A History of Mankind

By the 8th century, the rising influence of Turkic mercenaries and warlords was ominous both in the Abbasid Caliphate and the Chinese Empire. The Turks were employed to paper over the cracks for armies lacking sufficient numbers of reliable, warlike locals, and became elite forces with little affection or respect for their rulers.

Nobody Wins As far as most people in the West were concerned, John Demjanjuk (1920–2012) was a for decades one of the world’s most notorious Nazis. An Ukrainian-born former Soviet Red Army soldier, Demjanjuk was captured by German forces in 1942 and imprisoned in Nazi prisoner-of-war encampments, some of the deadliest places in WW2: since the Soviet Union hadn’t signed the Geneva Conventions, Germany didn’t feel itself bound by them.

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A History of Mankind (409) An Lushan’s request in the spring of 755 to replace Han generals with non-Han generals was granted by the Chinese Emperor Xuanzong, but relations between the two friends rapidly shifted from close comradery to suspicion.

A History of Mankind (408) Islamic propaganda that Muslim translators saved the Greco-Roman Classics from being lost did contain nuggets of truth. As with Euclid’s The Elements, important works often became familiar to Western Europeans through later Arabic-to-Latin translations that were valuable as means of transmission.

Is there any theory behind the Don’s flip-flopping in the international stage? When I was a foreign affairs correspondent, my biggest strength was knowing about the history of places I reported from. The way I saw it, it’s basic physics: if you don’t know where things come from, it’s really hard to track any consistent line showing you where things are moving to next.

Why huge ruins of ancient settlements may have never been cities; plus questions on Islam and Iconoclasm, a history of deforestation, Machiavelli’s opinion on Communist dynasties & more To check all newsletters in the History of Mankind series, organized by subject, you can click here. This is the fiftieth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

The myth of the House of Wisdom is multi-faceted, and it took on increasingly absurd traits over time. For instance, some Muslim scholars came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 987.

The story about the survival and transmission of Ptolemy’s classic “Geography” is a good example of the exaggerated claims made for the influence of the House of Wisdom and Abbasid-era translators.

One of the least-known features of the Protestant Reformation is the popularity of astrology and related occultism among the protestant flock. While Catholics had been fighting astrology for centuries, protestants embraced it with great enthusiasm. Despite Martin Luther’s personal skepticism toward the art of stellar prediction, German protestants were particularly drawn to popular calendrical astrology.