The World: A Family History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

That’s why the most successful leaders are visionaries, transcendent strategists but also improvisers, opportunists, creatures of bungle and luck. ‘Even the shrewdest of the shrewd,’ admitted Bismark ‘goes like a child into the dark.’

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

A world historian, wrote al-Masudi in ninth-century Baghdad, is like ‘a man who, having found pearls of all kinds and colours, gathers them together into a necklace and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care’.

For most of history – the next eight and a half millennia – life expectancy was around thirty.

Around 3100, the people of Uruk – which meant the Place – may have invented writing, initially pictograms, but then took to marking clay with the wedge-end of a reed, a process that we call cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped. The first named people in history are an accountant, a slave master and two enslaved persons.

Alyattes, who, based in Sardis, ruled Lydia, a rich realm extending to the Aegean, trading between Babylon and Greece. Alyattes was the first to cast coins, money that gleamed with electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. The Lydians invented coins at the same time as they appeared in India and China.

Phoenicians only used consonants; the Greeks added vowels to develop the first alphabetic system of writing.

They prided themselves on manners and control, and were so curt that the word laconic comes from Laconia, the Spartan homeland.

The Greeks prided themselves on their involvement in governing the polis – politics based on good governance, eunomia, and freedom, eleutheria. Yet their poleis were dominated by aristocracies and often ruled by tyrants, sometimes by benign autocrats, who were supported by middle and lower classes against overweening nobles.

In 621, a nobleman Drakon drafted the first laws in his own blood, but his draconian code scarcely restrained the aristocratic faction fights that often led to massacres: eighty skeletons with bound wrists were found in one mass grave.

Around 500 BC, the contrarian philosopher Heraklitos of Ephesus first used the word cosmos – order – to mean the universe. ‘All things come into being by conflict of opposites,’ he said, ‘and everything flows’ in a constant evolution: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’

the Athenians instituted a novelty to control the dominance of their paladins: voters could secretly write a politician’s name on a pottery shard (ostrakon) to sentence him to exile – ostracism – for ten years, providing at least 6,000 votes were cast.

Socrates believed all humans must aspire to arete – virtuous excellence – while the alternative, ‘the unexamined life’, is ‘not worth living’.

‘You can lose a war as easily as you win. War is unpredictable. Avoid war.’

These patricians wore the national dress, the toga, a white garment with a purple border for office holders (hence the word candidate, from candidatus, meaning a man who wore the white toga of election campaigns).

Antony took revenge on Cicero for his witticisms. ‘There’s nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,’ Cicero told the hitman, ‘but do try to kill me properly.’ Antony nailed his victim’s hands and head to the rostrum in the Forum, while Fulvia cut out his tongue and pierced it with her hatpin – an ugly display even by Roman standards.

From the moment he ascended the throne in 768 at the age of twenty, Charlemagne, blond, giant and irrepressibly energetic, galloped, broadsword in hand, from one end of Europe to the other, dominating the continent more than anyone else until Napoleon and Hitler, with the difference that he ruled for forty years – and virtually every monarch in Europe down to 1918 was descended from him.

Hoards of the caliph’s coins – 100,000 so far – have been discovered in Sweden, as has a small bronze Buddha cast in Kashmir, while in Britain Mercian kings adapted dirhams, still marked in Arabic, for local use.

As for the Norse raider Rollo, the battle of Paris made him too. In its aftermath, he stole a Frankish count’s bride, Poppa of Bayeux, with whom he founded a dynasty that in some ways still endures. So hulking that no horse would hold him, Rollo the Walker, now captured Rouen, then in 911 attacked Paris again. The Carolingian king of West Francia, Charles the Simple, bought him off with a deal to keep his lands provided he converted to Christianity, and repelled Viking raiders and overmighty barons. Rollo agreed: he and his Norsemen became known as Normans, his duchy as Normandy; his descendants conquered England, and today’s British monarchs are descended from him.

‘An empire that can be conquered on horseback,’ he mused, ‘can’t be ruled from it.’ Whether or not he really said that, Genghis now commissioned a system of taxation.

Right up until the middle of the eighteenth century, doctors were so destructive that it is likely that aristocrats with access to expensive medics lived less long than peasants with none.

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.

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 …

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.

The word banking derives from banco, the marketplace stall from which these early financiers did their business.

Rebranding himself as Pachacuti – Earthshaker – Yupanqui seized the throne, humiliating the father and embarking on almost forty years of conquests that subdued most of Peru. He beautified Cusco, building the monumental Golden Temple of the Sun at its centre and the Saqsawaman fortress complex with its zigzag walls above the city, and in the mountains he erected the mysterious but astounding terraced palace of Machu Picchu

In 1526, an Italian artisan, Bartolomeo Beretta, founded a foundry in northern Italy that manufactured muskets. In the 1530s, Beretta was experimenting with a new, smaller firearm: pistols – from the Czech pistole – became an aristocratic fashion item, bespoke and intricately ornamented. As for the Beretta, the factory is still producing guns today.

Statistics are guesswork but over many centuries, child mortality before the age of five varied from 20 per cent to 50; as many as 20 per cent of births ended in death for the mother.

1526

The sweet potato, transplanted by European traders, became popular in Africa and especially in China, where it helped propel Chinese population growth.

Circa 1550

Departure is one of the tests of political acumen; few know when or how to do it. Succession is the great test of a system; few manage it well.

Jahangir’s empire was the richest power on earth, approaching the height of its economic power: it is estimated that its share of world GDP was climbing fast, from 22.7 per cent in 1600 to 24.4 per cent in 1700, bigger than China’s. Its population – 110 million – was larger than all Europe combined.

Kepler also invented a new genre, science fiction, writing an autobiographical story Somnium (The Dream), predicting space travel. He lived until 1630, leaving this epitaph: ‘I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure; / Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests.’

As Oliver’s secretary Milton wrote Paradise Lost about the Fall in the Garden of Eden, many Cromwellians, including the clerk Samuel Pepys, negotiated pardons and rewards.

This was Johan de Witt, imperial mastermind and mathematical scholar – he used survival rates from the first studies of the causes of death to calculate life insurance rates and also devised the financial annuity – who had ruled, informally, for twenty successful years.

Pepys started his famous diary on 1 January 1660 in time to recount the Restoration – he sailed back to England with the king – with an irrepressible joie de vivre that at least partly derived from his survival of a lithotomy procedure or ‘cutting for the stone’. He celebrated the date annually with a feast for the rest of his life. The Cromwellians who delivered the army and navy, Monck and Montagu, were made duke of Albermarle and earl of Sandwich, becoming two of the king’s top courtiers: young Pepys rose with them. The king appointed him clerk of the acts at the Navy Board.

‘The Duke of Buckingham doth rule all now,’ wrote Pepys. The word cabal derives from the ministry led by Buckingham (an acronym from the names Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale).

The Dutchman delivered the stability, the rule of law and the creative energy needed to forge a world power. He oversaw the creation of the Bank of England and, realizing that the English coinage was dangerously debased, launched the Great Recoinage, which was managed by an English luminary, Isaac Newton. Now fifty-three, Newton had been given a sinecure wardenship of the Royal Mint, but its management was so incompetent that he agreed to run the vital recoinage himself as master, a highly lucrative position, earning a percentage of every coin produced.

Velázquez’s Las Meninas. ‘What do you think of it?’ asked Carlos. ‘Sire,’ replied Giordano, ‘this is the theology of painting.’

‘In a twinkle, in a minute, in a breath,’ said the greatest monarch of his time, Alamgir, ‘the condition of the world changes.’

London was in the grip of a speculative frenzy, ignited by shares of the slave-trading South Sea Company, which was structured to pay off government debt. Fortunes were made trading in and out of the shares. The elderly Isaac Newton made so much selling shares that he could not resist rebuying them. But few realized that the company was badly run. When it crashed, it wiped out many investors. Newton, who in old age lived with his niece (her husband had succeeded him at the Mint), was abashed to lose half his fortune – though he remained very rich.

Voltaire was the first of the philosophes, who advocated a new, sceptical, rational, scientific, tolerant state of mind that sought the greatest happiness for mankind and challenged blind faith and sacred monarchy. If we choose to worship God, argued Immanuel Kant, the German philosophe of Königsberg later in the century, ‘we finite creatures can never understand the infinite nature of reality’. Kant summed up the Enlightened spirit in two words: Sapere aude! – Dare to use your own intellect!

enlightenment

‘Democracy,’ wrote Kant, ‘is a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which “all” decide for or against the “one” who does not.’ Most believed in mixed monarchies with reform from above but Voltaire wrote a biography of Peter the Great and encouraged ‘philosopher-kings’.

The vaunted Enlightenment was actually the intellectual movement of a feverishly interconnected European elite close to a nervous breakdown and identity crisis, still honeycombed with snobbery, bigotry, conspiracy theories and magical hucksterism. It was an era of disguise and reinvention, a time of sociability, travel, individuality and sexual freedom personified by a writer named Giacomo Casanova.

When the Jews were expelled from their suburb across the Danube, Im Werd, the Austrians celebrated by renaming it Leopoldstadt, but later this neighbourhood again became popular with Viennese Jews, their lives celebrated in Tom Stoppard’s play, Leopoldstadt.

Coffee houses were already popular in London – Pepys wrote, ‘Thence I to the coffee house where much good discourse’ – but Vienna did not yet have any. A legend claims that Sobieski gave the sacks to a Ukrainian soldier-spy Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who founded the first Viennese café. The crescent shape and name of croissants was said to originate in this victory.

It is currently estimated that 6,494,619 slaves were traded across the Atlantic in the period 1701–1800, over half the total of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1492 and 1866.

A sudden spurt in the British population – fuelled by rising food production, which doubled between 1600 and 1800 – provided a market of workers and consumers. People poured into cities: between 1790 and 1850, the city dwellers more than doubled from 9.7 per cent to 22.6. By 1800, there were a million Londoners. In thirty years, that doubled; by the 1870s, it had doubled

Napoleon believed that ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the others with enough authority to force them to live in harmony’ and that power was France.

But Peru ‘contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society’, said Bolívar, ‘gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in itself.’

In January 1830, Bolivar, still only forty-seven, faced reality: ‘Colombians! Today I cease to govern you … Never, never, I swear, have my thoughts been tainted by lust for kingship.’ Cadaverously consumptive, he retired to his house, La Quinta, near Cartagena, spluttering, ‘How will I get out of this labyrinth?’ There was no way out.

The General in his labyrinth