The Alhambra Palace, 1333

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Ruth

In 1333, Emir Yusuf began to build the splendid palace that came to be known as The Red Fort, Qalat al-Hamra: the Alhambra. His reign and his son’s spanned most of the 1300s and established the palace that we tour today. There are other sections built by later Christian kings, but I won’t write about them here.

During the Reconquista years of the 1200s, the Emirs of Granada chose to move their residence to an ancient fortress on a hilltop. The first fort, the Alcazaba, had been built in the early years of the Muslim Conquest. It was seated at the point of the long hilltop, where steep hillsides fell away to the river valley, like the prow of a land-based ship. Of course, it was strictly practical, modeled after the classical world’s fortresses in Syria. There were few windows and no residential chambers.

To make it into a residence, the 13th century Emirs built three square tower keeps, each about 16 meters to a side. Interior arches supported four floors that included residential rooms. One of the towers had a bell that was used for many years to keep time for farmers who needed to turn on and off irrigation systems. In 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the hoisting of their flag over this bell tower was the symbolic “Mission Accomplished” moment.

The next important task was to bring water into the fortress, using canals and, I suppose, a system of pumps to get it to the hilltop. New warehouses held stores in case of a siege. During the next few Emirs’ reigns, they added public baths (complete with steam room supported by a copper boiler) and a mosque.

The technology used to pump water up to the hilltop and then keep pipes pressurized for fountains was a primary luxury of the time; Southern Spain is very hot and dry. The Alhambra managed the climate with interior courtyards (blocking hot dry wind) that offered shade and evaporative cooling. Keeping ponds full and fountains running took up a lot of the available water resources. The most famous fountain courtyard has 12 lions with water jets, while the Court of the Myrtles contains a large pool of water.

In Yusuf’s time, the fortified gate called Gate of Justice was the main entrance, completed in 1348. Visitors passed under a horseshoe arch with a carving of The Hand of Fatima. This hand is a charm against evil, and its five fingers represent the five principles of Islam. The same design, more stylized than in the 14th century carving, is used as a general good-luck symbol in the Middle East, even in Israel, where it’s known as a Chamsa (chamesh means 5).

The Emir’s private living quarters, known as the harem, used a lot of water. They had running water (early taps had been invented by the 1300s) both hot and cold, and both baths and pressurized showers! Female grooming had a long tradition in the Middle East; women were shaved, bathed and perfumed, often with plucked eyebrows and cosmetics. But the word “harem” originally just means “restricted,” the way White House tour guides never cross lines into the restricted private areas where the President actually lives, so it was not supposed to mean “women only.”

Emir Yusuf and his son, Mohammed, wanted their living quarters to amaze the world, so they were decorated more elaborately than any monarch’s palace until Versailles. The Alhambra Palace’s decoration with geometric figures really stands out to Western eyes, since European decorative traditions tended to use figures of humans, animals, and flowers. M. C. Escher was inspired by the tesselated tiles to develop his tesselation drawings. “Circle Limit” (1960) closely resembles the domed tiled ceilings of some Alhamabra rooms.

Instead of using color, yeseria technique uses carved plaster to create three-dimensional wall art. Where Greek sculpture had created bas-relief, in which figures are in half-round, Islamic yeseria actually cut through the plaster so that darkness behind the screen of carved plaster made the designs stand out very starkly. They showed geometric figures, leaves, and Arabic scripts, often in combination. The “Hall of the Boat” (actually “Blessing” in original, Arabic baraka –> Spanish barca) has walls and ceiling entirely covered in yeseria plasterwork.

An even more three-dimensional decoration can be found in the techniques of muqarnas and mocarabe, from Persian decorative tradition. The muqarnas uses concave surfaces to create texture, sometimes with colored decorations inside each concave bowl or cell. The mocarabe is an extreme form of muqarnas technique; it is like a honeycomb tipped to point its openings downward, hanging from above like a stalactite. One hall in the Alhambra is known as the Hall of the Mocarabes.

Finally, the Alhambra’s rooms were often decorated by poems in Arabic. The poems praised the artistry of each room, and many praised Mohammed V, the Emir whose long reign in the late 1300s saw the completion of the palace’s greatest beauties. The Alhambra Palace was the most beautiful king’s residence of its time.

 

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Game of Mamluk Thrones, 1290-1330

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Ruth

The Mamluks governed based on competence, in a time when governance was always based on inheritance. They didn’t come up with a framework for peaceful transfers of power or group selection of the leader. Instead, they functioned like a monarchy that’s constantly at risk of internal coup. Every Mamluk Sultan wanted to leave power to his kids if he could, but “if” was the big question. Let’s look at some of the stories.

Baybars oversaw the rising dominance of the Mamluk regime between 1260 and 1277; he is thought to have had ten children, including three sons. At his death, his son Barakah took control, so that at first it looked like the Mamluks might have started a new monarchist dynasty. Barakah understood how to use power; he started weeding out powerful Mamluk Emirs who might shoulder him aside as his father had done to Qutuz. After about a year, the Emir who was also Barakah’s father in law put a stop to it, forcing him to abdicate in favor of his seven-year-old brother. Barakah withdrew to Kerak,  Jordan, where the Mamluks had captured a Crusader castle, and later died there.

No child can rule a Mamluk kingdom, so the real ruler was Qalawun, the father in law. By 1279, the child was expelled to Constantinople and Qalawun simply became the Sultan. The Emir of Damascus thought this was very wrong, since his concept of government was still royal inheritance, but by the time the Mongols came around for the Second Battle of Homs, he was glad to accept a strong Mamluk Sultan’s help. Qalawun successfully negotiated with the remaining Latins of the Holy Land to pay tribute and accept restrictions on fortifying cities like Tyre and Beirut.

Qalawun had at least two sons, too. Like Baybars, he preferred to establish a family dynasty, and he had an idea to weaken the other Emirs around him. He started promoting Circassians, another ethnic minority from around Georgia, to power among the Mamluks. This disrupted the old-boy networks that his fellow Kipchaks had built up. It worked: his son Khalil inherited after him. Khalil was the conqueror of Acre in 1291.

Khalil continued to promote Circassians, probably rewarding those who were loyal to his family, until he was assassinated by other Kipchak Mamluks. And then the Circassians supported his brother an-Nasir Mohammed, so the family kept power. Qalawun’s family strategy not only worked, it also brought a wave of Circassians into Egypt, so that eventually they would become the rulers in their turn (and into modern times). Even before they took power, they became known as the Burji Mamluks, fighting the mainstream Bahris.

An-Nasir Mohammed’s nemesis was an Oirat Mongolian named Kitbogha, who had been captured as an adult fighter in the Second Battle of Homs. Although the Mamluks abandoned their ethnicity in theory, it seems like in practice they formed ethnic mafias. A whole group of Oirats (roughly equivalent to today’s Tuvans?) were in a conspiracy to cast down Qalawun’s legacy and put their own guy into power, and they succeeded twice—and failed twice.

Kitbogha had his own nemesis: his Vizier, probably a Kipchak Turk loyal to Qalawun’s family. The Burji faction drove Kitbogha out of Cairo, but he returned with the support of Mongolian and Kurdish Mamluks and besieged the Vizier in the Citadel. Qalawun’s Mongolian widow, mother to nine-year-old Sultan an-Nasir, sided with Kitbogha by locking the rival Emir out of the Citadel. A third Emir named Lajin (whose ethnicity is uncertain: his hair was blond) persuaded Kitbogha to depose and exile the child, after all, so they set up as Sultan and Vice-Sultan in 1294.

Lajin was a dangerous guy: not only had he been the assassin of Khalil, he then deposed Kitbogha in 1296. Not to worry: soon Lajin was also assassinated by another Mongolian Mamluk. Now what? One of the Mamluk Emirs had to rule, but there was no clear leader. They finally decided to reinstate the King: they brought back 14-year-old Nasir Mohammed from exile at Kerak Castle and agreed to two viziers: an Oirat Mongol and a Circassian.

Sultan Nasir Mohammed led the Mamluk army against Ghazan’s third Mongolian invasion in 1299, just in time to lose the battle. He won the peace, though, when Ghazan inevitably withdrew. In 1303, Ghazan and the Mongols tried one more time, but the young Sultan led an army to surprise them into defeat just south of Damascus. But unknown to everyone else, the Sultan was getting sick of power struggles with domineering Viziers. The Circassian Burji Mamluks had started a protection racket in Cairo, too, and nobody could call them to heel. In 1309, Sultan Nasir announced he was going on Hajj and just didn’t come back. Instead, he went “home” to Kerak, the Crusader castle in Jordan where he had been exiled as a child.

The Circassian Vizier, Baibars al-Jashnakir, ruled as Sultan for nearly a year. It was dreadful; the Mongols and Latins were still threatening war, while the new “Sultan” was greeted with riots in Cairo. So a delegation sent to Kerak, begging an-Nasir (now 24) to come back. He did, and his first act was to execute Baibars al-Jashnakir. Then he started on the rest, and boy he knew where the bodies were buried, as they say. He got rid of the Oirats, stopped the Circassian Mafia racket, and shut down a prison where the Mamluk Emirs had been disappearing their enemies.

This time, Nasir Mohammed ruled until his death in 1341. He oversaw the redigging of a canal in Alexandria and received envoys from the Pope and the King of France (who simply wanted Jerusalem back, please?). When he died, he left eight sons who all became Sultans in their turn, followed by four grandsons. Sounds good, right? But wait, why eight of his sons? If the family dynasty was really settled in now, like a real monarchy, what happened? Ah…

So in truth, although Nasir groomed and trained his oldest son to be the best Sultan ever, the Mamluk Emirs around him were still too much for them. It was only a peaceful power transition on the surface, and really another strongman was in control and used Nasir’s sons as puppets. Qusun was another easterner of some kind, who had come west with a Mongolian army, perhaps as a merchant or suttler. He was powerful enough by 1341 to have Nasir’s son, the new Sultan, arrested and executed. He installed the infant Ashraf Küçük (which means “little”) as Sultan, but dang if Little Ashraf didn’t need a strong Regent, you know?

It was a stormy year, and by the end, Qusun had been executed. The next living son of Nasir, who like his brothers had been trained in strict desert warfare at his father’s “home” of Kerak Castle, came to power. He only wanted to go back to Kerak, so the Emirs installed another brother. That one lasted a few years, then another (we’re up to 5 now) who was a terrible partier and made it only one year. Time for number six, who turned out to be an obsessive pigeon racer and gambler. Number 7 was a child but stayed alive long enough to have 11 children and rule as Sultan, twice (interrupted by #8).

The Mamluks were groping toward a system of oligarchy in which they’d privately elect an executive from among the dynastic potentials. They swapped out sons (and grandsons) as different factions seized power. Earlier, the Mamluks had actually taken a stab at peaceful power transitions by exiling former child Sultans, not killing them. During this period, usually the losing Sultan lost his life, but the last of Nasir’s sons was not executed during at least one coup, so that he was still there to return to power.

This last son of Nasir took steps to trim the powers of Mamluk Emirs, as his father had done. His weapon of choice was clever: he began promoting the descendants of Mamluks who had never been made into Mamluks themselves. The core “Mamluk” experience was to be enslaved then freed (or to free self via coup), but these descendants, the Awlad al-Nas, had not undergone this process, but had just lived as a sort of Cairo aristocracy. They now became Sultan an-Nasir Hasan’s civil servants, governing cities and heading up departments.

Naturally, by 1361, the still-young Sultan was assassinated by one of the Mamluks whose power he was trimming back. This murderer, Yalbugha (whose ethnic background is unclear), became the new strongman who chose which grandson of Nasir Mohammed to install at the moment. And so it went on, until the Mamluk Vizier Barquq ended the farce and just started a new Mamluk era, making himself the first Circassian Burji Mamluk Sultan.

 

 

 

 

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The First Ottomans and the Last Ilkhan, 1302-1337

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Ruth

In 1280, a Turk named Osman became the Bey of Söğüt, Turkey, and over the next 20 years, he took control of neighboring tribes and towns. His son Orhan named the new group the “Osmanlı,” or as we would say now, the Ottomans. In Osman’s time, they were just Turks, and perhaps not even much of a tribe, more like a political block. But any real estate agent will tell you what matters: location. Söğüt was far from the areas where Turks had clashed with Franks during the Crusades; it was in the heart of the old Roman empire, in Bithynia.

Bithynia is a long swath of land along the southern Black Sea coast; it was a kingdom in the Hellenistic period, then a Roman province. Its western edge touches the Bosporus Strait (at Constantinople), and its eastern edge is bounded by the Sakarya River. In the time of Emperor Justinian, they built a massive stone bridge where the military road met the river. The chief city of Bithynia, Nicaea, had just been serving as the seat of the Greek Byzantine government in exile. With the Greeks back in control of nearby Constantinople, Nicaea should have been a secure part of its territory. But Osman’s Turks were attacking many Byzantine towns to their north: Nicaea, Prussa, and  the port town of Nicomedia.

The Byzantine Empire was trying to recover its lost footing by crowning father-son pairs as co-Emperors, so that succession was clear and they could send one ruler on military campaign while the other secured the city. Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos had used marriages, including his own, to bring rival claimants into the family. He had resettled displaced persons from the long Venice-Crete-Constantinople wars around the Meander River (worth mentioning just for its name), and he had hired mercenaries from among the Alans (who were probably part of a Mongolian confederation, therefore loosely allies). Now in 1302, his son Co-Emperor Michael led a large force to confront the Turks on a field between Nicomedia and Nicaea.

The Battle of Bapheus was a simple engagement; the confederated Turks led by Osman overwhelmed the Byzantine army until it fell back to Nicomedia. From that point on, Bithynia was ruled by the Byzantines only from its forts, while the countryside became a no-go zone. When the town of Prussa fell, it became the Turks’ new capital. The name “Prussa” in Greek turned into “Bursa” in Turkish; it was also called “new town” in Turkish. Osman’s son Orhan ruled from Bursa and continued his conquests. In 1337, the port Nicomedia also fell to the Turks. From this point on, Osman’s line grew in power until now we can look back and see Bursa and Söğüt as the origin of the Ottoman Empire.

Also from this point, Muslim history is mostly the story of Ottoman growth. In 1335, still many years before the Black Death broke out in Europe, an early round of the plague carried off the last Ilkhan and his heirs. His territory broke into small fiefdoms and declined in power; Iran was not powerful again until the Safavid Empire in 1501. Everyday life went on as usual, but few Muslims in the 1300s enjoyed the privileges of Empire, as many had done in the past, and many would again in the future.

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The Last of the Templars, 1307

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Ruth

By the end of the 13th century, the Order of Knights of the Temple had received so much property as charitable gifts that they were wealthier than many kings. A large number of their members were involved not in protecting pilgrims in the Holy Land, but in managing the property, which included estates with farms and mines as well as cash invested in shipping. The Templars had become international bankers who first tried out the idea of traveling with a verified receipt for money deposited in one city’s Temple, to be withdrawn in another city’s Temple—-in other words, a banker’s cheque, or check as we say.

The end of the Order came suddenly with unexpected violence: hundreds of knights were burned alive. To understand why, we need some context of what was happening in Europe during the previous decade or so.

First, the Orders of Knights had lost their actual function when Acre fell in 1291. They hung onto a base in Limassol, Cyprus and a few islands, including the isle of Ruad just off the coast of Lebanon. The Templars and Hospitalers were using the island as a base to attack Tortosa, the nearest mainland city. In 1303, the Mamluks cleaned up a bit more, taking the fortress at Ruad from the Templars. About forty knights were captured and remained in prisons in Cairo for the rest of their lives, refusing to convert to Islam.

Second, the King in France was the grandson of King Louis IX, the great Crusader who died of dysentery at Tunis in 1271. Since the time of King Louis, France had become locked in territorial wars with England, as France tried to take portions of its Atlantic coast that had been ruled by Anglo-Norman kings. France also got drawn into war against Aragon. Philip IV (“the Fair”) inherited debt from his father and perhaps even his Crusading grandfather. He owed large sums to Jews and Templars.

Philip IV tried a number of tactics to become solvent again. He evicted the Jews in 1306, seizing their property, which included debts to other people—who now faced King Philip IV as their creditor. Next, he evicted bankers from Lombardy (northern Italy) in the same way. He minted new coins several times, cheating on the value of gold and silver to try to make a little profit. Some of that old saw about biting a gold coin to tell if it’s genuine might come from Philip’s 1295 mixture of copper with the gold, which made it harder than true gold. Currency lost so much value that riots in Paris forced the king to hide, at one point in the Templars’ headquarters.

But perhaps Philip’s most influential money scheme came first: in 1290, he tried out taxing the income of the church. They were a tempting target, since so much charitable giving in people’s wills had left them owning vast estates. But the Pope issued a bull forbidding the church to transfer any property to the French crown. Philip actually attempted to arrest the Pope near Rome. When this Pope passed away and the conclave elected a new Pope in 1305, their choice was a Frenchman who decided not to live in Rome. The new Pope Clement V set up his Papal court in Avignon, France in 1309. One of Clement’s first actions was to nullify the previous Pope’s decrees against the King of France. For the next 70 years, the Pope was always French, and always under the King’s thumb.

Pope Clement wanted to wind down the Orders of Knights; he thought maybe the Templars and Hospitallers could at least merge. The Grand Master of the Templars traveled to Avignon to discuss this with the Pope in 1307, and another small item came up on the agenda: a former Templar knight had lodged a criminal complaint against the organization. Although the Pope wasn’t inclined to believe the charges, he sent the King of France a letter about them, asking for his input.

King Philip acted quickly: he would inflate the charges to be as great as possible and use them to bring down the Temple. On Friday the 13th of October, he sent out an arrest order for the Grand Master and most of the other knights. He charged them with heresy and indecency: spitting on the Cross during secret ceremonies, worshiping idols, indecent homosexual practices, and financial fraud. Knights were questioned under torture until they admitted to anything the King wanted. In November 1307, at the King’s request, the Pope issued a bull instructing all Christian monarchs to arrest all Templars.

When Pope Clement V got involved, the torture stopped. He held trials, but some of the Templars defended themselves, and most of those who had confessed under torture recanted their confessions. This was a serious problem for Philip, so he made sure a French archbishop took control of the trials. With direct crown control restored, Philip could ensure that the original confessions were upheld as trial evidence. Those convicted were immediately burned at the stake in Paris.

Even as the King’s puppet, Pope Clement V was reluctant to continue suppressing the Templars. The King had to threaten military action, and then the Pope cooperated, outlawing the Order at the Council of Vienne (in France) in 1312. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and the Preceptor of Normandy were sentenced to be burnt for heresy on March 18, 1314. Legend says that the Grand Master called out of the flames to the Pope and King, saying that God knew the right of it and would judge them. Both Pope and King did die soon, within 1314.

The Temple properties were made over to the Hospital Order, though I think the Hospital chose wisely to cancel and destroy any certificates of debt to the King of France. Many Temple knights and other staff who had not been swept up in the heresy charges became Hospitallers. These knights continued on with headquarters on the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta.

The King of Portugal started the Order of Christ in 1317 with the remnants of the Templars in his region. He still needed them for the rest of the Reconquista. This Order still exists in Portugal.

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Mamluks vs. Mongols, 1299

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Ruth

I have it marked down as an important battle: the Third Battle of Homs in 1299, when the Mongols defeated the Mamluks after two previous losses at the same place. But when I look at it more closely, I’m not sure there’s much of a story here, more of a status report.

The Mongolian Ilkhans had invaded Syria in 1260 and 1271. Both times, the Mongols were at a disadvantage on the terrain, small in numbers, and were defeated. But the narrative of the Mongol invasion that began with Hulegu’s grandfather Genghis Khan had come to an end. After their 1258 victory over Baghdad, the Ilkhans of Persia continued to contest for territory against the Mamluk government in Egypt, but the lines were no longer clearly drawn, the story was no longer developing.

The Golden and Blue Hordes of Batu Khan’s lineage converted to Islam and aligned with the Mamluks against their own kin. Then after Hulegu’s son Abaqa died, another son took power and he, too, had converted to Islam. Traditional Buddhist/Christian/Tengri Mongols took back power and installed Abaqa’s non-Muslim son, but eventually Abaqa’s grandson Ghazan converted to Islam, again. Being a Muslim didn’t mean he couldn’t ally with Mongols, Franks, or anyone else; but it became a matter of one regional power balancing against another. It wasn’t about religion, and sometimes not even about ethnicity.

So when Ghazan’s Mongols allied with Armenians and some remaining Templars and Hospitallers, and won a battle against Egyptians near Damascus in 1299, it was not game-changing. Mongolian cavalry still couldn’t actually hold the region, and shortly they retreated to places less dry. Ghazan’s ambassador joined the knights at sea, where they tried to establish a base on Ruad Island. Ghazan made plans with Pope Boniface VIII for a new Crusade in 1302, but it never materialized: the Mongols just could not operate in the region.

Ghazan’s brother Öljeitu was baptized Christian by his mother, tentatively converted to Buddhism, then became a Muslim like Ghazan. At the same time, as the next Ilkhan he was very friendly with the Pope and never dropped the intention to help re-establish a Frankish Holy Land. The old Greek dynasty had finally taken Constantinople back from its Latin Crusade rulers and was trying to rebuild its power. Öljeitu married a Byzantine princess (illegitimate, but that never bothered the polygamous Mongols), allying with Constantinople against their local Turks. Those local Turks would become the main story shortly.

In China, Kublai Khan’s grandson Temür became Emperor in the new city of Khanbalik, and in 1304, the other lineages of Genghis who had been in rebellion against Kublai decided to accept Temür as Great Khan.  Unified, the Mongols could have organized a new giant expedition as they had done before, but they probably recognized the geographical limits. It was enough to just go on maintaining what they had, and the Great Khans of China became more and more Buddhist and Confucian as they assimilated to their conquest.

And that’s about how things continued until 1370, when Amir Temur (Tamerlane) revived the Mongol invasions.

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Marco Polo and the Golden Ticket, 1299

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Ruth

We owe the first descriptions of Xanadu and Khanbalik (Beijing) to Marco Polo of Venice, whose book was published in 1299, co-written by Rusticello of Pisa. The book was quickly translated into many languages; the oldest manuscript we have is in Old French. The copies were not controlled by a publisher, but were hand-copied and later printed at will. It first came into English in 1503, but by then it was very well-known (if not always believed) in Italian and French, and it had begun to influence map-making.

Marco was one of the Europeans living at the court of Kublai Khan. He told his story while in POW captivity in Genoa, after taking part in a Venice vs. Genoa battle shortly after he got back to Europe. In 1260, his father and uncle had set off on the Silk Road and eventually came to the Great Khan’s court in China. They were gone for ten years, while Marco grew from 6 to 16. In 1271, Marco went with them. He served Kublai Khan in various official posts while his father and uncle traded and, at times, helped build siege engines.

After 17 years, the Polos and the Khan were both growing old, so they wanted to return to Italy with their wealth before the Khan’s death might throw the Silk Road into anarchy. The Khan reluctantly gave them leave to go as escorts for the princess Kököjin. They traveled by ship, going through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Kublai Khan did die shortly, and their portion of travel through Iran was dangerous. Their protection along the way came from a tablet of gold that stated a death penalty for anyone who did not honor the Khan’s name. This golden ticket was a foot long, and it was still listed among Marco’s possessions when he died in 1324.

There are some questions about Marco’s authenticity, partly because his name is not mentioned in Yuan Dynasty records. Also, his account of China tells less of China than it might; he didn’t talk about the Great Wall or tell much about native Chinese customs. On the other hand, the Yuan Dynasty was not a time when the Wall was important, since the Mongols were some of the invaders it was meant to keep out. Marco’s family apparently learned languages that were spoken along the Silk Road, and perhaps Mongolian, but not Chinese. They mixed with the ruling class, not the farmers, and his reports about Mongolian customs seem accurate.

Marco loved the Chinese city of Hangzhou, which was filled with canals like Venice. He was very impressed with paper currency and the Yuan postal system. He described a system of first, second and third-class mail; first-class mail was the Khan’s own urgent business, carried by relays of riders without stopping. Marco was also very impressed with Kublai’s summer palace, a giant tent made of bamboo and cords, which had a hall that seated thousands. That’s what he was describing when he wrote about Xangdu, or Xanadu, as it appeared in English.

Marco saw several natural resources for the first time, too. Europe had coal, but there was no mining until the 15th century. They just found lumps of “sea coal,” a burnable rock, here and there. But China was mining coal for an additional fuel source, and Marco was amazed to see black rocks that burned like wood. He also reported seeing an asbestos-making industry among the Uyghurs; to his surprise, asbestos fabric was cleaned by throwing it into a fire!

Marco’s book’s greatest value to Europe was its geography. On the journey toward Cathay, his family party had chosen to go the long haul overland, across Afghanistan and eventually across the G0bi Desert. He reported on these places with realistic detail, effectively adding them to European maps. As a Yuan official, he traveled to Karakorum and saw parts of Siberia. These places had been so unknown to Europe that a century before, scholars had literally not known where the Mongols might be coming from, since their maps showed China but nothing beyond it.

Read more here

Marco Polo and his travels

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The Ilkhan Turns Muslim, 1291-95

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Ruth

In 1291, the Mamluks finally captured Acre, the last outpost of the Crusader states. The Christian world didn’t know that they’d never take back any of that land, but in fact, they never would, until after World War I.

At the same time, Marco Polo set out from Yuan Dynasty China with a Mongolian princess named Kököjin, conveying her across Asia to Khorasan (Iran), where she was to marry the Ilkhan Arghun. Marco was unknown to Europe at this point; he had been living in Mongol-ruled China since he was about 18. Giving him the task of traveling with the princess was Kublai Khan’s way of allowing him to return home to Italy.

Kublai and Marco had no way to know that after Arghun’s envoys left Khorasan, the Ilkhan died. But it wouldn’t matter; it was understood among the Mongols that the political treaty that this marriage represented would involve whoever the Ilkhan was at the time. During this time of Mongolian civil war, the Ilkhanate wanted stronger ties with Kublai Khan. So when the caravan arrived in Khorasan in 1293, about 3 years after the envoys had sent for a new wife, Kököjin married Arghun’s son Ghazan. Because of her status, she became the principal wife, but it’s possible she was truly the first wife since Ghazan was a young man.

Arghun didn’t die a natural death; he was assassinated by a conspiracy of generals. His son didn’t immediately or easily become the Ilkhan. Between 1291 and 1295, the conspirators put Ghazan’s cousin on the throne so they could rule the Ilkhanate through him. One of the regional governors, an Oirat Mongol who had converted to Islam, rebelled against Arghun, and also against his successors. Ghazan made an alliance with him that included, as one of its terms, his own formal conversion to Islam. This alliance put him firmly in power.

There appears to be a great difference between his relative Berke Khan’s conversion in the 1250s and Ghazan’s in 1295. Berke had been living in a Muslim area and converted as an individual, from the heart. Ghazan, by contrast, converted in a public way for political reasons. It was much more like Kublai Khan’s strategy of adopting Chinese culture as a form of conquest. Ghazan pretty clearly did not convert from the heart. He had been raised as a traditional Mongol, speaking Monglian while riding horses from his earliest years, living in a ger and practicing Tengri shamanism. As a Muslim, he adopted the name Mahmud, but he probably continued carrying out Tengri rituals.

And unlike Berke Khan in Russia, Ghazan Ilkhan continued to encourage free religious practice. He didn’t suppress Shi’ite Muslims in Iran nor put any conversion pressure on the Christian Armenians and Georgians who paid him tribute, and he protected Tibetan Buddhists. His brother succeeded him, and he followed the same practices. However, the Ilkhanate was now officially Muslim, which probably meant that the tax structure began to include Sharia-related taxes.

Nawruz, the Mongolian Muslim who had first helped Ghazan gain power, persecuted Christians, Buddhists and Tengrists in his district. He destroyed temples and churches and forced the jizya tax on non-Muslims. Ghazan called it treason, undid what could be undone, and eventually executed Nawruz. He appointed a Persian Jew, now a Muslim, to be his vizier. This man, Rashid Hamadani, was a medical doctor and poet, as well.

Rashid Hamadani wrote a comprehensive history of the Mongols, in Persian, with a team of assistants at a library and workshop in Tabriz. The book was supposed to help Mongols remember their roots as they became assimilated to Iran, and it was also a propaganda work to help Iranians accept Mongolian rule. As the years passed, the project grew until it was something like a History of Mankind from Adam. We still have some copies of this book, called the Jami al-Tawarikh, and probably some of the facts about Ghazan and his relatives originated in those pages. A few years after he finished the book, Rashid apparently poisoned Ghazan’s brother, who had succeeded him. Rashid went from the height of wealth and influence to an executioner’s block: sic transit gloria mundi.

 

 

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In Xanadu did Kublai Khan: the Yuans, 1271

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Ruth

“In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumpuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.” — Samuel Purchas (1614) paraphrasing Marco Polo (1299).

Kublai, the youngest son of Genghis Khan’s youngest son, nominally ruled the entire Empire, but specifically, he ruled China. Northern China had been conquered in Genghis Khan’s time, but Kublai and his brothers pushed Mongolian rule until it encompassed all of China. As we’ve seen before, Mongolian war tactics couldn’t survive the tropical climate of Southern China, so Kublai had to innovate. He conquered China by becoming “more Chinese than the Chinese,” according to Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World).

The Chinese were consciously proud of their culture, but they had been torn apart by civil war countless times. Kublai made his government appealing by adopting all of the cultural markers of former Imperial courts. He named his new dynasty the Da Yuan (“Great Beginnings”) Dynasty and created a back-dated Chinese history: Chinese names and Imperial portraits for his Mongolian ancestors four generations back. They needed an ancestral temple, so he built one. If you’ve ever looked at a portrait of Kublai or Genghis Khan and thought to yourself, “He looks very Chinese,” you were right. It’s effectively the equivalent of medieval portraits of Biblical characters dressed like medieval townsmen.

Kublai began with a palace in Shangdu (Xanadu), but to extend his power, he built the new city of Beijing; he called it Khanbalik and his subjects called it Daidu. He created it as a modern city, somewhat like Karakorum with its right-angle intersections and wide streets. Main streets had to be wide enough for 9 mounted men to ride abreast! Because the streets were straight, guards could see from one city gate to the other. Both of these traffic details would make it easier for a Mongolian army to subdue a rebellious citizenry. Like Karakorum, the new city had specific quarters for Muslim, Christian, and Mongolian nomadic residents.

Here’s the most interesting part: the new city was designed around the open land that Mongols prized most. The origin of the Imperial “Forbidden City” was apparently as an enclosed parkland complete with Mongolian gers/yurts. Just as Xanadu had a large enclosed forest, Beijing’s inner enclosure had an artificial lake and a small mountain. There was plenty of grazing space for horses and sheep, and the park may have been stocked with wild animals for hunting, too. Mongolian children of Kublai’s officials were born in gers and grew up speaking Mongolian while riding ponies. Mongolian customs were kept alive, especially the ones that shocked the Chinese.

For example, in Chinese Imperial culture, the knife was a kitchen tool, not a dining utensil. Food came to the table ready to eat (and nicely spiced as well). But in Mongolian “cuisine,” big chunks of meat were roasted or boiled, then brought to the table (actually a white felt rug on the ground) where the diner used his own knife to cut it up. Inside the Forbidden City, they could wipe their mouths on their sleeves and eat unseasoned legs of mutton. The Chinese subjects were not allowed to watch. Anywhere they were permitted, the Mongolian rulers followed Chinese etiquette.

The Forbidden City’s secret culture eventually turned out very important, when the Yuan Dynasty was overthrown and the survivors came back to Mongolia as refugees. They were spoiled rotten (and terrible hunters) by Mongolian standards, but at least they knew the language and customs so they could try to fit back in.

Perhaps Kublai’s most brilliant achievement was to reform Chinese law to make it both uniform and compatible with the laws laid down by Genghis. Contrary to what we think of the Mongols’ wild cruelty, Kublai’s laws shifted away from whippings and execution, toward fines and encouraging repentance. His legal code required officials to use logical analysis to figure things out and only resort to torture after other avenues were exhausted. The Chinese had often tattooed a criminal’s forehead, but the Mongols believed this too cruel because the forehead was the seat of the soul. They discouraged the practice of tattoos at all, and transitioned the locals instead to a system of placing a billboard in front of a criminal’s house to shame him.

The Chinese had pioneered printing paper money, an innovation that the Mongols enthusiastically adopted and expanded. Yuan Dynasty China floated almost entirely on paper currency. Of course, Genghis Khan’s emphasis on a good postal system continued too, so the Chinese were the first to send paper money to each other, carried by paid riders.

Officials in Kublai’s China were always a mix of ethnicities, the way Genghis Khan had mixed them in his armies. He promoted Muslims from the west, Europeans like Marco Polo, and a quota-based mix of regional Chinese. During the Yuan Dynasty, the rigid Chinese system of mandarin exams was suspended. Instead, Kublai began a system of licensing other professions, ensuring some minimal level of competency. Local governments were also pushed to create councils that operated somewhat like the Mongolian kurultai assemblies. Peasants were organized into administrative groups to solve problems and promote literacy. Kublai’s China even had some basic public schools, about 20,000 of them according to Mongol court records.

Kublai also put on public shows of theater, which had been neglected in previous dynasties. He wanted acrobats, bright colors, and action. At one point, Weatherford reports, he staged an epic retelling of Mongolian history with thousands of actors, going on for days. The Yuan Dynasty became a period of rapid growth in Chinese literature; if there is a Chinese Shakespeare, he lived during the Yuan years.

Effectively, Kublai’s Mongolian-China became the place anyone and everyone would want to live. He competed with the old Song Dynasty so effectively that it eroded from within, as officials, peasants, and regions deserted to serve the Yuan. He always had an army operating in the southern region, picking off towns and winning small battles. In 1276, this Mongol army finally entered the Song capital of Hangzhou. The heir to the Song throne was sent to Tibet (another Mongolian holding) to become a monk.

Kublai did make an attempt to conquer Japan, at last. When he had taken over a unified China as well as Korea, his empire had the ship building power to invade islands. Japan ignored the usual Mongolian demand for surrender, and they even took the tried and true way of executing envoys, always sure to launch an invasion. In 1274, a naval operation set out from Korea and easily conquered Takashima Island, which lies between the mainland and big islands. In a grand battle against samurai knights, the Mongolian-Chinese-Korean force won a huge victory.

However, conquest of the Japanese islands did not follow. The Mongolian forces took ship again that night, probably intending to sail to another port and attack. But a huge storm came up and the entire fleet was destroyed. In 1281, a newly-built fleet tried again, with the same result. The most important lasting effect from Kublai’s invasions seems to be that Japan began to take foreigners more seriously. Its loose government started to turn into the centralized, militarized power that so awed Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Had Kublai never invaded, perhaps history would have gone differently.

Kublai tried one more naval invasion: Indonesia in 1291. In a direct battle, the Mongolian-Chinese-Korean forces killed the king and appeared to win, but they could not parlay this into actual conquest. The Mongolian genius had been for horseback warfare, and while ships looked at first like so many floating horses, in fact, they weren’t.

Jack Weatherford says that it was during Kublai’s Yuan Dynasty that Chinese culture started to influence the rest of South-east Asia. Until then, its culture had been Hindu or Buddhist, influenced from India (you can see this in Cambodia’s and Bali’s most ancient ruins). Kublai’s government encouraged Chinese migration to what we now call Indo-China. In tribute-paying places like Thailand and Vietnam, Chinese officials probably represented the Yuans, since they had a core competency in bureaucracy and the Mongols were all about borrowing the competencies of other cultures.

Mongolian expansion had reached its maximum territorial limits.

 

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The Eighth and Ninth Crusades, 1270-2

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Ruth

The Mamluk Sultan Baybars had a field day in the Holy Land during the 1260s. War between Venice and Genoa had drawn the remaining Crusader towns into war with each other, exhausting the region one more time. Mamluk forces, which already held Jerusalem, destroyed the cathedral of Nazareth and took Ascalon, Jaffa, Arsuf, Caesarea and Haifa. It was time to call a new Crusade.

The first volunteer was Louis IX, whose religious faith made him truly devoted to the Holy Land cause. He had never stopped trying to guide and support the Crusader states after his family returned to Paris. Now, in 1267, he took the Cross. He was 53 in a time when 60 was a very ripe old age, and his aging process had been sped by past serious illness and austere living. He had nine living children, the eldest now Queen of Navarre, the youngest seven years old. The King of Navarre, son of the leading Barons’ Crusader, also took the Cross. The King of Aragon attempted to join, but storms forced his ships back. The Crown Prince of England, Edward, also planned to join when he could, but he came from a greater distance.

Louis wanted to go straight back to Acre and help win back more cities from the Mamluks, but his brother Charles had become King of Sicily. If Louis went to Sicily, then to Tunis, he could conquer territory that would help Charles and weaken Egypt. It wasn’t a very good plan. Louis may have wished to convert the Muslims of Tunis to Christianity, and he’d already had his fill of Egypt’s obstinacy on that count.

The Pope devoted some of the Church’s income in France and Navarre to funding the royal expeditions, and in July of 1270, the two kings sailed with large fleets to Tunisia, where they camped on the ruins of Carthage. While they waited for the new King of Sicily or the Crown Prince of England to arrive, they call caught dysentery. Jean Tristan, the baby born in Damietta, died, and his father soon after. When the King of Sicily arrived, he negotiated a truce with Baybars. It worked out well for Sicily: trade with Tunis was opened, with a cash payment and Egypt’s promise not to harbor rivals for the Sicilian crown.

Prince Edward of England arrived after all this was over, so he wintered in Sicily but was determined to go on, to Acre, with King Charles of Sicily. This effort became the Ninth Crusade. Meanwhile, Baybars had taken even Antioch, the well-fortified city that had given the First Crusaders so much trouble.  There was not much left of the Latin Holy Land.

The joint force sailed into Acre while Baybars was besieging Tripoli, the last Crusader “state” in existence. The Mamluks backed away from Acre for the time being, allowing the Crusaders to establish a strong camp there. From this camp, Edward and Charles led raids against the Galilee, taking Nazareth in a no-prisoners battle. More men came from England and Cyprus, with Edward’s younger brother. In 1271, the largest Latin force in years was occupying the land, looking about for possible victories to push back Mamluk governance.

One soft target was a group of recent Turkic immigrants who may have come with the Mongols but stayed behind. The Mamluks had given them land and titles, but they did not know the land and could easily be routed by Crusaders. During 1271, Prince Edward sent an embassy to the Ilkhan, Hulegu’s son Abagha. The Ilkhan agreed to an alliance against the Mamluks and sent a new Mongol force of 10,000 horse.

This was good as far as it went, but the Ilkhan was not committed to resettling the land in any way. His cavalry spent one month in the Holy Land and then rode back to Iran with their spoils. When the Mamluks arrived to push them back, they were gone.

Baybars planned one more large attack to get rid of the Christian armies. Disguising some Egyptian ships as Christian, he sent them to Cyprus to make a surprise attack on Limassol. It wasn’t a bad plan, and it would have materially weakened the Christian forces to lose their supply base on Cyprus. However, the Mamluks lost this one.

By now, it was clear to Prince Edward that the biggest obstacle to taking back the Holy Land was that the “native” Christian rulers were too divided. The Jerusalem royals had died out and been diverted into the Hohenstaufen dynasty of Germany, but other smaller families had taken up the power that remained. Hugh III of Cyprus, descended from Hugh of Lusignan, fought continually with the Ibelin family, the last Franks to defend Jerusalem. And it was time for Prince Edward to return home. He negotiated a truce with Baybars, concluding a 10 year truce in 1272.

Before Edward could embark for England, an assassin with a poisoned knife stabbed him. Edward, however, was a strong young man. He killed the assassin and gradually recovered from the toxic wound, staying on Sicily until he regained his strength. By then, his father had died, so the new King Edward returned to England, covered with Crusader glory.

To the people on the scene, it was not obvious that the Crusade was really over. The King of Sicily bought the rights to “King of Jerusalem” from the last survivor of the old family. The last years of the truce were wasted by civil war among factions. Further Crusader energy was squandered on a last attempt to hold onto Constantinople against the Byzantines who were finally winning it back. Can anyone be surprised that in 1291, the city of Acre at last fell to the Mamluks? Even then, small Crusade attempts dribbled along, but no territory was ever won again. In hindsight, Edward’s Ninth Crusade retaking of some towns like Nazareth was the last success the Latin Crusaders would ever see.

 

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West African Empires, 1269-1312

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Ruth

The Almohad dynasty had been ruling in Marrakesh and much of Spanish Andalusia for the last century. It wasn’t materially different from the Almoravids before or the Marinids after it; at this point, West and North Africa had settled into a theological and cultural way that didn’t change. In earlier centuries, it had been a volatile area that swung from Sunni to Shi’ite and back, so that it birthed the Fatimid Shi’ite dynasty that built Cairo. But after the Medina-based Maliki theology took root, it stuck.

So the change, in 1269, from the last Almohad Caliph Idris to the first Marinid Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub, wasn’t a sea change for the population. It would have had a big effect on the ruling class, who needed to bend the knee to a new set of officials. The seat of government, too, drifted from Marrakech to Fez, where the Marinids built up wealth and power. Fez’s height of intellectual influence was during the 1300s, when the Marinids were at their peak.

During this time, the Empire of Mali also arose. It had been established roughly in 1230, but its power took time to grow. Its conquest of Sosso, a caravan-trade-route kingdom of the 12th century, established it as the new receiver of oasis fees and taxes. The ruler of the Mali Empire was called the Mansa, a Mandinka word for Sultan. They were devout Maliki Muslims, like the Marinids to the north. Mansas went on Hajj to Mecca, traveling through Timbuktu and Egypt. They had friendly relations with the Sunni Mamluks of Cairo.

Mansa Musa Keito, who was born around 1280, was the most famous Mansa of Mali. He was made Regent when the Mansa before him decided to explore the Atlantic Ocean and never came back. In 1312, Musa became Mansa on his own. He was one of the richest men in history, apparently controlling the world market price of gold with his own personal actions (by giving too much, he devalued it, and had to fix this by borrowing a lot of it back). Mali was the leading producer of gold at this time.

Timbuktu’s population began to increase during the Mali Empire period. In the time of Mansa Musa, it probably had 10,000 people living on the edge of the Sahara. (Its odd location seems to have marked the outside limits of the annual Niger River flood.) Its famous mosque made entirely of mud and straw was built during the 14th century, though the one we see now was probably a renewed model built when the population had grown even larger, in the 1500s. Of course, it was a center for Maliki scholarship. In our time, its residents made a huge effort to rescue most of the books and scrolls from the mosque before rebels in Mali’s civil war could burn them.

 

 

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