The rise of the Mongols in the twelfth century a.d. was a sharp and hideously brutal episode, in which an eastern empire—with its capital in what is now Beijing—achieved fleeting domination over half the world, at the cost of millions of lives. Against the background of this dramatic shift in global geopolitics, part III also looks at other emerging powers in what is sometimes called the “high” Middle Ages. We will meet merchants who invented extraordinary new financial techniques to make themselves and the world richer; scholars who revived the wisdom of the ancients and founded some of
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