The World Quotes

“The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“The Arabs traded with the Bantu-speaking Africans, gradually developing a new hybrid language, Swahili, from the Arabic al-Sahel – the Coast.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Women were sub manu – under the hand: they could technically be executed by their fathers and husbands and were expected to display pudicitia, chastity and fidelity, to ensure the bloodline of their children, while running the home and keeping out of politics – though of course they exerted power behind the scenes. Once the childbearing was done, it is clear they enjoyed affairs with other nobles and even sex with slaves – provided they did not flaunt their pleasures. The familia included the family’s slaves, who were expected to be loyal to the dominus (master) and his household even more so than to the state. Domestic slavery, male and female, always involved sexual predations by masters – and mistresses. The killing of slaves by masters was entirely legal. In a slave-owning society, with as many as 40 per cent of the population enslaved, family and slavery were entwined. But slaves were often educated, sometimes revered and loved by their masters. They were frequently freed and freedmen could become citizens, later even potentates.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Kublai did not just tolerate but celebrated the festivals of ‘the Saracens, Jews and idolaters (Buddhists).’ On being asked the reason, Kublai replied, ‘There are four prophets. The Christians had Jesus, the Saracens Muhammad, the Jews Moses and the idolaters Buddha, who was the first. I reverence all four.’ When the Polos asked him to be baptized, he jovially replied that his shaman, astrologers and sorcerers were much more powerful than Christians: ‘My lords and other believers would demand “What miracles have you seen of Jesus?”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Gregory IX created the Papal Inquisition to prevent local rulers or mobs taking on supposed heretics without papal supervision. He burned copies of the Jewish Talmud and ordered that all Jews should be regarded as perpetuam servitus judaeorum – in servitude until Judgement Day.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“The new Egyptian rulers were tough soldiers who had started as slaves – Mamluks. They were Russians and Turks, Georgians and Circassians, blue-eyed blonds being specially prized, stolen or bought from their villages, sold in the Genoan slave markets of Crimea and bought by Saladin and his family.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“This occulted vanishing only added to al-Hakim’s mystique among his disciples, who were massacred on his sister’s orders. Some of them escaped: today two million Druze in Israel, Lebanon and Syria still revere his divinity. Sitt al-Mulk covered her own traces, executed Ibn Daws and ruled the Fatimiyya empire as princess-aunt, reversing al-Hakim’s bans: wine drinking and music playing were restored, women were allowed to dress as they wished and to shop; Jews and Christians could return to their faiths and stop wearing distinguishing clothes; Easter and Christmas were back.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“A fifth of slaves may have died on the nightmarish journeys across the desert, where their bones were a well-known sight. Between 700 and the abolition of slavery, it is likely that as many slaves were traded from east Africa as in the Atlantic trade. Ralph A. Austen estimates 11.75 million were traded – but the numbers are educated guesses.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Al-Hakim was wildly inconsistent, founding a Dar al-Ilm – House of Knowledge – similar to al-Mamun’s House of Wisdom – where not only Ismaili theology but astronomy and philosophy were taught in sessions that he himself often attended. But once Barjawan was gone al-Hakim seems to have believed that tolerance had displeased God. In 1004, noticing rich Christian caravans setting off for Jerusalem, he started executing Christians and converting churches into mosques. On hearing of the frenzied Christian rite of the Holy Fire that took place every Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he banned Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, and wine drinking as well. Then he ordered that Jews and Christians wear distinguishing clothing, a Jew a wooden cow-yoke (and in the baths a cowbell) and Christians a cross. Jews and Christians were ordered to convert or die; many pretended to convert.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“In Jerusalem, Jews were allowed to pray with Muslims at the mosque on the Temple Mount for many decades, while in Damascus Christians and Muslims prayed together in the Church of St John (today’s Umayyad Mosque). Monophysite and Nestorian Christians persecuted by Heraclius probably regarded the Arabs as uncouth ruffians but fellow monotheists.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“There were said to be 365 gods, but the chief ones were the gold-handed god Hubal, who offered divinations, the goddesses Al-Lat, Manat and al-Uzza, for whom humans were burned as sacrifices, a couple Isaf and Nailah who had been petrified for copulating there, and Jesus and Mary, all of them under the aegis of the chief god, Allah.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“But Hadrian persisted in building Aelia, banning Jews from Judaea, which he pointedly renamed Palestina – after the Philistines. 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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Rome’s success was, its people believed, owing to the favour of chief god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Roman religion was not one of doctrine, improvement or salvation but one of ritual and lifestyle, based on sacrifices to a pantheon to ensure success and prosperity.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Rulers, statesmen and nations are often advised to learn the lesson of historical experience. But what experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history. Hegel”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“As in 1842, the British understood the principle of Afghan war: strike hard and then get out fast, leaving a friendly ruler. ‘It may not be very flattering to our amour propre,’ wrote Bobs, ‘but…the less the Afghans see of us the less they’ll dislike us.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“her American son became the forefather of many Icelanders. Their American adventure did not change the world – the colonists were too few and the European prizes were too rich. Yet, as a newly discovered Milanese document reveals, knowledge of the continent’s existence was passed down by Nordic sailors.[*16] A Danish king Harthacnut still ruled England, recognizing as his heir the Aethling Edward, son of Aethelred, later celebrated for saintly piety as the Confessor. But on 8 June 1042 Harthacnut, attending a wedding in London, raised a toast to the bride and ‘suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion’. The saintly Edward probably poisoned him. Edward was supported by the prince blinder, mass-scalper and kingmaker Godwin of Wessex, who, married to Canute’s sister-in-law, had helped destroy his father and killed at least one brother. But now they soothed these crimes with marriage: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith and raised his son Harold to earl. When Godwin died, Harold, half Anglo-Saxon, half Dane, succeeded as the first potentate of the kingdom, earl of Wessex. Since Edward had no children, who would inherit England? The island was on the edge of Europe, but Canute’s Roman trip showed how this Scando-Britannic empire was now linked by Mediterranean trade routes to Asia. Two coins from a resurgent China have been found in Edward’s England, while in Egypt the Mad Caliph, al-Hakim, had gone much further, contacting the new Chinese emperor.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Most historians believe that it is impossible that Africans crossed the Atlantic because they lacked the shipbuilding technology. But of course they could have copied Genoese ships that were shipwrecked down the African coast. A Spanish friar who interviewed Yucatán Maya in 1588 was told that ‘in ancient times seventy Moros [black people] reached the coast in a vessel that must have been through a great storm’ led by a ‘xeque’ – a sheikh: all, he claimed, were killed.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Kublai appointed his brother Hulagu the Il-Khan of Persia-Iraq: when he died in 1265, he was buried with the human sacrifice of his favourite slaves. The Golden Horde (Russia) remained the khanate of Batu’s family, now Muslims.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“The death rates were astonishing – 50 per cent of England’s six million people; 75 per cent of Venice’s population; 98 per cent of parts of Egypt – ultimately killing a third to a half of Eurasia and north Africa. Out of seventy-five million Europeans, twenty-five million died. The virus also reached west and central Africa, where villages have been found abandoned. Worldwide, the total number of deaths was somewhere between 75 and 200 million. And nor was this the end: pandemics always return, and the plague struck repeatedly over the next centuries. Finally in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the Venetian authorities ordered sailors to stay on their ships for thirty days (trentino), later raised to forty (quarantino) – a system that started to work. But, for most, it was too late. The ultimate super-propellent, the Great Mortality changed everything.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Texcoco and Azcapotzalco, where peoples lived on maize and beans, cooking tamales and tortillas, drinking alcoholic pulque made from the agave cactus (much weaker than tequila and fermented rather than distilled). Women spun cotton textiles; men farmed and fought – they deployed neither metal nor the wheel but their children’s toys had wheels; they used rubber mixed with the sap of morning glory (a process not discovered in the west until the nineteenth century) to make balls for their games. In the absence of metal, they crafted obsidian volcanic glass for their weapons.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“The advancing tribes who may have pressured Cahokia or exploited the chaos were peoples speaking Uto-Nahuatl or Uto-Aztecan languages moving eastwards from California. Some stayed in the north – later they became the Comanche and Shoshane peoples – but many others, gradually over centuries, were drawn to the rich cities and fecund land of the Valley of Mexico and migrated south. They all came from a semi-mythical land they called Aztlan – origin of the word Aztec. In around 1300, one of the poorest and latest to arrive were the Mexica (pronounced me-sheek-a), who were treated as outcasts and driven on to the least desirable land.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“But in August 1281 Kublai’s southern fleet landed at Kyushu, where Japanese nobles used small fireships to create havoc among the gargantuan Mongol vessels and defeated the invaders, aided by the Sacred Wind (kamikaze) of a fortuitous typhoon. Shipwrecked Mongol vessels, discovered by naufragiologists, were enormous – one was 230 feet long with watertight compartments and colossal anchors – but their shoddy workmanship explains their failure. The loss of life was eyewatering, perhaps the most lethal day of naval warfare ever.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity