A History of the World (105 page)

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Authors: Andrew Marr

BOOK: A History of the World

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23. The Byzantine emperor Justinian: he could fight the barbarians but he could not fight famine and plague, nor rebuild the glory that was Rome.

24. An Emir of Cordoba consults with his advisers: Muslim al-Andalus was a centre of learning and urban sophistication, which put Christendom to shame.

25. The Mongol leader Genghis Khan has a good claim to be the single most influential figure in world history; but history would have been happier had he never been born.

26. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, as a European-style monarch on his throne: in fact he was rather grander than that.

27. Ivan the Terrible – whose name also translates as Ivan the Great – was the ruler who spread Russia deep into Siberia but also gave her the tradition of ruthless, centralist autocracy she still suffers from today.

28. Hideyoshi was the great founder of Tokugawa Japan, who ruled at the same time as England’s Queen Elizabeth I and is in many ways comparable.

29. The Inca emperor Atahualpa, murdered by the Spanish: but his gold then helped ruin Spain’s economy.

30. The Dutch tulip mania was a financial bubble which made all Europe laugh. The Dutch learned and prospered again, however – unlike some of their critics.

31. The arrival of tobacco from the New World and the smoking craze of the 1600s horrified rulers from London to Japan.

32. ‘Yet it moves.’ Rough and garrulous Galileo of Pisa, born at the right time to understand the solar system; born in the wrong place to explain how it works.

33. Timur hands his crown to Babur, 1630: Babur was the real founder of the Mughal empire, which produced radical thinking and glorious buildings, but was eventually brought down by the cost of war driven by religious intolerance.

34. Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, was the model of the absolutist ruler – a dull theory decorated with fine palaces and flamboyant individuals.

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