteen of his other girls were strangled by white silk nooses then buried with Yongle in his tomb. Yongle’s ultimate successor, his grandson Xuande, diverted his admiral to other tasks, appointing him to run Nanjing and to the post of Grand Director of the Buddhist Three Treasures – though he allowed him a seventh and final voyage. The last voyages connected many worlds – none more different than that of the Ming of Beijing and the Swahili sultans of east Africa.

THE LEOPARD KING AND JOãO THE BASTARD

In January 1419, Zheng He, the eunuch admiral, after receiving the submission of Hormuz (Iran), landed in Aden (Arabia) where the local sultans, keen to avoid the power of the Mamluks of Cairo, submitted to Yongle and exchanged gifts before the Chinese fleet sailed on to Malindi in Africa, collecting a menagerie of leopards, lions, camels, rhinos and giraffes for the emperor. The sensation created in Beijing by these beasts encouraged further voyages to Africa.

China and Africa had long been connected: Chinese, Malay and Arab merchants traded porcelain and silk for ivory, ebony and gold; thousands of Chinese coins and much porcelain have been found on Zanzibar. On Zheng’s sixth voyage, which sailed in November 1421, the treasure fleet visited Barawa and Mogadishu, ports of the Somalian kingdom of Ajura that stretched as far as the Ogaden on the borders with Ethiopia.^*

Zheng’s fleet sailed down to Kilwa, founded by African converts to Islam who invented a mythical descent from a Persian aristocrat from Shiraz. These princes, now intermarried with Africans and Arabs, maybe Omanis, controlled a littoral empire from Mombasa (Kenya) to Sofala (Mozambique), with colonies on the Island of the Moon (Madagascar). When the sultan of Kilwa crossed him, Zheng stormed the city and later sailed down to Sofala. The Swahili monarchs then recognized the emperor of China. After collecting frankincense, ambergris, ivory, more animals (including elephants and ‘camel-birds’ – ostriches), Zheng, now on his seventh voyage, probably died at sea on the way home. Emperor Xuande and his bureaucrats rejected Yongle’s improvidence and docked the superfleets, burning Zheng’s records, confident that Chinese superiority required no connection with the outside world. China would not project global power like this again nor return in force to Africa until the Belt and Road Initiative of 2013.

The Chinese recorded that the Swahilis traded in enslaved ‘savages’ from the African interior as well as in ebony, ivory and gold. Elephants and men were hunted throughout what is today Kenya and Tanzania, but the gold and copper that arrived in Sofala for export across the Indian Ocean came from a kingdom inland: its capital, Zimbabwe,^* was a stone city, the oldest one south of the Sahara, founded around 900, its towered and walled Great Enclosure built during the 1200s. Its Bantu-speaking Shona princes were gold traders, cattle herders and pottery manufacturers. They were also owners of golden artefacts and sculpted eagles found there, along with porcelain from China and Persia. By the time Zheng visited Sofala, Zimbabwe was falling apart, its ruler Mukwati undermined by a younger prince, Nyatsimba Mutota, who challenged its trade in salt and gold, breaking away to become mwene (king) of a new realm, Mutapa. Encompassing Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Mutapa was expanded further by Mutota’s son, Nyanhewe Matope. The mwene, residing at Zvongombe on the southern Zambezi and wielding a ceremonial axe and golden spear, governed through nine ministers known as the King Wives, some of them actually his queens and sisters, others male advisers. But Zimbabwe lost its importance, and later it was abandoned.

The very different worlds of east and west Africa were connected by Saharan trade routes that led to Egypt and the Maghreb, but movement between them was blocked by the intervening vastness of the jungle and savannah. Yet the politics of western Africa was just as dynamic and complex: a few powerful kingdoms and a multitude of smaller entities fought for territory, for control of gold from the Akan goldfields, and for slaves captured in war. Gold and slaves were traded across the Sahara via Arab caravans, probably over six million slaves between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. The Bantu-speaking kingdoms, many of them new, were founded, like their European equivalents, by gifted warlords using personal charisma, bloody conquest and shrewd marriage. Around 1375, when Tamerlane and Hongwu were rising warlords, the biggest of these kingdoms, Kongo, was created by a marriage between two royal families. The king of Mpemba Kasi, Nima a Nzima, married Luqueni Luansanze, the daughter or sister of the king of Mbata, Nsaku Lau. Their sons merged the kingdoms and then, ruling until 1415, conquered much of Angola and Congo (Brazzaville) republic and built a capital, Mbanza, that was soon home to tens of thousands. Chosen always from this lineage, the manikongo (king) held court wearing gold and feathers, on a covered throne, and could be approached only by making prostration. No one was allowed to watch him eat.

Around Mbanza, slaves worked farms – ‘Collecting slaves gave the Kongo kings great power.’ Slavery was an ancient part of African society, ‘widespread because slaves were the only form of private revenue-producing property recognized in African law’, writes John Thornton; in fact slaves were the ‘main form of wealth in central Africa’. But this was not the chattel slavery – the ownership and trading of people and their children – of later European empires. Kongo was founded on expert artisanship with a speciality in blacksmithery. The first king was said to have designed a special forge, but the manikongos traded ivory, furs, cloth, pottery and slaves, constantly replenished in slave raids and wars of expansion.

To the north, a dynamic oba (king), Ewuare the Great, was expanding a small Yoruba kingdom named Ibini – Benin (Nigeria). Descended from the Ogiso – Sky Kings – of a medieval Edo kingdom Igodomigodo,^* his real name was Ogun, an oba’s son driven out by his brother who, in exile, learned confidence and magic, partly by pulling a thorn from the paw of a lion which then granted him supernatural powers. Assassinating his brother and renaming himself Ewuare (Strife-is-Over), he simplified the succession rules, reducing the elective influence of the umaza (chiefs), before embarking on a spree of conquests and embellishing Ibini’s palaces. Calling himself the Leopard King, Ewuare centred all life around himself and his family, promoting the queen mother to special rank. His Benin City became the biggest city in sub-Saharan Africa, soon to be described by a European visitor as ‘larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king which is richly decorated and has fine columns.’ Ewuare commissioned naturalistic sculptures and carvings, made of coral, wood, terracotta, stone, iron and bronze, which portrayed earlier obas – who were worshipped as divine or as possessing supernatural powers – or himself and his pantherine avatars; his artisans also produced pillars, altars, doors and masks. All were used in a calendar of festivals to celebrate and restore the power of the oba and purge evil spirits that might threaten the kingdom.^*

The city contained many slaves captured in Ewuare’s wars, used as servants, as labourers and as currency to exchange for gold, ivory and copper. The free were distinguished from the enslaved by scarification rituals. Human sacrifice, attended by dancing rituals, honoured the oba and appeased the god-king of death. On the death of an oba, his guards were sacrificed, his wives committed suicide and all were buried with him.

Ewuare, already known as the Great, was just starting out – unaware that another family at the northmost corner of the continent were taking their first steps into Africa.

On 21 August 1415, while the Chinese visited the east coast of Africa, a fleet of 200 Portuguese ships, bearing 45,000 troops led by King João and his sons, invaded the north-west, landing at Ceuta (Morocco) on a minor crusading adventure that would gradually bring Iberian adventurers all the way around Africa to India.^*

Portugal was tiny, just 900,000 people, culled by the Great Mortality. On the edge of Iberia, a hinge between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Europe and Africa, it was ideally located to trade north to England and south along the African coast.

Portugal had become an independent kingdom under a family of Burgundian adventurers in the 1140s, but its relationship with its larger rival Castile was intimate and suspicious, wars alternating with marriages for centuries. In consequence their royal families were densely interrelated to the extent that a Castilian takeover of Portugal or vice versa was never far away, while an English bid for the Castilian throne meant repeated interventions from London. The three Christian kingdoms, Portugal, Castile and Aragon, had all played heroic roles in the Reconquista, a crusade against the Muslims, that left Granada as the last Islamic kingdom in Spain. Portugal’s tough but poor noblemen, the fidalgos, were keen for new spoils – and their new king, the Bastard, had something to prove.

João had never expected to rule, but he had thrived in a murderous, louche court, ruled by his erratic and concupiscent father.^* As a late son by a mistress, the Bastard, promoted to the office of master of the crusading Order of Aviz, was more popular than his legitimate half-brother who succeeded to the throne. When that brother died, the legitimate line – through the king’s daughter married to the king of Castile – would have led to Castilian annexation. Instead the nobility backed João as the popular Portuguese option. Foiling Castilian attempts to seize the kingdom, he saved Portuguese independence. His marriage to an English princess, Philippa, delivered a line of five impressive infantes, who were now excited to embark on a Moor-killing invasion of Africa: war was God’s work, and vengeance for the many Moroccan invasions of Spain. João’s third son, Henry, later known by foreigners as the Navigator, was the most enthusiastic.

João’s timing was good. Morocco was hopelessly divided while the adventure satisfied his restless fidalgos.

As João landed at Ceuta, the surprised Moroccans sortied out, but they were too late. After vicious fighting, João’s fidalgos rushed the gates, racing into the thriving city. Prince Henry displayed insane courage in the attack, becoming cut off among hacking Moroccan warriors, and had to be rescued by a knight who gave his life for the infante. Henry himself suffered only light wounds. João unleashed three days of looting, killing Muslims with crusading glee and torturing rich Arabs to death. They plundered not only Arab but also Genoese merchants, already in Morocco. The Genoese were the vanguard of African venturers: they had already tried to seize Ceuta and helped Castile make the first Atlantic conquest, the Canary Islands.^* João converted the mosque to a church and knighted the three infantes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry. Such was the meagreness of Portuguese comforts that their soldiers were dazzled by the luxurious houses in Ceuta.

It happened that the Portuguese had developed new naval technology: their light vessels – barcas and bergantinas, then caravelas, all tiny, less than eighty feet, were hardy and manoeuvrable. Henry’s sailors had begun to understand the volta do mar (literally, return from the sea), a navigational technique which exploited the Atlantic’s circular wind and sea currents, allowing a swing out into the unknown that would lead to new shores. These caravels were ideal for ocean-going voyages; later when the Portuguese crammed them with new weaponry, bombarda – cannon – this mix of gunpowder and lightness proved formidable. The Navigator was not an explorer or scientist (there is no evidence that he founded navigational schools or scientific academics) but, appointed by his father as administrator of the crusading Order of Christ, he saw no contradiction between God’s work, the grandeur of Portugal and the exploitation of Africa. This was the start of a process that created the world today; later came empire, and alongside it came the settlement – ‘the reproduction of one’s own society through long-range migration’, says James Belich – started now by the Portuguese, followed by the Spanish, English, French and Dutch, that, ultimately, by killing and destroying, building and procreating, created often unique hybrid societies and later modern states on four distant continents.

João decided to keep Ceuta, the start of a new age of imperial seafaring in which a European power family, the Aviz, used their new ships, bombarda and ferocious crusading-mercantile ambition to blast their way into Africa and Asia.

* The marriage was part of Edward’s policy of marrying into the Castilian family. But, had the Mortality not been such a cruel death, one might have thought Joan lucky to avoid her husband, Pedro the Cruel, who had his first wife, Blanche de Bourbon, murdered, supposedly by two Jewish assassins, and abandoned his second after two nights of marriage. Edward III did not give up his Castilian policy, marrying his younger son John of Gaunt (Ghent) to Pedro’s daughter. John launched a long, failed campaign to win the Castilian throne. Notorious for his indulgence towards the Jewish community and his Jewish treasurer Samuel Ha-Levi, Pedro finally tortured his Jewish minister to death and, despite English backing, managed to unite Castile against himself. He lost the throne to his bastard half-brother Enrique (the Brother Killer) of Trastámara, who personally slaughtered him with his ballock knife (as in ‘bollocks’ – named for the two testicular shapes at the guard) and founded a new dynasty.

* Hafiz was the other great Iranian poet to come from Shiraz – after Saadi the Master. He became a poet when he fell in love with a girl, pining for her until a vision converted his romantic fervour into Sufist passion for God. His nom de plume meant Reciter of the Quran, but his delicious poems about the relationship between love and God were mystical and sensual:

Ah foolish heart! The pleasure of today.

Although abandoned, will tomorrow stand

A surety for the gold you threw away.

He embraced old age like this:

The time is drawing near for me to find

Some quiet tavern; unmaligned

With no companion but my cup and book …

His Diwan is as widely read in Iran as the Quran. It is traditional in times of crisis to open the book at random to find the solution to any dilemma.

* In September 1380, Dmitri’s victory at Kulikovo on the Don River was the first time a Rurikovich prince defeated a Mongol army. It earned the prince his nickname, Donskoi, and later it became the legendary battle that broke the invincible Golden Horde. But only in hindsight. Moscow remained a Mongol vassal until 1502.

* After the battle, Christian prisoners, including a fourteen-year-old Bavarian squire named Johann Schiltberger, knelt piteously for beheading before Thunderbolt, who, as heads rolled, spared the boy, making him a slave – the start of an extraordinary life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* The Yoruba worshipped a large pantheon of gods and spirits (orishas), but their cosmology placed art at the centre of life itself. They believed that their chief god, Olodumare, source of ase, the life force of the universe, ordered the god Obatala to fashion the first Yorubas, who lived at the holy city of Ile-Ife under a king – the Ooni – descended from a god-king. Ile-Ife, settled as early as 400 BC, had thrived since around AD 700 as the sacred city of west Africa. Even when political power moved to the Oyo and Benin kingdoms, Ile-Ife enjoyed an artistic golden age, and royal heads from the other kingdoms were still sent there for burial. At just this time, the king of Ile-Ife, Obalufon, was commissioning artists there to create sculptures featuring himself.

* A week earlier, on 13 August, a small English army under the twenty-seven-year-old king Henry V had landed in France to restart the conquest of France, successfully begun by the vigorous Edward III then lost by his psychopathic grandson Richard II. Richard had been overthrown and murdered by his cousin, Henry, duke of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. The most extraordinary thing about Henry V was that he was alive at all. When he was sixteen, fighting with his father against a rebel nobleman, he was hit in the face by an arrow that entered below his eye and lodged in the back of the neck – without touching his brain. Usually this would have led to death from infection and most physicians would simply have pulled the arrow out through the face, tearing the flesh inside. An initial team of doctors – later described as ‘lewd chattering leeches’ – bungled this, breaking off the arrow. But the royal doctor, John Bradmore, a brilliant man, was also a metalworker and gemestre (jeweller). He disinfected the wounds with honey, washed them with alcohol and devised an instrument to grip the arrow head within a cylinder and pull it through the skull and out the other side. Astonishingly this operation worked and the wound did not become infected; Bradmore was richly rewarded. Henry, tall and powerful, must have been heavily scarred. On succeeding to the throne, he gathered his fleet in Southampton, before swiftly killing his best friend and two other barons who were caught in a conspiracy. In France, he took the port of Harfleur, then fought a French army double the size of his own at Agincourt, massacring most of the French prisoners, the first of several such atrocities. After his victories, the French king agreed to marry his daughter Catherine to Henry. Their only son was a baby when Henry died at thirty-six from dysentery. After his death Catherine married a Welsh steward, Owen Tudor, from whom the Tudors were descended.

* João’s father Pedro, erratic and lascivious, had married a Castilian princess, Constanza. But she arrived with a lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro. Pedro had a son with his wife but fell in love with Inês. After Constanza’s death, he started to advance Inês’s family: in a showdown with the hostile court, Inês was beheaded in front of her children. When Pedro became king, he hunted down her killers and personally tore out their hearts in revenge. It was said he exhumed Inês, dressed her in crown and jewels and had the court pay tribute. He certainly built her a tomb, facing his own, engraved with the words ‘until the end of the world’.

* The Canary Islands had been inhabited since around the birth of Christ by the Guanche, Berber Canary islanders, enjoying occasional contact with Europe or Africa and maintaining a Stone Age civilization without boats or metal. The discovery of their mummified ancestors reveals a sophisticated alternative way to embalm, leaving brains and intestines intact by smoking the bodies in bonfires then wrapping them in goatskins. In 1312, the Genoese banker-adventurer Lancelotto Malocello had tried to find what happened to the Vivaldi brothers, who had landed on the islands; he gave his name to Lanzarote (Lancelotto) and founded a fortress there, but was eventually expelled in a Guanche rebellion. Now, in 1402, a French Crusader colonized the islands and declared himself king – but, facing revolts by the indigenous peoples, he ceded the islands to Castile. The islanders were rapidly enslaved, killed and decimated by disease.