A Short History of the World (10 page)

Kublai Khan (AD 1215–1294)

The Mongol leader chosen to succeed Mongke was Kublai Khan. While in theory he ruled the largest land empire in history, by this time the Mongolian Empire had been bequeathed to Genghis’ four sons in the form of four territories. These had become de facto independent empires or ‘khanates’, each ruled by a separate khan and each pursuing its own separate interests and objectives.

The greatest khanate – that of Mongolia, Korea, Tibet and parts of China – was ruled by Kublai, who completed the subjugation of China, effectively ending the ruling Sung Dynasty there. The second khanate, the Chagatai Khanate, comprised much of Central Asia. The third khanate in south-west Asia, known as the Il-Khanate, and created by Hulegu, ruled over Persia and the Middle East.
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The fourth and longest lasting khanate was the Kipchak Khanate, or ‘Golden Horde’, which eventually included most of Russia, Poland and Hungary.

Kublai Khan relocated the imperial capital of the Mongolian Empire from Karakorum, in Mongolia, to Beijing, in northern China. Having conquered all of southern China, Kublai Khan added Emperor of China to his long list of titles, even adopting a Chinese dynastic name, the Yuan, which became the ruling dynasty in China for about a hundred years.
 

Wishing to extend his lands further, in 1274 and 1281, Kublai Khan launched two major assaults on Japan, both of which were hindered by terrible storms. The Japanese believed the winds had been sent by the gods to protect them and called them the ‘divine wind’, or ‘kamikaze’.
 

Outside China, the other khanates slowly started to pay less attention to the demands of the Great Khan and began to govern themselves, partially because they felt the Great Khanate in the east had forsaken its Mongolian roots and become too Chinese. The resulting loss of unity and the struggles for succession following the death of Great Khan Mongke in around 1260 signalled the end of a unified Mongol empire and Kublai Khan ended up being the last person to hold the title of Great Khan of the Mongols.
 

The Ascent of Moscow

In Russia, the Mongols of the Golden Horde ruled Kievan Rus through local princes who paid tribute to them. By assisting the Mongols in collecting these tributes, the insignificant trading outpost of Moscow began to flourish around the turn of the 14th century and became a relatively safe place to live. As a result it attracted more wealth and people. As a sign of the city's importance, the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church was transferred from the town of Vladimir to Moscow, making it the spiritual capital of Russia.
 

By 1480 the grand princes of Muscovy had accumulated so much wealth that nobody was left to challenge them. Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy – not to be confused with his son, Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ – began subjugating most of Moscow’s rival cities and was the first Muscovite ruler to adopt the title of tsar and ‘Ruler of all Rus’. It was during his reign that northern Russia was united under one ruler and that Mongol rule was shaken off.

While the Mongols may have allowed Muscovy to grow and develop at the expense of the surrounding city states, effectively fuelling the expansion of the nascent Russian Empire, Mongol rule also isolated Russia from Europe. This partially explains why Russia fell behind in introducing the kinds of major social and political reforms that were being introduced in Europe at the time thanks to the Renaissance and the Reformation. Europe developed a middle class; Russia did not. This was to have far-reaching consequences for the country’s subsequent development.

The Legacy of the Mongols

In terms of territory, the Mongols were the greatest conquerors of all time, bringing almost the entire continent of Asia under the control of one Great Khan; only the British Empire in the 19th century had more land to its name, but it was more disparate, spanning the world. Unlike the Confucian Chinese, who considered traders parasites, the Mongols fortunately recognised the importance of trade and commerce. By improving communications within their empire and by permitting European merchants to journey overland as far as China for the first time, the Mongols effectively put the East in touch with the West, re-opening trade routes that had lain dormant since the time of Muhammad.
 

It was during this period that Kublai Khan welcomed the Italian explorer Marco Polo to his court. Marco Polo was a 13
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century explorer from Venice who spent many years at the court of Kublai Khan and travelled throughout his Empire. His book about the time he spent there, which he dictated while in prison after being captured during a war between Venice and Genoa, became famous in Europe.
 

As we will see, it was contact with the East – and the ensuing insatiable European demand for its silk and spices – that encouraged Europeans to seek a Western sea route to Asia, thereby ‘discovering’ America in the process.
 

The Hundred Years War in Europe (AD 1337–1453)

Over in Europe, in 1337 England had gone to war with France over the inheritance of the French crown, initiating a conflict that would rage on and off for a century, the longest single conflict in English history. French support for the Scots in the face of English intervention there only strengthened the resolve of the English to teach the French a lesson. With the help of their archers, the English won a series of major battles over the coming century; the battles of Crecy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415 are just two of the better-known battles in which the flower of French aristocracy was destroyed.

By the 1420s England possessed most of present-day France north of the Loire River and it looked like France had been decisively beaten. However, wearied by such a long war and worn down by taxes implemented to finance the military campaigns,
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the English found themselves unable to withstand the force of a united France under Joan of Arc and they were driven from French soil. The capture of Bordeaux by the French in 1453, just as Constantinople was falling to the Ottomans, marked the end of the war. Before they fled, however, they managed to seize Joan of Arc, try her for heresy, and burn her at the stake.
 

Ten years into the Hundred Years War, Europe was hit by a devastating plague brought in on ships from Asia, where it had originated in the 1330s. Called the ‘Black Death’ because it caused the blackening of skin around the swellings it induced, the plague wiped out some 20 million people, or between one-quarter and one-third of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1351.

The largely uneducated non-Jewish European populations did not understand why religious groups that prescribed washing, such as Jews and Muslims, had lower levels of the disease. As a result, many Jews were blamed for the plague, or for sorcery, and were in many instances either murdered or driven from towns. In a frenzy of religious hatred, Jews would eventually be expelled from France in 1394 and Spain in 1492, having already been expelled from England in 1290.
 

The plague and continuous wars of the 14th century led people to question authority, including even that of the Church, which was about to go through its own struggle, causing a further decline in its authority. In a dispute over the validity of an election for Pope in 1378, Europe was split between the support for an Italian Pope in Rome and a French Pope in Avignon in France, who had both ex-communicated each other. This impasse lasted for a period of 40 years, with each Pope naming his own successor, and became known as the Great Western Schism. When an attempt was finally made to resolve the split, a third rival Pope was produced. Finally, all three Popes were deposed in favour of a new pontiff, Martin V, the election of whom, in 1417, gave the Catholic world a new single Pope based in Rome. However, the schism had weakened the Papacy and further decreased loyalty to the Church.
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The Rise of the Ottomans (AD 1301)

Weakened by civil war and under constant pressure from the crusaders from the west, the Arabs from the south, and the Mongols from the east, it was amazing that the Seljuk Sultanate lasted as long as it did. When it eventually weakened, the small remaining principalities all vied for supremacy. When peace eventually came through the retreat of both the Mongols and the crusaders, one of these principalities rose to dominance and succeeded in building a powerful and extensive empire for the next several hundred years: that of the Ottomans.

In 1301 the leader of one of these principalities and the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, defeated a Byzantine army a few miles from Constantinople. This gave him great prestige and led to the consolidation of Ottoman authority over a substantial area in north-west Anatolia (Turkey). The Ottomans expanded rapidly, absorbing weaker tribes to the east and reducing the weakened Byzantine Empire to just the city of Constantinople by 1351. The Byzantine Emperor attempted to persuade the Pope in Rome that, despite their differences, they had a common enemy, even travelling to Rome in person in 1369 to submit publicly to the Pope in the hope of receiving aid, but with no success.
   

In 1389 the Ottomans, under Murad I, wiped out a huge combined army of Serbs, Albanians and Poles at the Battle of Kosovo Polje, in present-day Serbia, in yet another defining moment for the West. Shortly after the battle, the whole of Macedonia was incorporated into the Ottoman state. Murad himself was killed in the battle but his son, Bayezid, who succeeded him, ended up laying siege to Constantinople in 1394. It seemed that nothing could stop the Ottoman advance and that the long-awaited collapse of the Byzantine Empire was finally at hand. However, at the last hour it was the Ottoman Turks themselves who were attacked from the east. The capture of Constantinople would have to wait.
 

Tamerlane (AD 1336–1405)

The Mongol leader, Timur – or Tamerlane as he is referred to in the West – unwittingly came to the defence of Europe at the turn of the 15th century. Tamerlane had grown in power in the mid-14th century by taking advantage of the slow disintegration of the Chagatai Khanate, which had been ruled by a series of weak leaders. He was determined to make himself master of Central Asia. ‘As there is but one God in heaven,’ he said, ‘there ought to be but one ruler on earth.’ In an eight year rampage of destruction between 1396 and 1404 he conquered most of Central Asia, invaded northern India, executing up to 100,000 Indian prisoners in cold blood before the gates of Delhi, and destroyed Baghdad, slaughtering up to 20,000 of its inhabitants and making towers of their skulls. He also captured Syria, conquered Persia, and received submission from Egypt.

Tamerlane's campaign in the west was directed against two enemies: the Ottomans and the Mamluks. After defeating the Mamluks, he successfully defeated an Ottoman army at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, capturing Sultan Bayezid in the process. The Sultan died in captivity, after having been paraded around in a cage, an ignominious end for an Ottoman Sultan. The capture of the Sultan was greeted with rejoicing by the kings in the West, who even sent sycophantic messages to Tamerlane in the hope that he would ally with them against the Turks. Mercifully for everyone, he died in 1405, at the age of 69, before any of his plans could be realised, and his Timurid Empire lasted only a short period after his death. His legacy did continue, however, in India, where his great-great-grandson Babur founded the Mughal Empire.

The Fall of Constantinople (AD 1453)

Bayezid’s sons fought over the inheritance of their father for the following ten years until Mehmed I emerged as the new leader. He almost immediately went on the warpath, retaking most of the lands that Tamerlane had won from his father while his son, Murad II, successfully defeated an alliance of Europeans sent to meet him after he invaded Serbia in 1439.
 

It was Murad’s son, Mehmed II, who finally brought an end to what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire
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with a 54 day siege of Constantinople. The relatively new weapon, the canon, finally helped break the walls that had defended Constantinople for centuries. One of Mehmed’s first actions was to go to the Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Orthodox Christianity built under Justinian and, after a quick prayer of thanks, order it to be turned into a mosque.
 

By the end of the 14th century the Byzantine Empire had long lost its influence and no longer posed a military threat, consisting as it did of only the city of Constantinople and some surrounding land. The city itself had never really regained its grandeur following the crusader occupation of 1204-1261. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine the sensation that the fall of Constantinople – one of the greatest cities in the world for over 800 years – would have caused in the West. It was, after all, still the capital of the Roman Empire, no matter how run down, and its fall only increased fears that the Turks were about to overrun the entire continent, a fear that even led to Pope Pius II offering to make Mehmed Emperor if he converted to Christianity.