The sixth century: the years 565–570

The year 565 saw the death of the great Byzantine emperor Justinian. His marriage to Theodora, a much younger actress of ill repute, had not produced any children, so Justinian was succeeded by a nephew, Justin II. In spite of his remarkable successes in recovering Roman territory in the West, Justinian left behind a state that was still far removed from the ideal of Pax Romana (‘Roman Peace’). It is true that on the eastern front, after years of warfare, a 50-year truce had been concluded with the Sassanian shah in 562, but a new and greater threat emerged with the appearance of the nomadic Avars in the western steppes. They were remnants of the Jou-Jan (or Rouran or Nirun) khaganate that had built up an impressive empire in the Mongolian steppe until it was annihilated by the confederation of the so-called Blue or ‘Heavenly’ Turks (Göktürk). The Avars penetrated through the lower Danube area into what is now called the Hungarian puszta or steppe soon after the middle of the sixth century, where they were faced with Germanic speaking peoples such as the Gepids and the Langobards. In a set of events as yet ill understood, but taking place soon after Justinian’s death, the Avars probably supported the Langobards in their war against the Gepids, on condition that they would leave the steppe lands to the Avars. That is exactly what happened. Right after their great victory over the Gepids in 568, the Langobard ‘army’ left its homeland and invaded Italy. The historical consequences were far-reaching: while the larger part of Italy would come under Langobard or Lombard rule for centuries, the Avar khaganate became the dominant power on the Pontic steppe and in central and south-east Europe, giving the Byzantine Empire a new and dreaded enemy. One other result was the stealthy but continuous penetration of the Balkans and western Greece by small bands of Slavonic speaking peoples. They also were the Avars’ closest allies, to the point where the Avars changed their language from Altaic to Slav.

Far to the south east of these European developments, but at exactly the same time (although the events were in no way connected), something took place that would alter world history: the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the Arabian city of Mecca.

Portrait of the emperor Justinian in one of the famous mosaics on the walls of the San Vitale church at Ravenna. The mosaics were created in 547, when Justinian must have been about 65 years old

Drawing from Avar graves showing horsemen, arms, decorations and spurs.

Drawing from Avar graves showing a novelty from the eastern steppe that the Avars introduced into Europe.

Allegedly, the Langobard king Alboin offered his wife, the fair Rosamund, daughter of the Gepid king Kunimund, a drink from her father’s skull. Ink drawing from the nineteenth century.

Langobard ruler on coin.

View of Mecca: great mosque of Mecca and its hundreds of thousands of pilgrims dwarfed by skyscrapers.

The seventh century: the years 660–665

In the year 660, members of the Pippinid family, the ancestors of Charlemagne, staged their first coup d’état in Merovingian Francia. Grimoald, son of Pippin of Landen and mayor of the palace – the king’s chief advisor – in Austrasia, together with his brother-in-law Ansegisel had the old king of Austrasia, Sigebert III, adopt Grimoald’s son, Childebert, and put Childebert on the throne after Sigebert died. The scheme did not last very long however, and all three Pippinids were executed in 662.

In that same period the steppe lands north of the Black Sea were shaken by a power struggle between two Turkic-speaking groups trying to fill the power vacuum that was left behind by the dwindling hold of the Avars over the area. The Khazars won; they became the masters of a powerful steppe empire centred around the lower Volga. The losers were the Bulgars of khan Kubrat, who shortly after 660 moved in large numbers to the lower Danube region and thence into the Balkans, and into the northern part of the Byzantine Empire. This was the beginning of the very successful ‘First’ Bulgarian Empire, which would last from 680 to 1018.

While in 664 at the council of Streonashalh, near Whitby, the fate of the Anglo-Saxon church was decided – it became definitively Roman rather than Irish – Muslim armies penetrated into Afghanistan (where Kabul was conquered in 665) and Libya.

Golden tremissis with the image of the short-lived Pippinid king of Austrasia, Childebert III ‘the Adopted’.

Heroic equestrian statue of the founder of the first Bulgarian Empire, Asparuch.

Asparuch’s successors were eternalised in the rocks of the holy site of Madara. The horseman (a Bulgarian khan?) tramples a lion.

Ruins of the first Bulgarian Empire’s capital Pliska that may have had more than 100,000 inhabitants at the height of its power.

The monastery of St Hilda at Streonashalh near Whitby.

Afghan craftsmen between the fourth and seventh centuries chiselled two giant Buddhas from the sandstone rocks flanking the Silk Road through the Bamiyan Valley connecting Afghan Kabul with India. The statues survived the Arab-Muslim invasion of the 660s, but not the attack by the Taliban in 2001.

The eighth century: years 750–755

In the years 750–754, two political revolutions of great historical importance took place. First, in 750, Abu-Abbas al-Saffah (‘the blood spiller’), a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed’s youngest uncle, led a revolt against the Ummayad caliph in Damascus from eastern Iran. The rising succeeded thanks to the broad political and military support for Abu-Abbas’s case among both the Arab and Iranian elite. Abu-Abbas proclaimed himself the new caliph, the first in line of a dynasty that would formally hold to the caliphate until 1258. He moved the administrative centre of Arab-Islamic power further to the east, to the city of Kufa on the Tigris river. Soon afterwards the building of an entirely new capital started, which would become Baghdad.

Several months after this momentous event, a similar revolution took place in the Latin Christian West. In 751, Pippin the Short, long-time mayor of the palace who finally unified the kingdoms of the Franks, had the last king from the Merovingian dynasty, Childerik, deposed, and himself anointed and crowned with the support of the Roman pope. He was the first in line of the famous royal dynasty of the Carolingians.

King Pippin’s major military activities were his campaigns against the Arab-Muslim occupation of a number of cities and strongholds in Provence and Septimania (present-day Languedoc). Clearly, Pippin took advantage of the political turmoil in Arab-Muslim Andalus (Iberia) following the Abbasid revolution in the East, and he was not the only one. In 755, the Cordovan governor Yusuf al-Firi led an army against the Basques of Pamplona, and was defeated. Abu-Abbas himself, who died in 754, had been luckier against a formidable enemy appearing in Central Asia. In 751, an Abbasid armed force led by Ziyad ibn Salih blocked the advance of a Tang-Chinese army under the command of general Gao Xianzhi at the Talas river in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Chinese revenge was prevented by the outbreak in China, in 755, of the atrocious and protracted An Lushan or An Shi rebellion. In crushing that rebellion, the Tang emperor would have made use of Arab mercenaries, put at his disposal by the second Abbasid caliph, Abu-Abbas’s brother and successor, Al-Mansoer.

Manuscript page from the Tarikhnama (‘Book of History’) of Balami, written in 963 and known as the oldest prose work in the New Persian language. Balami was a Persian aristocrat who served the Samanids, the dynasty that ruled Iran during the ninth and tenth centuries, as vizier. The picture shows a page from a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Tarikhnama which describes the proclamation of Al-Saffah as caliph.

Plan of the original, perfectly circular structure of the new city of Baghdad.

Artist’s impression of early Baghdad.

Pippin the Short (the shorter man on the left) and his son Charlemagne (the taller man on the right) ‘offer’ the abbey of Prüm to God. Illustration in the thirteenth-century copy of the polyptych (list of possessions) of Prüm, drawn up by abbot Caesarius in 893.

Current view of the Talas river in Kyrgyzstan.

The ninth century: the years 874–879

While Viking settlers from Norway had found their way to the uninhabited isle of Iceland in the year 874, a ‘great army’ of Danish invaders was roaming England, spreading death and destruction. In 878 a decisive battle against the Anglo-Saxon army of King Alfred of Wessex was fought at a place called Ethandun (now Edington, Wiltshire). The Vikings lost. It paved the road to the conclusion, at an uncertain date, of a comprehensive treaty between Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum, which divided the spheres of influence of the Danes and the English, with an old Roman road as a linear borderline.

The year after Edington, 879, saw the death of another legendary Viking chieftain: Rurik of Sweden, who had successfully penetrated the Volga basin with his retinue. The subdued Slav-speaking local populations called the Swedish Vikings ‘Rus’ (probably meaning ‘rowboatmen’). The Rus were there to stay, attracted by the wealth of the Arab world further south. Rurik’s son Oleg moved his power base to the west, to a place called Kiev, on the Dniepr river.

In the autumn of 877 Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks, and since 875 also king of Italy and Roman Emperor, died on his return from Italy to France on the descent of the Mont Cenis pass in a spa – now skiing resort – called Brides-les-Bains. Should Charles have lived longer, Italy and the imperial crown might have passed for good to the kings of West Francia (the later kingdom of France). Further west, in Viking-infested England, Charles’s old friend and long-time intellectual guide, John Scotus Eriugena (‘John the Scot born in Ireland’), passed away in the abbey of Malmesbury. Eriugena was considered by many to have been the greatest scholar of his age. Others, however, considered him to be a dangerous magician with suspect, heretical ideas.

Also in 877, an army of the caliph of Baghdad, al-Mu’tamid, tried to expel the rebel Turkic general Ahmad ibn Tulun from Egypt, where he had seized power – which makes him the first of many rulers of Turkic extraction in the Arab-Muslim world. Ahmad successfully fought off the caliph’s army and further extended his power over Syria. This was the beginning of the autonomous Tulunid emirate, which would last until 905.

Sólfar (‘Sun voyager’). Aluminium sculpture by Jon Gunnar Arnason in Reykjavik harbour commemorating the arrival of the Vikings in Iceland.

Reconstruction of Viking farmstead on Iceland; statue of Alfred the Great at Winchester (capital of Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex), made by the British sculptor Sir William ‘Hamo’ Thornycroft in 1899, a thousand years after Alfred’s death.

Sculpture of Viking ship with three Viking warriors in the city park of Kiev, fully recognising the Viking Rus as the founders of Kiev; Charles the Bald enthroned as king, manuscript illustration from 869 (Paris, BnF, Mss Latin 1152, f. 3v).

Charles the Bald enthroned as king, manuscript illustration from 869 (Paris, BnF, Mss Latin 1152, f. 3v).

Royal seal of Charles the Bald, 847.

Ink drawing of John Scotus Eriugena in a twelfth-century manuscript copy of Clavis Physicae, a book on physics by Honorius of Autun, in which ample use is made of Eriugena’s work (Paris, BnF, Mss Latin 6734, f. 3).

Map of the Tulunid emirate in Egypt and Syria (868–905).

The tenth century: the years 962–969

These were years of royal hopes and royal defeat, starting with the coronation of Otto I, king of Germany and Italy, as Roman Emperor in St Peter’s basilica in Rome (962). A short while later, in 963, and while Otto was busy subjecting the ‘duke’ of Poland, Mieszko (who was forced into paying tribute and into being baptised), a brilliant Byzantine career general named Nikephoros Phocas was pushed forward after the unexpected death of emperor Romanos II to become the joint emperor of Byzantium with Romanos’s two minor sons, Basilios and Constantine. Six years later, in 969, Phocas, described by the Italian bishop-diplomat Liutprand of Cremona as ‘a monstrous, fat-headed pygmy with the eyes of a mole’, was murdered by his nephew, John Tzimiskes – also a quite capable military man. He took over his uncle’s mistress, Romanos’s widow, Theofanu, and then his position as co-emperor.

In the meantime, the western emperor Otto in his turn had deposed Pope Benedict V in favour of a man of his choosing: scion of a noble family from Rome who took the name Pope Leo VIII. Leo would die less than a year later, two years before Otto, in 967, had his eponymous son and future successor, Otto II, crowned as co-emperor in Rome by Leo’s successor Pope John XIII.

The same years, 966–967, saw the birth of two royal princes who were both destined to become great rulers although neither succeeded in fulfilling this promise. Louis, the son of Lothar III, king of the West Franks, would reign for only 14 months as the last ruler in the West who descended directly from Charlemagne. He died at age 20 in 987. Due to the insignificance of his reign he was nicknamed Louis V ‘Le Fainéant’ (‘who did nothing’). In contrast, his counterpart Aethelred II, son of King Edgar of England, would rule over England for almost 40 years, from 978 to 1016 to be precise, but his reign was steeped in disaster. It was characterised by lost battles against the Danes, protracted periods of Danish raids ending in large-scale invasion, and a foolish attempt to deal with the Danes in England once and for all by staging a bloody day of reckoning. All this misfortune earned Aethelred the nickname ‘the Unready’, which means much the same as ‘ill-advised’.

In the east, the descendants of the Viking Rus were waging their own life-and-death struggle. After the Rus ruler of Kiev, Sviatoslav, had first invaded the Khazar steppe empire in 965, ending Khazar power over the western steppe, and then proceeded to conquer Bulgaria, the emperor of Byzantium, alarmed, paid the Turkic confederation of the Pechenegs to lay siege to Kiev, which they did in 968. After having solved this problem, Sviatoslav continued campaigning against Bulgaria – with the aid of Pecheneg mercenaries. Several years later, while planning to attack the Pechenegs on the steppe, he was ambushed and killed.

The most spectacular, and historically far-reaching, event of 969 happened in Egypt, which was invaded from the west by the army of Al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah, fourth caliph of the Berber dynasty of the Fatimids (‘descendants of [the Prophet’s daughter] Fatima’). The Fatimids had extended their power over Muslim Ifriqya (present-day Tunisia and Algeria) from the beginning of the tenth century, and taken on the title of caliph in 921. After their successful invasion of Egypt they moved their centre of power to their headquarters just north of the city of Fustat on the Nile; they called it al-Qahira (Cairo), ‘the Victorious’, a reference both to their astounding military success and to the planet Mars, which had been high in the sky at the moment of decisive battle. Because the Fatimids were Shi’ite Muslims, the new Egypt became a Shi’ite state until the fall of the Fatimid dynasty in 1171.

The German king/emperor Otto I and his wife Adelheid of Burgundy. Statues in polychromed stone on the interior wall of the choir of Meissen Cathedral, Germany – Otto and Adelheid founded the diocese of Meissen.

Coronation of King Louis V le Fainéant as depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France.

Gold coin with the head of King Aethelred II the Unready from c.1005.

‘Glorious entry’ of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas in Constantinople, 963, as depicted in a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of the chronicle of John Skylitzes, which covers Byzantine history of the years 811–1057.

Pechenegs attacking Kiev, 968, as depicted in the so-called Madrid manuscript copy of the same chronicle of John Skylitzes.

Gold coin struck by caliph al-Mu’izz in Cairo, 969, after his conquest of Egypt.

Map of old Cairo, with the citadel (military headquarters) to the south-east, and old Fustat to the south, opposite the Gizeh plateau.

The eleventh century: the years 1064–1066

In 1064, the Seljuq sultan Alp Arslan conquered Armenia and Georgia before invading, in 1068, Byzantine Anatolia (Asia Minor), to devastating effect. In the same year 1064, the reformer Pope Alexander II (1061–1073) sent the papal banner to Duke William of Aquitaine, who had put himself in command of a large army of knights ‘from France and Burgundy and other peoples’. Its target was the Iberian peninsula. Duke William wanted to give military aid to the king of Aragon in his struggle against the Muslims, who were advancing against the Christian principalities in the north of Spain. The knights were moved to their supportive action by fiery sermons by Pope Alexander and the abbot of Cluny. They insisted that liberation of Christian lands that had been occupied by Muslims was of ‘utmost necessity’. The major feat of arms was the siege and capture of the town of Barbastro in the southern foothills of the Pyrenees. It has often been seen as the start of the Reconquista, if not of the Crusades.

Among the ‘peoples’ in the army of William of Aquitaine most certainly of prominence was the Norman ‘race’, because this was the era of the Normans, the masters of political power play in eleventh-century Europe. Also in 1064, and inspired by the same spirit of holy war against Islam, Pope Alexander sent a second papal banner to the Norman warlord Roger of Hauteville, who three years earlier had crossed the Strait of Messina with his private army with the aim of conquering the isle of Sicily, that had been in Muslim hands since the beginning of the ninth century.

Of course, the most significant Norman success story started two years later, in the early days of 1066, when the English king Edward the Confessor died without leaving any offspring. Less than a week later England’s most powerful aristocrat, Earl Harold Godwinsson, was crowned as Edward’s successor, but this bloodless take-over of power was defied at once by two other candidates, both reputable warriors: the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, and William, Duke of Normandy. Their relentless struggle came to a head in the course of three weeks at the beginning of autumn, when three battles were fought on English soil which would decide over England’s fate. Each of the competitors won one – Hardrada beat the English at Fulford; Earl Harold beat (and killed) Hardrada at Stamford Bridge; Duke William beat (and killed) Earl Harold at Hastings – but only the last winner took all. For reasons not entirely clear, Duke William, at the battlefield of Hastings, flew the papal banner.

Understandably, other events in 1066 are overshadowed by Hastings, but they are still important: the grant of a written charter to the town of Huy on the Meuse (the earliest north of the Alps), the horrifying pogrom against the Jewish community of Muslim Granada, and the irreparable Slav destruction of Hedeby, once the centre of long-distance trade between the Scandinavian and the Frankish worlds.

One of many representations of battles between Christians and Muslims during the Reconquista. Miniature from a thirteenth-century copy of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.

‘Duke Roger’, probably Roger Borsa, Duke of Apulia, son of Robert Guiscard, brother of Roger of Hauteville. Drawing from the manuscript of Peter of Eboli’s Liber in honorem Augusti (1196).

Harald Hardrada (in red, with royal crown) fighting at the battle of Stamford Bridge. Miniature from copy of Matthew Paris, Life of King Edward the Confessor (c.1250).

Overview of the modern display of the Bayeux tapestry in the Bayeux Tapestry Museum.

Scene from the Bayeux tapestry showing a messenger approaching Duke William who is holding the papal banner (second scene from the left).

The town of Huy, near Liège, on the confluence of the rivers Hoyoux and Meuse. There is a marked contrast between the steep rock on which the bishop’s castle and church once stood (now a fortress built in the nineteenth-century), and the lower town on the river shore, where the merchants’ and artisans’ quarters were.

Aerial photo of the medieval location of the town of Hedeby on the medieval border between Germany and Denmark.

The twelfth century: the years 1143–1144

The year 1143 saw the death of prince Yelü Dashi (or Yeh-lü Ta-shih), who had fled China after the collapse of the Liao, the dynasty of nomadic Kitan origin that had ruled northern China since the beginning of the tenth century and into which Yelü Dashi had been born. In a series of heroic events Yelü Dashi had escaped to the Mongolian steppe with a large army of followers. On the western extensions of the Mongolian steppe he created a huge empire that became known as the empire of the Xi Liao (‘Western Liao’) or khanate of the Qara Kitan (‘the Black Khitan’). Under Yelü Dashi it would pose a serious threat to Seljuk power in the Middle East. For that reason, western legend would transform the Kitan khan into the ‘priest-king John’ (Prester John), a mysterious Christian ally from the Far East, who was first mentioned in a German source in 1145. The actual Yelü was succeeded by his wife, princess Tabuyan (T’a-Pu-Yen). For a period of six years she acted as a regent for their grandson who was still in his minority, and during that time she must have been one of the most powerful women in the world.

One year after Yelü’s death, in 1144, the Turkic lord of Mosul and Aleppo, Imad ad-Din Zengi, stormed and conquered the town of Edessa, now in northern Iraq, then the capital of one of the small so-called crusader states that had been founded during the First Crusade. The outrage in Latin Christendom was great, and a new crusade was preached, most famously by the militant Cistercian leader Bernard of Clairvaux. From 1145 on, various crusader armies would depart to the East; the largest two were led by the German king, Konrad III, and by the king of France, Louis VII, who was accompanied by his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The whole enterprise turned into a fiasco.

Also in 1144, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, assumed the title duke of Normandy on behalf of his wife, the empress dowager Mathilda, daughter and heiress to the English king Henry I. This can be seen as the hesitant start of what would grow into the Angevin Empire under Geoffrey and Mathilda’s son, Henry Plantagenet, who was recognised as king of England in 1154, two years after he had married Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Without a doubt, on 11 June 1144, Eleanor, then still queen of France, will have attended the grandiose ceremony to rededicate the magnificent Cathedral of Saint-Denis which had been completely rebuild in a revolutionary new architectural style now known as ‘Gothic’. And while being blinded by the dazzling light pouring in from the stained glass windows, decorated with the images of margrave Roland and other heroes of France, she may have dreamed of being buried there, her grave surrounded by the tombs of so many kings and queens of France. However, fate would have something completely different in store for Eleanor.

Funerary mask from the Kitan-Liao (tenth–twelfth century).

The town of Edessa on a postcard from the early twentieth century.

Bernard of Clairvaux blesses King Louis VII of France on his departure for the crusade – engraving by Gustave Doré from the illustrated re-edition of Jean-François Michaud’s History of the Crusades (Paris 1875).

Eleanor of Aquitaine’s effigy on her tomb in the abbey of Fontevraud in Poitou. Although the work is probably near contemporary, the artist made Eleanor look decades younger than she was when she died at age 82.

King Henry II of England deliberating with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. Miniature from an early fourteenth-century manuscript of Peter of Langtoft’s Chronicle of England.

Gothic choir of the cathedral of Saint-Denis.

The thirteenth century: the years 1212–1215

1212–1214 were the years of three momentous battles in various parts of Europe, which is in itself remarkable. Battles were usually avoided because of the tremendous consequences they potentially had; not only armies but whole kingdoms could be lost in a few hours. The battles fought in 1212–1214 were all turning points in medieval history: on the field of Las Navas de Tolosa in southern Spain (July 1212) an end was made to the power of the Almohad rulers of al-Andalus, and the Reconquista was decided in favour of the Christians. The battle of Muret (September 1213) put an end to Aragonese ambitions north of the Pyrenees, and opened the road to definitive French royal penetration in the Languedoc. The battle of Bouvines (July 1214) decided the fate of the Angevin Empire of the Plantagenets, who lost all hope of recovering most of their French territories – although the English presence on the battlefield had been limited. The uncontested winner of this outward show of muscle was the French king Philip II August. His Aragonese colleague Peter II, although one of the great heroes of Las Navas, lost his life on the battlefield of Muret as an enemy of Christendom, while the Christian victory over de Almohads at Las Navas brought the king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, to the brink of bankruptcy. Many foreign knights had left his army even before the battle had started because he was no longer able to pay them.

In the same year, 1212, crusading enthusiasm had infected common people for the first time since 1096, and in France and Germany two motley ‘armies’ gathered, mainly consisting of pueri, which must be translated as ‘lads’ rather than ‘children’ – a misapprehension that gave rise to the myth of the ‘Childrens’ Crusade’. Predictably, this youthful enthusiasm led to nothing. The luckier ones returned home after months of hardship; others stayed in the south and settled in the larger cities on the Mediterranean coast (Genoa, Marseilles) which the dwindling armies had managed to reach.

All this did not prevent Pope Innocent III from making yet another urgent call for yet another crusade to the Holy Land. Innocent liked to present himself as the true leader of Europe. In 1215, he convened the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome, the largest church meeting held to date (almost 1,400 church prelates attended the council sessions). It tackled a number of serious problems facing the Roman Church. But Pope Innocent also interfered directly in secular policy; in 1209, he excommunicated John Lackland, King of England, who refused to install the pope’s candidate for the archbishopric of Canterbury. In 1210, the same sanction was meted out to the German King, Otto IV. In the end, Otto had to pay dearly for defying the pope. In 1212, he could not prevent the election of Innocent’s former pupil, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, as (rival) king of Germany. His hopes or turning the tables were dashed at Bouvines, and four years later Otto, disillusioned and ill, was battered to death by a group of priests in Harzburg castle. King John’s reconciliation with the pope came too late to prevent the outbreak of the barons’ revolt, which certainly was not ended with the promulgation of the Magna Carta in June 1215.

In the same year, 1215, a Castilian priest called Dominic Guzman, who by that time was making a career of challenging the so-called Cathar heresy in the Languedoc, had been given several houses in Toulouse for the establishment of a fraternity of preachers, just after the city had been captured by the crusading army that had been set at the Cathars – or rather, at the people of Languedoc. Later in the same year, Dominic travelled to Rome to ask the pope to recognise his friars as a special branch of canons regular, following the rule of Saint Augustine and with the specific task of preaching. The pope yielded after a second visit the following year: the Dominican Order, or Order of Preachers, was born.

One might wonder whether during these exciting events rumours had already reached Europe of the rise of a new and terrible great Khan named Chinggis in the miraculous Far East. In the years 1212–1215 Chinggis was constantly campaigning in the north-eastern part of China. In 1215 he razed the city of Zhongdu to the ground. It was rebuilt as Beijing and would become the seat of government of Chinggis’s grandson, Kublai, who was born in 1215. Kublai became the founder of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the first Mongol emperor of the whole of China.

The battlefield of Las Navas de Tolosa. Drawing from a Spanish textbook. On the left: the Christian army; on the right, the Muslim army.

Peter II, king of Aragon (1196–1213). Engraving from about 1860 of Peter’s original seal.

Ferrand of Portugal, Count of Flanders, is taken prisoner in the battle of Bouvines. Miniature from a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Chroniques de Saint-Denis.

Children’s Crusade fantasy from a modern children’s book.

Pope Innocent III (Lothar of Segni) (1198–1216), as depicted on a fresco in the Sacro Speco (‘Holy Cave’) at Subiaco, a separate sanctuary close to the Benedictine mother abbey of Sancta Scholastica.

Magna Carta of 1215. Authentic copy in the British Library (Cotton ms Augustus II.106).

Portraits of the Mongol Yuan emperors, starting with Genghis Khan (top left), from a seventeenth-century Chinese manuscript.