The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

‘will come to you from those you love.’

the modern cult of childhood.

‘He who has a why to live for,’ says Nietzsche, ‘can tolerate any how.’

family for many can be a privilege.

But history has become a sparkwheel, its moral power instantly igniting torches of knowledge and dumpster-fires of ignorance.

But historians are often not so much chroniclers of the past or seers of the future as simply mirrors of their own present.

lost in stability for the children fought for power, and often destroyed the very realm they coveted.

Lapis lazuli,

Lady Fu Hao, mentioned in 170 oracle bones, may have started as a court diviner, but became the king’s partner. When the king appointed Lady Hao, he consulted the diviners and they confirmed the appointment.

‘All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.’

Tathagata, the One Who’s Here.

parinirvana,

The plague undermined confidence. ‘The catastrophe,’ wrote Thucydides, ‘was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen to them next, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law,’ and it stretched the limits of early government, impairing the ability to feed the city and undermining its religious system that was designed to keep natural disasters at bay.

The king sent his youngest brother, the thirteen-year-old Philip. Spending three years in Thebes, Philip was taught a lifestyle of vegetarianism, celibacy and pacifism (all of which he later ignored), but he stayed in the house of the Theban general who was his mentor, probably also his lover, and studied the tactics of the Sacred Band, the elite corps of 300 (supposedly 150 male couples) whose victories had won Thebes its supremacy.

When Philip learned his team had won the Olympics, Polyxena changed her name to Olympias to celebrate. But they were never close, and soon Olympias found she positively disliked him. Vigilant and feral in her political instincts, Olympias, an adept of Dionysian mystery cults, nurtured a menagerie of sacred snakes that slept in her bed with her and frightened her menfolk – and that surely included Philip, who was afraid of virtually nothing else. Besides, he was very rarely at home.

‘No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not fully repaid’

Domitia, grandmother of his children, and reflected aloud that his fate was to marry women then punish them.

looking ‘like a man always straining to have a shit’

The Jews cursed Hadrian, but after this third catastrophe, following the destructions of Jerusalem in 586 BC and AD 70, the Jews – settling in large numbers in Alexandria and Hispania – survived as both a religion and a people, never losing their link to, and reverence for, Jerusalem and Judaea.

pandemics are invisible and inexplicable, but they have brought down more empires than any number of demented emperors and fierce battles.

‘What repayment for the kindness I’ve lavished on you and for the drunken insults endured all these years. A drunkard can’t outplay a sober woman.’

‘There is no god but God,’ recited Muhammad, in the earliest version of the shahada, and this God had no son. The only path was submission – Islam – living according to the rules of worship in a religion that welcomed everyone, regardless of class, gender or nation, offering moral universality, the incentive of afterlife, and easily understood rituals and rules.

Umayyad Mosque).

Wu had a daughter whom the empress liked to dandle on her knee. In 654, the empress played with the baby; when she left, Wu suffocated her own daughter and then, when the emperor visited, she revealed in an agony of grief the blue-faced child, blaming Empress Wang. Gaozong questioned the staff, all of whom replied that ‘the Empress’ was responsible. Gaozong cried, ‘The Empress has murdered my baby!’ Wu’s career was recorded after her death by hostile historians, but even if she did not murder her own daughter, she used the death to destroy Gaozong’s relationship with his wife, whose barrenness was a tragedy in a dynastic court when her rival would deliver six children.

sempiternal schism at the heart of Islam.

‘Weeping in the wilderness, how many families know of war and loss,’ wrote Du Fu. ‘All word of events in the human world lost in those vast silent spaces.’[*12]

he happily remembered in old age: ‘I recall your earthy aroma to this day!’ Finally he reached Morocco and, after sending his freedman to test support, he arrived

‘My vagina is like a split pomegranate,’ said one, ‘and smells of ground amber. Lucky the one who gets me when I’m shaven.’

establishing a Côte d’Azur pirates’ nest at Fréjus and campaigning in Morocco, where his general was a Slavic eunuch nicknamed the Castrated Cockerell.

Now in 1000, Basil stormed into Bulgaria, the start of fourteen atrocious years that culminated in 1014 with victory at Kleidion, where the emperor blinded ninety-nine out of every hundred of his 15,000 prisoners, with each unit led home by their solitary one-eyed guide

‘We have no friends other than our shadows,’

Basileia Romaion

a vainglorious, incompetent and overpromoted buffoon whose rise to the top seemed an impossible joke

White Pagoda,

Sankarani River

Djinguereber Mosque (made of earth) and

Darius, Alexander, their great hullabaloo Can be summed up simply in a line or two.[*2]

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.

Güzelce Hisar, that still stands. With the west

Lake Poyang

Senegal River

‘You stupid Greeks. All you will do is lose the little you have.’

‘His lips gave life anew to one whom his glances kill’ – in a culture that regarded sexuality as a question of power rather than identity: the penetrator, virile, the penetrated, submissive.

Cape Verde,

As a vassal and later successor state to the khans, Ivan and his heirs commandeered the Mongol belief in absolute power of the sacred tsar, his holy mission to conquer, total ownership of the land and control of over all their ‘slaves’ – as all subjects, even nobles, were known. The imperial splendour and Orthodox mission of Constantinople were vital too, but it was the Mongol tradition that is probably key to understanding Russia right into the twenty-first century.

São Jorge da Mina

The Taínos were hit by smallpox and other pathogens brought by the Spanish, to which they had no resistance. They perished fast, ceasing to exist as a separate race, though DNA analysis of today’s inhabitants reveals they interbred with the Spanish. Only their words – canoe, hammock, hurricane and tobacco – survived. The Spanish were infected with syphilis, which they brought back to Europe where it raced through the population.[*6]

His reign demonstrates how a small but determined clique of self-righteous, self-selected extremists can dominate a society, rewarding their supporters with spoils and destroying those deemed unvirtuous – a template for authoritarian ideologies ever since. They can always be foiled by the will of the majority, but they flourish when others fail to organize or lose their courage.

Haitian kasike named Hatuey who had fled with his men by canoe to Cuba. Brandishing gold, Hatuey warned the Cuban Taínos, ‘Here’s the God the Spaniards worship. For these they kill…they speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, rape our daughters.’ In the course of a three-year war, Velázquez crushed Hatuey, eventually burning him alive, and, in one atrocity among many, slaughtered 2,000 Taínos who had merely gathered to gawp at the Spanish and their horses.

‘God’s given us the papacy,’ said Leo. ‘Let’s enjoy it.’ And he did, presiding over feasts of ape meat, monkey brains and parrot tongues with sixty starters, naked boys jumping out of pies