Between about 1350 and 1550 great swathes of the world were occupied by the superpowers of their day from the Inca in South America to the Ming in China, the Timurids in central Asia and the vigorous Ottoman Empire, which spanned three continents and ran from Algiers to the Caspian, from Budapest to Mecca. Two of these empires lasted for centuries; the other two collapsed within a couple of generations. The ones that lasted endured not only by the sword but also by the pen that is, they had flourishing and successful bureaucracies which could sustain them through tough times and incompetent leaders. The paper tiger, paradoxically, is the one that lasts. The enduring power we are looking at in this chapter is the great Islamic Ottoman Empire, which by 1500 had conquered Constantinople and was moving, with the confidence born of secure borders and expanding strength, from being a military power to an administrative one. In the modern world, as the Ottomans demonstrated, paper is power.

And what a piece of paper this is. It is a very beautiful painted drawing it is a badge of state, a stamp of authority and a work of the highest art. It is called a tughra. This tughra has been drawn on heavy paper in bold lines of blue cobalt ink, enclosing what looks like a tiny meadow of colourful, golden flowers. On the left there is a sweeping, decorated loop, a generous oval, then in the centre three strong upright lines, and a curving decorated tail to the right. It's an elegant, elaborate monogram cut from the top of an official document, and the whole design spells the title of the sultan whose authority it represents. The words are: 'Suleiman, son of Selim Khan, ever victorious'. This simple Arabic phrase, elaborated into an emblem made out of lavish and opulent materials, speaks clearly of great wealth; it is no surprise that this ever-victorious sultan, the contemporary of Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was later called by Europeans Suleiman the Magnificent.

Suleiman inherited an already expanding empire when he came to power in 1520. He went on to consolidate and extend his territory with almost unstoppable energy. Within a few years his armies had shattered the kingdom of Hungary, taken the Greek island of Rhodes, secured Tunis and fought the Portuguese for control of the Red Sea. Italy was now in the front-line. Suleiman seemed to envisage a restoration of the Roman Empire under Muslim rule the dream of recovering an ancient Roman glory, which fired the Renaissance in western Europe, was also a spur to the greatest Ottoman achievements. The two hostile worlds shared the same impossible dream. When a Venetian ambassador expressed the hope of one day welcoming the sultan as a visitor to his city, Suleiman replied, 'Certainly, but after I have captured Rome.' He never did capture Rome, but today he is considered the greatest of all the Ottoman emperors.

The novelist Elif Shafak gives a Turkish perspective: Suleiman was an unforgettable sultan for many people, for the Turks definitely he reigned for forty-six years. In the West he was known as Suleiman the Magnificent, but we know him as Suleiman Kanuni Suleiman 'the law maker' because he changed the legal system. When I look at this signature, it speaks of power, glory, great magnificence. Suleiman was very interested in conquering East and West, and that's why many historians think he was inspired by Alexander the Great. I see that statement, that world power, in this calligraphy as well.

How do you govern an empire of the size of Suleiman's and ensure that power in the centre is properly deployed at the periphery? You need a bureaucracy. Administrators all over the empire need to demonstrate that they have the authority of the ruler, which is done by issuing a visible emblem that can be carried and shown to everyone. That emblem is the tughra. It acted like a royal warrant, or a sheriff's star, giving officers of the empire a badge of power. The tughra would be at the top of all important official documents, and Suleiman issued about 150,000 in his reign. He was industrious in establishing diplomatic ties, creating a formidable civil service and promulgating new laws. All of this required letters of state, instructions to ambassadors and legal documents, all of which would begin with his tughra.

The tughra itself names the sultan, while the line below reads, 'This is the noble and exalted sign of the Sultan's name, the revered monogram that gives light to the world. May this instruction, with the help of the Lord and the protection of the Eternal, be given force and effect. The Sultan orders that ...' At this point our paper has been cut, but the document below would have continued with a particular instruction, law or command. Interestingly, there are two languages here: the tughra names the sultan in Arabic, reminding us that Suleiman is protector of the faithful with a duty to the whole Islamic world; the words below it are in Turkish, and proclaim his role as sultan, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Arabic for the spiritual world, Turkish for the temporal.

Turkish would certainly have been the language of the official to whom this document was addressed. Given the opulent artistry of this tughra, the recipient had to be very grand, so it might be a governor, a general, a diplomat, or perhaps a member of the ruling house; and it could have been sent to any part of Suleiman fast-growing empire, as the historian Caroline Finkel explains: He overthrew the Mamluk Empire, so Egypt and Syria with all their Arab population, the Hejaz [in south-west Saudi Arabia] as well, with the Holy Places which were extremely important, all these people were now Ottoman subjects, for better or worse. Suleiman's tughra could be seen as far as the Persian border, where their great rival in the East, the Shi'a Safavid Empire, was always trying to challenge the Ottomans; in North Africa, where Ottoman naval expeditions were having great success against the Spanish Habsburgs in the western Mediterranean; and up into the lower reaches of what we now call Russia.

Suleiman's Ottoman Empire controlled the whole coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, from Tunis all the way round almost to Trieste. After 800 years the Eastern Roman Empire had been re-established, but now as a Muslim imperium. It was this huge new state that compelled the western Europeans to look for other ways of travelling to and trading with the East, forcing them from the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic. But that is for a later chapter.

Most official documents get lost, destroyed or thrown away. Our driving licences, our tax bills, don't usually survive death. Similarly, the huge bulk of the official paper of the Ottoman Empire is lost to us. The most common reason for keeping any official document is that it has to do with land, because subsequent generations need to know the authority by which land is owned. So the best guess is that our tughra was at the head of a document giving a major grant of land, conferring or confirming ownership of a huge estate. That would explain why the document survived long enough for a later collector, probably in the nineteenth century, to cut off the tughra from the document and sell it as a separate work of art.

And it certainly is a work of art. In between the lines of cobalt blue enlivened with gold leaf are great loops containing riotous flowerbeds of swirling lotus and pomegranate, tulips, roses and hyacinths. This is magnificent Islamic decoration, rejoicing in natural forms while avoiding showing the human body. It is also a virtuoso demonstration of calligraphy, of sheer skill and joy in writing. The Ottoman Turks, like their predecessors and contemporaries in the Islamic world, held the art of writing in high esteem. The word of God had to be written with all the beauty of holiness. Calligraphers were important bureaucrats who staffed the Turkish chancery, the Divan, which gave its name to the official script of the Ottoman Empire, known as 'Divani'. The calligraphers developed beautiful and extremely intricate forms of this script. It is notoriously difficult to read deliberately so and is designed to prevent extra words being inserted into the text and forgery of official documents. The calligraphers were artists as well as bureaucrats, often belonging to dynasties of craftsmen, passing skills from one generation to the next. In the Islamic world, red tape is often high art.

Modern politicians proudly announce their desire to sweep away bureaucracy. The contemporary prejudice is that it slows you down, clogs things up; but if you take a historical view, it is bureaucracy that sees you through the rocky patches and enables the state to survive. Bureaucracy is not evidence of inertia, as we saw in Chapter 15; it can be life-saving continuity and nowhere is that clearer than in China. China is the longest surviving state in the world and it is no coincidence that it has the longest tradition of bureaucracy. My next object is a piece of Chinese paper that, like the tughra, is a powerful tool of the state: paper money.

72.

Ming Banknote.

Paper money, from China.

AD 13751425.

'Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!'

The famous moment when Peter Pan asks the audience to save Tinkerbell by joining him in believing in fairies is an unfailing winner. That ability to convince others to believe in something they can't see but wish to be true is a trick that has been effective in all sorts of ways throughout history. Take the case of paper money: someone in China centuries ago printed a value on a piece of paper and asked everyone else to agree with them that the paper was actually worth what it said it was. You could say that the paper notes, like the Darling children in Peter Pan, were supposed to be 'as good as gold', or in this case as good as copper literally worth the number of copper coins printed on the note. The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith. Paper money is truly one of the revolutionary inventions of human history.

This object is one of these early paper money notes, which the Chinese called feiqian 'flying cash' and it's from the time of the Ming, around 1400. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has this to say on the reasons for this invention: I think in some way the right aphorism is that 'evil is the root of all money'! Money was invented in order to get round the problems of trusting other individuals. But then the issue was could you trust the person issuing the money? So the state became the natural issuer of money. And then the question is, can we trust the state? And in many ways that's a question about whether we can trust ourselves in the future.

Most of the world until this time was exchanging money in coins of gold, silver and copper that had an intrinsic value you could judge by weight. But the Chinese saw that paper money has obvious advantages over quantities of coin: it's light, easily transportable and big enough to carry words and images to announce not only its value but the authority of the government that backs it and the assumptions on which it rests. Properly managed, paper money is a powerful tool in maintaining an effective state.

At first glance, this note doesn't look at all like modern paper money. It is paper, obviously enough, and it's larger than a sheet of A4. It's a soft, velvety grey colour, and it's made out of mulberry bark, which was the legally approved material for Chinese paper money at the time. The fibres of mulberry bark are long and flexible, so even today, though it's around 600 years old, the paper is still soft and pliable.

It is fully printed on only one side, a woodblock stamp in black ink with Chinese characters and decorative features arranged in a series of rows and columns. Along the top, six bold characters announce that this is the 'Great Ming Circulating Treasure Certificate'. Below this there is a decorative border of dragons going all round the sheet dragons of course being one of the traditional symbols of China and of its emperor. Just inside the border are two columns of text, the one on the left announcing again that this is the 'Great Ming Treasure Certificate' and the one on the right saying that this is 'To Circulate for Ever'.

That's quite a claim. How permanent can for ever be? In stamping the promise on to the very note, the Ming state seems to be asserting that it too will be around for ever to honour it. I asked Mervyn King to comment on this brave assertion: I think it's a contract, an implicit contract, between people and the decisions they believe will be taken in the years and decades to come, about preserving the value of that money. It is a piece of paper there is nothing intrinsic in value to it its value is determined by the stability of the institutions that lie behind the issuance of that paper money. If people have confidence that those institutions will continue, if they have confidence that their commitment to stability can be believed, then they will accept and use paper money, and it will become a normal part of circulation. When that breaks down, as it has done in countries where the regime has been destroyed through war or revolution, then the currency collapses.

And indeed this is exactly what had happened in China around 1350, as the Mongol Empire disintegrated. So one of the challenges for the new Ming Dynasty, which took over in 1368, was not just to reorder the state, but to re-establish the currency. The first Ming emperor was a rough provincial warlord, Zhu Yuanzhang, who as a ruler embarked on an ambitious programme to build a Chinese society which would be stable, highly educated and shaped by the principles of the great philosopher Confucius, as the historian Timothy Brook details: The goal of the founding Ming emperor was that children should be able to read, write and count. It was an idea that he had that everyone should be literate, and he thought literacy was a good idea because it had commercial implications the economy would run more effectively and it had moral implications: he wanted school children to read the sayings of Confucius, to read the basic texts about filial piety and respecting elders, and he hoped that literacy would accompany the general re-stabilization of the realm. I would imagine a quarter of the population could read what's on this note, which by European standards at the time was remarkable.

As part of this impressive political programme, the new Ming emperor decided to relaunch the paper currency. A sound but flexible monetary system would, he knew, encourage a stable society. So he founded the Imperial Board of Revenue and then, in 1374, a 'treasure note control bureau'. Paper notes began to be issued the following year.

The first challenge was fighting forgery. All paper currencies run the risk of counterfeiting, because of the enormous gulf between the low real value of the piece of paper and the high promissory value that appears on it. This Ming note carries on it a government promise of a reward to anyone who denounces a counterfeiter. And alongside this carrot, there was a terrifying stick for any potential forger: To counterfeit is death. The informant will receive 250 taels of silver and in addition the entire property of the criminal.

The much bigger challenge was to keep the worth of the new currency intact. Here, the key monetary decision of the Ming was to ensure that the paper note could always be converted into copper coins the value of the paper would equal the value of a specific number of coins. Europeans called these coins quite simply 'cash' they are round coins, with a square hole in the middle, which the Chinese had already been using for well over a thousand years. One of the things I love about this Ming note is that right in the middle of it is a picture of the actual coins that the paper note represents. There are ten stacks of coins with a hundred in each pile, so a total of a thousand cash or, as it says in writing on the note, one guan. You can get some idea of just how useful and welcome this early paper must have been when you compare carrying the paper around with the actual coins represented. Pictured here is 1,000 cash: 1.5 metres (5 feet) of copper coins all on a piece of string. They weigh about 3 kilos (7 lbs), are extremely cumbersome to handle, and are very difficult to subdivide and pay out. This note must have made life, for some people, very much easier. A contemporary wrote: Whenever paper money is presented, copper coins will be paid out, and whenever paper money is issued, copper coins will be paid in. This will never prove unworkable. It is like water in a pool.

The middle of the note shows a string of ten stacks of coins.

It sounds easy. But the words 'never prove unworkable' would come back to haunt the Ming emperor. As usual, the practice turned out to be more complicated than the theory. The exchange of paper for copper, copper for paper, never flowed smoothly, and, like so many governments since, the Ming just couldn't resist the temptation of simply printing more money. The value of its paper money dived, and fifteen years after the first Ming banknote was issued, one official noted that a 1,000-cash note like this one had plummeted to an exchange value of a mere 250. What had gone wrong? Mervyn King explains: They didn't have a central bank, and they issued too much paper money. It was backed by copper coin, in principle that was the idea behind it. But in fact that link broke down, and once people realized the link had broken down, then the question of how much it was worth was really a judgement about whether a future administration would issue even more, and devalue its real value in terms of purchasing power. In the end this money did become worthless.

But I don't think paper money is always doomed to failure, and I think if you'd asked me four or five years ago before the financial crisis I would have said, 'I think we've now worked out how to manage paper money.' Perhaps in the light of the financial crisis we should be a bit more cautious, and maybe to quote Zhou Enlai, another great Chinese figure, when asked about the French Revolution: 'Well, it's too soon to tell'. Maybe we should say about paper money after 700 years it is perhaps too soon to tell.

Eventually, around 1425, the Chinese government gave up the struggle and suspended the use of paper money. The fairies had fled or, in grander language, the faith structure needed for paper money to work had collapsed. Silver bullion became the basis of the Ming monetary world. But however difficult to manage, paper currency has so many advantages that inevitably the world came back to it, and no modern state could now think of functioning without it. And the memory of that very early paper currency of the Ming, printed on Chinese mulberry paper, lives on today in a little garden in the middle of London. In the 1920s the Bank of England, in conscious homage to those early paper notes, planted a little stand of mulberry trees.

73.

Inca Gold Llama.

Gold figurine, from Peru.

AD 14001550.

Around 500 years ago the empire of the Incas was bigger than Ottoman Turkey, bigger than Ming China in fact, it was the largest empire in the world. At its height, around 1500, it ran for more than 3,000 miles down the Andes and ruled over 12 million people from Columbia to Chile and from the Pacific Coast to the Amazonian jungle. In the 1520s the Spanish would come and everything would collapse; but until then, the Inca Empire flourished. It didn't have writing, but it was an efficient military society, an ordered, productive and wealthy civilization centred on Cusco, in Peru. Its economy was driven by manpower and, just as important, llama power a vast human labour force and hundreds of thousands of llamas. And though it was the biggest empire of the time, it is represented by the smallest object in this section of our history a tiny, gold messenger from a mountain-topped world.

Although this empire was highly organized militarily, socially and politically, the Incas had no script, so we are heavily dependent on the accounts of their Spanish conquerors. We know from these and the objects left behind that the making of the Inca Empire is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of the world. As the Ming Dynasty was starting in China and the Ottomans were conquering Constantinople, the Inca were constructing their vast empire. Inca control had spread from their heartland in southern Peru to a territory ten times bigger by 1500.

Andean territory is forbiddingly mountainous this was a vertical empire that made terraced fields on mountainsides and roads that ran over the peaks. Irrigation projects and canals changed the courses of rivers and turned mountainsides into lush, terraced fields. Well-stocked storehouses and extensive highways showed detailed concern with planning and provisioning. The Incas made the impassable passable, and the key to their success was the llama. But a state's dependency on animals was nothing new, as the scientist and writer Jared Diamond can tell us: The availability and type of domestic animals has had a huge effect on human history and on human culture. For example, in the Old World, in Europe and Asia, the big domestic animals of Eurasia the horse, cow, goat, sheep and pig provided meat and protein and milk. Some of them were big enough to provide transport. Some of them the horse, camels and donkeys were big enough to ride, and some of them, particularly cattle and horses, were able to pull carts. The horses and camels that could be ridden became war animals and provided an enormous advantage for Eurasian people over peoples of other continents. One can say that domestic animals became not only a big spur to the development of settled living and provided us with our food, but they also provided a weapon of conquest.

The zoological lottery that Jared Diamond describes the pure chance of whether your local animals can be domesticated enormously favoured Europe and Asia. Australia, by contrast, drew a very short straw. It is hard to domesticate an emu, and no one ever rode a kangaroo into battle. The Americas were almost as badly off, but they did have the llama. Llamas cannot compete with horses for speed, or donkeys for pack power; they also have an infuriating habit, when tired, of just stopping and refusing to move. But they are extraordinarily well adapted to high altitude; they cope well with the cold and can forage for their own food; they can provide wool, meat and manure; and, although they cannot carry people, a healthy llama can comfortably transport about 30 kilograms (60 lbs) of goods more than today's average baggage allowance for air travel so they can be very useful indeed for carrying the kind of supplies required for military campaigns. As they expanded down the great spine of the Andes, the Incas bred huge numbers of llamas as army pack animals. Not surprisingly, they also made models of this hardy creature that was so fundamental to the lives of the people and the running of the empire.

Our little gold llama is so small that it can stand comfortably in my hand it is only a little over 6 cm (2 inches) high. It's hollow, made up of hammered-out thin leaves of gold, and therefore very light. It's an engagingly sprightly figure straight neck, ears upright and alert, large eyes and a mouth that's clearly smiling, making an unusually cheerful-looking example of a creature from a species which usually seems to veer between amused condescension and a spitting sneer. Many little figures like this have been found, in gold and silver, all over Inca territory, frequently buried as offerings on mountain peaks.

That territory was on three distinct levels: there was the flat coastal strip; then the mountainsides, with the famous Andean terraced fields producing crops on very difficult terrain; and then the mountain plateaus with high grasslands, 3,500 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The llama unified these three disparate Inca worlds and held this vast empire together. It was a world of different peoples, languages and gods, whose communities had often been at war with each other, and the full range of imperial techniques was deployed to control this swiftly created state. Some local elites were ruthlessly eliminated; others were co-opted, given private land and excused taxation. Late-conquered territories, in northern Ecuador for example, could operate more as client states instead of being fully incorporated into the Inca system. This cultural mosaic was welded together into a powerful empire by the Inca military machine, which depended on thousands upon thousands of llamas to provide portage and food. We know that after an early battle against the Spanish, the defeated Incas abandoned 15,000 of the animals.

Our little llama is made of gold, a key substance in Inca myth. Gold was the attribute of the great Inca sun god and represented his generative powers gold was described as the 'sweat of the Sun', while silver was the 'tears of the Moon'. Gold was therefore related to masculine power, above all to the power of the Inca himself, the emperor, child of the Sun. Today, Inca objects in gold and silver are rare survivals: tiny scraps of the dizzying opulence that was described by the Spanish when they arrived in the 1520s. They wrote of palaces walled with sheets of gold, of gold and silver statues of humans and animals, and of miniature golden gardens inhabited by glittering birds, reptiles and insects. All of these would be surrendered to or seized by the Spanish. Nearly all were melted down for bullion and sent to Spain.

As in all societies, planting and harvesting were accompanied by rituals and offerings to the gods, and with the Inca this often involved sacrifice of living beings, from guinea pigs to children of the elite. And as the Peruvian Inca expert Gabriel Ramon explains, llamas were sacrificed by the thousand: There were two calendars during the Incan period. One was the official imperial calendar, and at the same time they have lots of small calendars from the provinces or territories that they conquered. But in the official calendar they tried to match the agricultural calendar, the main times for harvesting and planting, with the main ceremonies, and it's in this official calendar that you have several ceremonies with the llama. There is one mentioned by Guaman Poma, a colonial writer, in October, and for that ceremony, to bring the rain, you need to kill white llamas.

The greatest Inca religious rite was the Festival of the Sun. A Spanish chronicler has left us a full description: Then came the Inca priests with a great number of young, female and male llamas of all colours, for the Peruvian llama is found in all colours, like horses in Spain. All the llamas belonged to the Sun. The first sacrifice of a young black llama was intended to observe the auguries and omens of the festival. They took the llama and placed it with its head facing the east. While still alive, its left side was opened, and by inserting the hand they drew forth the heart, lungs and entrails; the whole must come out together from the throat downwards. They regarded it as a most happy omen if the lungs came out still quivering. After they had sacrificed the llama lamb, a great quantity of other young, female and male llamas was brought for the common sacrifice. Their throats were cut and they were flayed. Their blood and hearts were all kept and offered to the Sun. Everything was burned to ashes.

The same Spanish writer tells us that while real llamas were being slaughtered, the rulers of the provinces also brought to the Incas models of llamas made of gold and silver as tokens of the great animal wealth of the region. Our llama may have been one of these tokens. Alternatively, and less comfortably, it may have been part of one of the other Inca religious rituals. Selected children of the elite were ritually exposed and left on the mountain peaks as living sacrifices to the mountain spirits, and little gold llamas like ours have been found beside their dead bodies.

The wealth of the Inca Empire depended not only on the vast herds of llamas but also on the Incas' ability to force their conquered subjects to work for them. The subjects, however, weren't by any means as docile as the llamas, and many Andeans dispossessed and exploited resented the Incas as alien aggressors: Inca tyranny is at our gate ... If we yield to the Inca, we shall be obliged to give up our former freedom, our best land, our most beautiful women and girls, our customs, our laws ... We shall become for all time this tyrant's vassals and servitors.

The Inca hold on many of its provinces was fragile. Continuous rebellions tell of potential weakness, which turned out to be crucial when Pizarro returned to conquer Peru in 1532. Some of the local elites immediately seized the opportunity to ally with the incomers and throw off the Inca yoke.

As well as being joined by a growing number of rebels, the Spanish had swords, armour and guns, none of which the Incas possessed and crucially they also had horses. The Inca had never before seen men on the backs of animals, nor had they seen the speed and agility with which this combination of man and beast could move. The Inca llamas must have suddenly looked hopelessly delicate and slow. It was all over fairly quickly a mere couple of hundred Spaniards massacred the Inca army, captured their emperor, installed a puppet ruler and seized and melted down their gold treasures. Our little llama is one of the rare survivors.

The Spanish had come to Peru lured by tales of enormous quantities of gold. But they discovered instead the richest silver mines in the world and began to mint the coins that would power the world's first global currency. The Inca measured the wealth of their empire in llamas. The Spanish would measure theirs, as we shall see in Chapter 80, in silver pieces of eight.

74.

Jade Dragon Cup.

Jade cup, from central Asia.

AD 14171449.

We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

In these words Christopher Marlowe fixed for ever the European image of Tamburlaine, still a legendary force in Elizabethan England. A couple of hundred years earlier, by 1400, the real Tamerlane had become the ruler of all the Mongol lands except China. The heart of his empire was the region we now know as the 'stans' Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. That huge area in central Asia has always had a fluctuating history, where empires build, crumble and fade until another empire rises and the cycle begins again. It is a region that has inevitably had two faces one looking towards China in the east and the other towards Turkey and Iran in the west. Samarkand, Tamerlane's capital, was a major city on the great Silk Road that linked these two worlds. Much of this complex cultural and religious history is embodied in this small jade cup, which belonged to Tamerlane's astronomer grandson, Ulugh Beg.

The surface of the Moon is dimpled with hundreds of craters. For the Moon-watcher they add interest and texture, but their names also provide another kind of pleasure: they form a kind of dictionary of great scientists. There are craters honouring Halley, Galileo and Copernicus and many more astronomers and among them is Ulugh Beg, who lived in central Asia at the start of the fifteenth century. Ulugh Beg built a great observatory in Samarkand, in modern Uzbekistan, and compiled a famous catalogue of just under a thousand stars, which became a standard work of reference in both Asia and Europe, and was translated into Latin in Oxford in the seventeenth century it was this which earned him the honour of that crater on the Moon. He was also briefly the ruler of one of the world's great powers the Timurid Empire, which at its height ruled not only central Asia, but also Iran and Afghanistan, as well as parts of Iraq, Pakistan and India. The Timurid Empire had been founded by the redoubtable Tamerlane in the years around 1400. The name of his grandson, the astronomer prince Ulugh Beg, is incised on the cup pictured here.

The Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov says: It is extremely exciting that this object belonged to Ulugh Beg, because I can see here in Arabic Ulugh Beg Kuragan and imagine that it served Ulugh Beg while he was looking at the stars. It's magnificent.

Ulugh Beg's cup is oval, just over 6 centimetres (2 inches) high and 20 centimetres (7 inches) long more a small bowl than a cup and made from a superbly grained olive-green jade with natural cloud-like markings drifting across the glossy stone. It is very beautiful, but jade was valued in central Asia not just for its beauty, but also for its powers of protection: jade would keep you safe against lightning and earthquakes and especially important in a cup against poison. Poison placed in a jade cup, so it was said, would result in the vessel splitting. The owner of this cup could drink without fear.

The cup's handle is a splendid Chinese dragon. It has its back feet firmly planted on the underside of the bowl, while its mouth and webbed front feet cling to the edge at the top. It peeps over the rim of the bowl, so you can put your finger through the space left by its curving body. It's a sensuous, intimate experience.

The style of the handle may be Chinese, but the inscription Ulugh Beg Kuragan carved into the cup is in Arabic script. Kuragan is a title that literally means 'royal son-in-law', but it was used by Tamerlane and later by Ulugh Beg. They had both married princesses of the house of Genghis Khan, and by calling themselves sons-in-law they declared themselves the heirs to the universal sovereignty of Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire.

The Arabic inscription reading 'Ulugh Beg Kuragan'

A later repair carries a Turkish inscription: 'There is no limit to the beneficence of God '

So, the cup was probably made in Samarkand, with a handle showing connections east to China, and an inscription looking west to the Islamic world. The Arabic inscription reminds us that this new Timurid Empire created by Tamerlane was energetically Muslim. This is the time of the building of the great mosques of Bukhara and Samarkand, Tashkent and Herat, conceived and executed on a monumental scale, a central Asian equivalent of the European Renaissance.

From about 1410 Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand for his father, and there he built the observatory in which he revised and corrected the astronomical computations of the ancient Greek Ptolemy the same fusion of Classical Greek and Arab scholarship that we saw in the medieval Hebrew Astrolabe (see Chapter 62). But this central Asian Renaissance prince didn't take after his military, empire-building grandfather Tamerlane. The historian Beatrice Forbes Manz sums him up: He was a very poor commander and probably not a great governor in certain ways. He was, however, an excellent cultural patron, famous especially for his patronage of mathematics and astronomy. These were his real passions, much more I think than government or military campaigning. He also had a passion for jade, so it's not surprising to find that cup in his possession, and he had a fairly high-living court, looser morally than his father's. Ulugh Beg was pious, he knew the Qur'an by heart, but he, like many rulers, took a certain amount of licence. So there was a lot of drinking, for instance, at his court.

An envoy from Ming China who visited Samarkand around 1415 was taken aback at the free-wheeling manners of the Timurid capital, which still smacked of the easy-going informality of a semi-nomadic society. It was an odd city, designed to accommodate both modern buildings and traditional tents, the yurts that the Timurids had brought with them from the steppes. For the rarefied Chinese visitor, Samarkand was the Wild West: They have no principles or propriety. When inferiors meet superiors, they come forward, shake hands, and that is all! When women go out, they ride horses and mules. If they meet someone on the road, they chat, laugh and fool around with no sense of shame. Moreover they utter lewd words when conversing. The men are even more despicable.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the Timurid Empire, bound together only by personal loyalties, didn't survive long. It was run by people more at home on the steppes than in a government office. There was no established habit of orderly central power and barely any working bureaucracy. The death of every ruler brought chaos. Ulugh Beg's father had struggled to rebuild the Timurid Empire, but after his death in 1447 Ulugh Beg would reign for only two years before he lost control. He tried hard to use the reputation of Tamerlane to bolster his authority, burying his illustrious grandfather under a monument made of rare black jade, inscribed in Arabic for all to see: 'When I rise, the world will tremble'. He must have longed for the return of a power that he knew he himself could never match. The earth was unlikely to tremble at Ulugh Beg. Hamid Ismailov sees a poetic, metaphorical meaning in his green jade cup: The symbolism of this cup is seen throughout the whole region as a sort of destiny of a person. When we say 'the cup is filled', so destiny is fulfilled. And so, for example, Babur, who was a great poet as well as the nephew of Ulugh Beg, says in one of his poems that troops of sadness are countless, and the only way to deal with them is bringing thicker wine and keeping a cup as a shield. That is the symbolism of the cup it's a shield, a metaphysical shield against the troops of sadness.

But it was a shield that failed, and towards the end of his life, the troops of sadness came crowding in on Ulugh Beg. His two-year rule of the empire was as disastrous as it was brief. Very unmetaphorical troops invaded Samarkand, and in 1449 he was defeated and captured by his own eldest son, handed over to a slave and decapitated. But Ulugh Beg was not forgotten. His great-nephew Babur, who became the first Mughal emperor of India, honoured him by interring his remains in the black jade monument alongside those of the great Tamerlane.

By that time the Timurid Empire was over. Once again central Asia fragmented and became the theatre of competing influences, among them the great new power in the West, the Ottoman Empire. That later development, too, is recorded in our cup. At some point, presumably long after Ulugh Beg's death, the precious jade cup must have been dropped, because it is badly cracked at one end. But the crack has been covered up by a repair in silver, and on the silver is an inscription. It was probably engraved in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, 300 years after its owner's execution. The inscription is in Ottoman Turkish, so the cup by then had probably found its way to Istanbul. It reads, 'There is no limit to the beneficence of God'.

The unfortunate Ulugh Beg might not have agreed. By the time this cup was re-inscribed in Turkish, Russia was already expanding into the old Timurid Empire. In the nineteenth century the whole region would become part of the Russian imperial scheme, and Samarkand would be absorbed into another central Asian empire first Tsarist, then Soviet, until in 1989 that in its turn collapsed, an upheaval which to the Timurids would have been very familiar.

One of the new states to emerge in the post-Soviet order is Uzbekistan. As it strives to define its identity it seeks in its past elements that are neither Russian, nor Chinese, nor Iranian, nor Turkish. The banknotes of modern Uzbekistan declare to the world that this new state is in fact the heir to the Timurid Empire: we see on them the mausoleum that houses the black jade monument where Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg lie buried.

There can be no doubt that Ulugh Beg achieved more as a scholar of the stars than as a ruler of his collapsing empire, so perhaps it is fitting that the crater on the Moon named after him is near the Oceanus Procellarum the sea of storms storms against which his jade cup might have given him solace, but not protection.

75.

Durer's Rhinoceros.

Woodcut, from Nuremberg, Germany.

AD 1515.

The tiny island of St Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic, is famous above all as the open prison of Napoleon Bonaparte, banished there after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. But another great wonder of Europe also once stayed on St Helena a being much less destructive than the French emperor and one that in the Europe of 1515 was truly a wonder: an Indian rhinoceros. He, too, was in captivity, but in a Portuguese ship stopping off on the long journey from India to Lisbon a journey that was a triumph of navigation. Europe was on the brink of a great expansion that would lead to the exploration, mapping and conquest of much of the world, all made possible by new technologies in ships and sails. There was intense interest in recording and disseminating this rapidly expanding knowledge through another new technology printing. All these disparate developments coincide in this object, one of the most famous images of Renaissance art. The Indian rhinoceros, in one respect at least, was luckier than Napoleon: his portrait was made by Albrecht Durer.

In recent chapters I have been examining objects from four great land empires, all of them controlling huge tracts of the globe around 500 years ago. This object introduces a fledgling maritime empire, that of Portugal. For centuries there had been a steady trade in spices between the Indian Ocean and Europe, but by the late-fifteenth century the Ottomans dominated the eastern Mediterranean and blocked the traditional trade routes (see Chapter 71). Spain and Portugal began searching for new ways to gain access to Asian goods. Both ventured into the Atlantic a very difficult ocean for long-distance sailing. In the quest for the Indies, Spain went west and found the Americas; the Portuguese went south, down the seemingly endless coast of Africa until they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and made their way into the Indian Ocean and to the wealth of the East. In Africa and Asia they established a slender network of stopping points harbours and trading stations and along that network travelled spices and other exotic goods, and also our rhinoceros.

Durer's Rhinoceros is a woodcut print, and it shows a massive beast, nicely identified over its head by the word RHINOCERVS, with the date 1515 above and the AD monogram of the artist below. The rhino is side on, looking to the right. Durer has cunningly framed it to give a great sense of pent up force, packing the body into a tightly drawn frame which only just contains it the end of its tail is partially cut off and its horn pushes aggressively against the right-hand edge. This animal will try to escape, we think and it is going to be trouble.

Above the animal in its printed box is a text in German: [In May 1515] Brought from India to the great and powerful King Emanuel of Portugal at Lisbon a live animal called a rhinoceros. His form is here represented. It has the colour of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick scales. It is like an elephant in size, but lower on its legs and almost invulnerable ... It is also said that the rhinoceros is fast, lively and cunning.

The story of how the rhino came to Europe tells us that the Portuguese were not just trading with India but were trying to establish permanent bases there this is the very beginning of the European land presence in Asia. They succeeded largely thanks to Alfonso d'Albuquerque, the first governor and effective founder of the Portuguese empire in India, and the man who brought us the rhino. In 1514 Albuquerque approached the sultan of Gujarat to negotiate the use of an island, accompanying his embassy with lavish presents. The sultan responded with gifts in return including a live rhinoceros. Albuquerque seems to have been somewhat flummoxed by this living gift, so he took advantage of a passing Portuguese flotilla and sent the beast to Lisbon as a special present to the king. Getting a rhino weighing between one and a half and two tons on to a sixteenth-century ship must have been quite a task.