The Fall of the Crusader States: Jerusalem and Acre

In 1244, the Ayubid Sultan granted the Khwarazmiyya the permission to attack Jerusalem. The Khwarazmiyya forces began their siege of Jerusalem from 11 July 1244. The city’s defenses fell rapidly. On 15 July 1244, the Khwarazmiyya entered the city. There was great looting and slaughter. When the Khwarazmiyya left, all the streets in the city were filled with rubble from the houses that had been torn down and rotting corpses. When the news of the pillaging and massacre in Jerusalem reached Western Europe, King Louis IX mobilized the Seventh Crusade to the Holy Land.

The remaining forces of Jerusalem rallied around the Crusading orders and they clashed with the army of the Ayubid Sultan in the Battle of La Forbie (also known as the Battle of Hiribya), which began on October 17, 1244. After the experience of Khwarazmiyya’s sack ofJerusalem, the crusaders realized that no mercy would be shown to them if they lost. They fought bravely, because they knew that defeat meant death or enslavement. But the Sultan’s forces had overwhelming numerical superiority, and the crusader resistance collapsed on October 18. Over 5,000 crusaders had died, 800 prisoners were taken, including Walter of Brienne, William of Chastelneuf, Master of the Hospital, and the Constable of Tripoli.

After the Khwarazmiyya’s sacking of Jerusalem and the decisive defeat in the Battle of La Forbie, the remaining Crusader states in the Middle East were in a bad shape. But instead of becoming united to face the external enemy, in Acre, they became embroiled in an internal war. This was the War of Saint Sabas, which pitted the shipping interests of Venice against the shipping interests of Genoa. The  Venetians and the Genoese quarters in Acre were separated by a neutral stretch of land belonging to the monastery of Saint Sabas. For years, the Venetians and the Genoese had been petitioning the Papacy in Rome to be granted possession of the monastery and its territory. 

It is not clear which party had received the Papal grant for the monastery’s territory. The Papal records of this decision are missing. In Acre, both Venetians and the Genoese flourished papers which showed that they had the exclusive papal grant to Saint Sabas. Each side accused the other of foul play and a war broke out. By 1256, the people in the Kingdom of Acre had forgotten that they faced the threat from the Islamic forces—they were too busy choosing sides in the battle between the Venetians and the Genoese. The Teutonic Knights sided with the Venetians while the Hospitallers with the Genoese. Between 1256 and 1260 intense fighting took place. Many sections of Acre were ruined. Most of its defensive towers were destroyed. 

The final fall of Acre came in 1291. The Mamluks besieged Acre in April 1291, and by May 18 they had breached its defenses. The crusaders, their families, and the local residents made a mad dash for the harbor to escape the invading army, but most were killed or enslaved. Many of those who made it into the boats drowned when the boats capsized due to overcrowding. A Templar stronghold was the last to fall. It held out till May 18, when the Templars surrendered after accepting a truce offer. They were promptly executed.

Churchill's Perspective

When British politician and socialite Violet Asquith, aboard the HMS Enchantress in 1912, looked out at the Mediterranean coastline and exclaimed, "How perfect!”, Churchill, who was with her, replied, "Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect—If we had got some six-inch guns on board how easily we could bombard …” (based on David Fromkin’s book A Peace to End All Peace)

The Imperial Ambitions of Anna Komnene

Anna Komnene, author of the twelfth century history text, the Alexiad, harbored imperial ambitions from her childhood. 

Born on 1 December 1083, she was the eldest of the seven children of Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina. Her younger siblings were Maria, John II, Andronikos, Isaac, Eudokia, and Theodora. Her father Alexios had seized the imperial throne of the Byzantine Empire on August 15, 1081, in a violent coup, during which his troops had sacked Constantinople. His reign was not stable and there were frequent attempts to overthrow him. But he managed to survive and ruled for nearly four decades, till he died on August 15, 1118.

Since John was the eldest son, he had been designated as the heir to the imperial throne by Alexios. Anna wanted the throne to go to the man whom she had married in 1097, Nikephoros Bryennios, a descendent of the Bryennios family that had held the imperial throne before the accession of Alexios.

Anna began to dispute John’s right to succession while her father was alive. Queen Irene Doukaina too preferred to see Nikephoros on the throne. Most accounts of that period show that Irene had thrown her full influence on Anna's side. She tried to coerce Alexios into nominating Nikephoros as the next emperor. But Alexios could not be moved. He continued to insist that John would be his successor.

At the funeral of Alexios, Anna and her mother tried to get John murdered. When this attempt failed, they made a second attempt to have him murdered. The second attempt too failed, possibly because Nikephoros did not fully cooperate with the coup plotters. Anna was outraged by her husband’s weakness. She is reported to have exclaimed that “nature had mistaken their sexes, for he [her husband] ought to have been the woman.”

A cleric in Hagia Sophia, the patriarchate of Constantinople and a principal setting for Byzantine imperial ceremonies, proclaimed John II Komnenos as emperor. He would rule until 1143, when he died of natural causes.

Anna was only thirty-six years old when she plotted to get her brother murdered. With the failure of her plot, her life as a powerful royal was over. She was banished to the monastery of Kecharitomene, which was founded by her mother. She would live at the monastery for the rest of her life, consumed with pain, jealousy, and hatred. She outlived John by a few years. The exact date of her death is not recorded, but it is believed that she died in the 1150s.

The Alexiad was written during the period when Anna was imprisoned at the monastery. There is no mention of her failed coup attempts in the book, but her pain at her thwarted political ambitions is visible in several passages.

George and Clemenceau: Dividing the Middle East

After the First World War, the British and French governments started the process of identifying the territories in the Middle East that they wanted to control. In December 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau had a blunt conversation in London, on the subject of how the Middle East was to be divided among the allies. Here’s how their conversation went:

Clemenceau: “What do you want?”

George: “I want Mosul.”

Clemenceau: “You shall have it. Anything else?”

George: “I want Jerusalem too.”

Clemenceau: “You shall have it.” 

Clemenceau wanted to establish a protectorate over Syria, to which George agreed. George identified Palestine as the territory which he must control if he was to protect the Suez Canal. Clemenceau agreed to let George have Palestine. (Source: The Papers of Lord Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Imperial War Cabinet and top aide to David Lloyd George)

In light of the knowledge of the disastrous fate of the interventions in the Middle East from 1918 to this day, this exchange between Clemenceau and George seems naive, arrogant, and quixotic.

If Clemenceau and George had a sense of history, they would have realized that the West had been failing in the Middle East for more than two thousand years. The Western Roman Empire failed to control the Middle East. The Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantines) failed. The three centuries of crusaders could not make any headway in the Middle East.

On Complete Independence

At a dinner in Baghdad in 1920, Gertrude Bell, an English writer who had been recruited to work for British intelligence, said to Jaafar Al-Askari, soon to be appointed Prime Minister of the new country of Iraq, that “complete independence is what we [the British] wish to give to Iraq.” Jaafar Al-Askari replied: “My lady, complete independence is never given—always taken.”

(Source: Gertrude Bell: Complete Letters; Page 224)

The Fallout of the Battle of Manzikert

When Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched his military into Asia Minor, he thought that he would decisively defeat the Turkish forces and prove to the world that the Byzantines, and not the Seljuk Turks, were the preeminent military power. The Byzantine and Turkish forces met at Manzikert on 26 August 1071. The spies employed by Romanos had conveyed to him that the Turkish forces at Manzikert were modest and were led by a minor commander. Romanos thought that they would be easy to defeat. The intelligence that he had received was flawed. The Turkish forces at Manzikert were under the command of Sultan Alp Arslan (who was the leader of Sunni Islam in Asia Minor) and were part of the main Turkish army. 

The Byzantines were employing a significant number of mercenaries and Anatolian levies who fled when the Seljuk Turks began their onslaught. The professional Byzantine soldiers tried to put up a stand. They managed to inflict heavy casualties on the Turkish forces but they were overwhelmed by the superior fighting tactics of the Turks. Romanos was injured and captured. When he was brought before Sultan Alp Arslan in a disheveled, bloodied, and tattered state, the Sultan could not believe that the exhausted man who was barely able to stand before him was the Emperor of the great Byzantine Empire (which was then known as the Roman Empire). According to one famous account, Arslan placed his boot on Romanos’s neck and forced him to kiss the ground. 

This is how history texts record the exchange between them: 

Alp Arslan: "What would you do if I were brought before you as a prisoner?"

Romanos: "Perhaps I'd kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople."

Alp Arslan: "My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you, and set you free."

Romanos and the survivors of his army were set free by the Sultan. A great damage had been done to the prestige of the Byzantine Empire. As the news of the defeat of the Byzantine army and the capture of its Emperor spread through the Levant, there was a panic among the orthodox Christians. They realized that in Asia Minor they were no longer safe. They started fleeing towards Constantinople, which they thought was the only place where they could be safe from the Turkish raids. The influx of refugees led to severe economic problems in Constantinople. There was massive inflation—by the middle of the 1070s, the price of wheat had risen by twenty times. The economic meltdown was accompanied by political upheaval. Leading magnates rebelled and Constantinople was plunged into a civil war. 

The neighbors of the Byzantine Empire took advantage of the chaos. With no military to oppose their advance, the Seljuk Turks marched into Asia Minor. Advancing at great speed, leaving a trail of slaughter and destruction in their wake (according to the account by Anna Komnene, written a few decades after the war), they reached the shores of the Bosphorus, and the surrounding areas became exposed to their raids. By the 1080s, the Seljuk Turks had captured an area of 78,000 square kilometers. There was trouble for the Byzantines in Europe too. The Normans started eying the Empire’s western territories. The dynasties in Croatia and Duklja cancelled their alliance with the Byzantines and sought a new alliance with the papal establishment in Rome.

The Age of Excommunication of Monarchs

In the eleventh century began the age of intense disputes between the papal establishment in Rome and the monarchies of Christendom. The Popes started excommunicating the monarchs to force them to obey the tenets of religion and the papal directives on political issues.  

Several major figures of the eleventh century were excommunicated by the Popes: Henry IV of Germany (excommunicated by Pope Alexander II), Philip I of France (excommunicated by Pope Urban II), King Harold of England (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII), Alexios I Komnenos of the Byzantine Empire (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII), the Norman Duke Robert Guiscard (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII). When the monarchs made the appropriate conciliatory gestures, the Popes allowed them to return to the communion but when another dispute emerged, the monarchs were excommunicated again. This became a regular feature of Christendom in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire.

Towards the end of the eleventh century, the Popes realized that the threat of excommunication was not a sufficient deterrence for the monarchs. They thought that a papal army could be used to subdue the recalcitrant monarchs. But how to create a papal army? Some popes believed that the crusades could be used to create papal armies. In principle, the crusaders owed allegiance to the papal authority. But in practice, the crusaders obeyed the monarchs. To drive a wedge between the crusaders and the monarchs, the popes started calling for crusades against the excommunicated monarchs.

Alexios I Komnenos and the First Crusade

Alexios I Komnenos had not attained the throne of the Byzantine Empire through the legitimate method of inheritance. He had seized the throne in a military coup in 1081. He was appointed as a general by Emperor Michael VII Doukas 1071. Since Alexios had served with distinction in campaigns against the Seljuk Turks, Nikephoros III Botaneiates, the next Emperor who took power in 1078, retained him as a general.

In 1081, Alexios was entrusted with a significant military to counter the Norman threat, but he used this military to besiege Constantinople. On 1 April 1081, Alexios and his men broke through the walls of Constantinople and sacked the city. Botaneiates was forced to abdicate and retire into a monastery where he spent the rest of his life as a monk.

Alexios became the emperor but a significant part of the Byzantine political establishment despised him. They viewed him as a traitor who had usurped the throne through a coup. During his reign, Alexios was battling external threats from the Seljuk Turks and other Islamic forces and internal threats from his enemies in Constantinople. He tried to straighten his grip on power by promoting family members to key positions.

By the 1090s, his position in Constantinople had become precarious. He could not be sure of the loyalties of even his family members. Since he could trust no one in his kingdom, he had to look westwards to save his throne. In 1095, he sent his envoys to Pope Urban II to plead for military assistance.

If Alexios needed military assistance then why did he choose to plead before the Pope, the leader of a religious institution that does not maintain a military. Alexios had connections with the monarchies of Western Europe. He could have asked for military assistance from them. But he didn’t. 

Alexios did not want a real military from Western Europe to march into the Levant. He knew that if he allowed the European monarchs to march into the Levant with their military, then his days as emperor would be numbered. Once the European monarchs became aware of the factionalism in Byzantine politics and his weak position, they would be tempted to usurp his throne. He thought that the Pope’s crusaders would pose less threat to his regime than with the militaries owned by the European monarchs.

In response to Alexios’s plea for assistance, Pope Urban II gave a call for a crusade for freeing the Holy Land. The ostensible purpose of the First Crusade was to free the Holy Land; the real purpose was to save Alexios’s throne from his rivals in Constantinople.

The Consequence of Richard Lionheart’s Death: Magna Carta

The unexpected consequence of the sudden death of Richard Lionheart, the hero of the Third Crusade, in April 1199, due to an arrow injury that he received while trying to suppress a revolt at the castle of Châlus-Chabrol, in southwestern France, was the promulgation of the Magna Carta in England. Richard was a courageous, jealous, and ruthless monarch. He had a traditionalist view of the institution of monarchy. He was convinced that he possessed the divine right to rule. The nobles of England would have found it impossible to coerce him into accepting the Magna Carta. He would have viewed the nobles who dared to present the Magna Carta before him as traitors and rebels who deserved to be executed.

John Lackland (he was nicknamed Lackland because, being the youngest son of King Henry II, he lacked significant lands to inherit) became the King of England after Richard’s death. He was unpopular with his subjects who viewed him as a coward because he had not participated in the Third Crusade, and as a traitor because when Richard was fighting the forces of Sultan Saladin in the Third  Crusade, John tried to usurp the throne of England. Richard’s contemptuous reflection on John’s treachery is preserved in the account of Roger of Howden, the twelfth century English diplomat and chronicler: “My brother John is not a man to conquer a land if there is someone to resist him with even a meagre degree of force.” If Richard had not died in 1199, it is likely that he would have ordered the execution of John for betraying him.

The historical accounts of that period are critical of John. One source, identified as the Anonymous of Bethune, writes: “[John] was a bad man, more cruel than all others; he lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could, he told lies rather than the truth.” In the chronicles of two thirteenth century monks at St Albans Abbey, Roger of Wendover and his successor Matthew Paris, John is presented as a cruel Godless tyrant. They allege that John had sent messages to the Emir of Morocco offering to convert his Kingdom to Islam. Paris concludes his assessment of King John with this verse:  “England is still fouled by the stink of John; the foulness of Hell is defiled by John’s foulness.”

John accepted the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215. The monarchs of Europe were horrified by the Magna Carta, and so was the papacy at Rome. Pope Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta but that led to a civil war in England, the First Barons’ War ((1215–1217). John was defeated in the civil war, and he died in 1216. Thus, the Angevin Empire, founded by the father of Richard Lionheart and John Lackland, King Henry II in 1154, came to an end.

Erich Hoffer: On the Elites

“But the elites are finally catching up with us. We can hear the swish of leather as saddles are heaved on our backs. The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.” ~ Eric Hoffer in “The Young and The Middle Aged" (1970). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the elites did catch up with us. The power grab by the elites in the name of a strange pandemic will not have a happy ending. The unexpected consequences of this power grab are now starting to reveal themselves. How devastating will be the tsunami of consequences which the elites have failed to anticipate?

The Consequences of Constantine’s Conversion

Persia was a rival of the Roman Empire since the third century BC. When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 AD, the Persians started regarding Christianity as a Roman religion. While Constantine had not made Christianity a state religion, his personal ambition was to be the protector of all Christians, including those who were living outside the borders of the Roman Empire. He adopted a strident attitude towards Persia, which was then being ruled by the Sasanian dynasty (224-651 AD) who were Zoroastrian. Zoroastrianism was deeply rooted in Persia, having arrived in the country in the second millennium BC.

In the final years of his life, Constantine was contemplating a military campaign against Persia. In a letter to Persian Emperor Shapur II, Constantine said that he was delighted to know that Persia was home to a significant number of Christians whose faith was like his own and that he would advise Shapur II to treat his Christian subjects well. Constantine’s letter sounded like a threat. He was eliding the promotion of Rome’s geopolitical interests with that of his new Christian faith. Shapur II was incensed by Constantine’s claim that he was the protector of Persian Christians. 

There was no cause for Constantine to believe that the Christians were being mistreated in Persia. While Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Persia, other religions were not facing persecution in the country. Moreover, there were too few Christians in Persia in that time for the Persian regime to take note of their existence. The Romans and the Persians had been fighting wars for more than six centuries. The Romans had contempt for Zoroastrianism, and the Persians were contemptuous of Roman paganism. But their wars were over geopolitical issues and not religious differences. In 297 AD, Narseh of Persia and Diocletian of Rome had signed a treaty (Peace of Nisibis) which led to a period of peace between the two empires.

Before he could march his troops into Persia, Constantine fell ill and died in 337 AD. In his letter to Shapur II, he had already created a convincing casus belli against the Persians. It is Shapur II who broke the peace treaty of 297 AD by moving into Roman Mesopotamia. The two empires became embroiled in a series of wars (337–350 AD and 358-363 AD). The Persians blamed Constantine’s conversion to Christianity for the conflict, and they started viewing the Christians living in their land as the secret supporters of Rome. Shapur II and his successors began a wave of persecutions which made martyrs of several Christians.

Blindsided by their obsession with destroying each other, the Romans and the Persians failed to act against the barbarian tribes: Goths, Alans, Huns, Vandals, Suebi, and the Turks. By the fifth century, some of these tribes had become a serious threat to Rome and Persia. Rome was conquered by the Visigoths in the fifth century. Persia was destabilized and economically ruined by the barbarians. But the Persian Empire survived till the seventh century, when a new force arose: Islam. The Islamic groups toppled the Sasanian dynasty and stamped out Zoroastrianism from Persia. By the eighth century, Islam had conquered a large part of the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia, and Southwestern Europe. 

Constantine’s conversion was good for Christianity in the West, but it proved to be a disaster for Christianity and Zoroastrianism in the East. According to a 2011 census, there are 25,000 Zoroastrians living in modern day Persia (Iran)—in Constantine’s time, ninety-seven percent of Persia was Zoroastrian.

Silk, Sesterces, and Sin: How Fashion Became a Political Issue in Rome

Silk from China began entering the Roman Empire as early as the third century BC, moving along vast trade networks that later came to be known as the Silk Routes. By the early imperial period, silk garments had become coveted symbols of luxury among Rome’s elite. Yet this fascination with an exotic fabric provoked deep moral unease among Rome’s traditionalists, who viewed silk not merely as a fashion trend but as a threat to social order and virtue.

Among the earliest and most vocal critics was Seneca the Elder, who regarded silk clothing as scarcely deserving the name of garments at all. In his view, silk failed in the most basic function of dress: it neither concealed the body nor preserved modesty. He argued that the very foundations of Roman morality were being eroded by fabrics so thin that they revealed the contours of the female form, leaving little to imagination and even less to decorum. What troubled Seneca was not only the visibility of the body, but the symbolic inversion of Roman values—discipline, restraint, and austerity—by a material associated with luxury and excess.

In Declamations (Volume One), Seneca expressed his indignation with biting clarity:
“I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body.” The passage reveals how silk was framed not simply as immodest, but as socially corrosive, blurring boundaries between public and private, husband and stranger.

Moral anxiety was accompanied by economic concern. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder lamented the enormous sums flowing eastward to satisfy Roman appetites for silk. He complained that the empire’s wealth was being siphoned off so that “the Roman lady might shimmer in public,” estimating that as much as 100 million sesterces were lost annually on silk imports. For Pliny, silk was emblematic of a broader imbalance: Rome’s military and political power contrasted sharply with its dependence on foreign luxuries.

The Roman political establishment periodically attempted to curb this perceived decadence. Emperor Aurelian, according to later sources, famously refused to allow his wife to purchase a mantle of Tyrian purple silk, citing its exorbitant cost. Sumptuary laws were also enacted to restrict or ban men from wearing silk altogether. Such garments were branded effeminate and incompatible with Rome’s martial ethos, which prized toughness, simplicity, and visible masculinity.

Taken together, these reactions reveal how a single material could unsettle an empire. Silk was not merely a fabric imported from distant China; it became a lightning rod for Roman fears about moral decline, economic leakage, and the softening of a society built on conquest and discipline.

Caesar and Constantine: Movement of Capital City to the East

If Julius Caesar was not assassinated in 44 BC, he would have moved the Roman Empire’s seat of Imperial Power out of Rome. Caesar believed that the seat of Imperial Power should be based in a region from where it was possible to provide stronger governance to the lands where the best interests of Rome lay. He had in mind two places: Alexandria and the site of Ancient Troy in Asia Minor. The seat of Imperial Power was ultimately moved by Constantine in 324 AD to Constantinople, strategically located at the Bosphorus strait. From Constantinople, the Roman government could dominate both Europe and Asia.

The Eastward March of Alexander and Octavian

When Alexander became the King of Macedonia in 336 BC, he had no doubt in which direction he had to march his military for gaining glory: East. He did not think of marching into Western Europe. East was where all the fabulous cities were located. East was where he would go. 

Tutored by Aristotle and other important teachers of Macedonia and Athens, Alexander knew about Herodotus’s glowing account of the wealth and splendor of Persia, and the grandeur of Egypt, which was conquered by the Persians in the 6th century BC. He knew about plays like The Bacchae (by Euripides), in which Dionysus says: “I have come to Greece from the fabulously wealthy East.” According to Dionysus, the lands of the East were dancing with the divine long before the Greeks. 

Alexander knew about the reports of the travelers, sailors, traders, and military adventurers in which the fabulous treasures and culture of the East is described. 

The “march eastwards” theme can be seen in the empire which inherited the legacy of Alexander and his general Seleucus I Nicator: Rome. The Romans did not become an empire when they established their control over much of Europe (which the Romans regarded as the land of barbarians) but when they turned their focus on Eastern Mediterranean, and under Emperor Augustus managed to conquer the great empire in the east, Egypt. 

Cleopatra made a miscalculation when she got involved in a Roman civil war and decided to support the faction led by Mark Antony. When Antony’s forces were routed in the Battle of Actium in 30 BC, Augustus found the opportunity to bring his Roman troops to Egypt. Despite the fall of Mark Antony, Cleopatra had enough military strength to cause serious damage to the Roman forces. But she played a series of bad political moves and was outfoxed by Augustus. 

Cleopatra committed suicide and the Romans became the masters of Egypt. Augustus had arrived in Egypt as a Roman general; he left as a Roman Emperor.

Our Apocalyptic Media

Reading a newspaper is like being waterboarded by a stream of apocalyptic water (propaganda masquerading as news). Here’s Michael Crichton’s take on the mainstream media: “The media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is.”

Napoleon and the Making of Modern Egypt

After the fall of Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty in the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultanate became the masters of Egypt. The Mamluks were overthrown by the Ottomans in the Ottoman–Mamluk war of 1516 and 1517. But the victorious Ottomans retained the Mamluks as an Egyptian ruling class. The Mamluks were allowed to rule Egypt as the vassals of the Ottomans. 

When Napoleon attacked Egypt in 1798, the country was out of direct control of the Ottomans and was being dominated by the local Mamluk elite. In the Battle of the Pyramids, fought on 21 July 1798, Napoleon’s French forces decisively defeated the Mamluk cavalry. The battle was over in an hour, with the French suffering just 300 casualties while inflicting more than 6000 casualties on the Mamluk cavalry. Mamluk power was finished in Egypt. The Mamluk survivors moved into Syria, leaving Egypt in the hands of Napoleon who, three days later, triumphantly marched his troops into Cairo.

With his quick victory in Egypt, Napoleon had created the impression in Western Europe that he would achieve what all the crusades of the past had failed to achieve. But ten days later, the British Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson shattered Napoleon’s dream of founding a French Empire in North Africa and the Middle East. In the Battle of the Nile, between 1st and 3rd of August 1798, Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s navy at Aboukir Bay on the Mediterranean coast. With most of his ships destroyed, Napoleon was cut off from France and stuck in Egypt with his 35,000 troops. He remained in Cairo for three years, till 1801. 

Napoleon’s three year stay in Cairo wrought profound, long-term consequences for Egypt. He had not arrived in Egypt to merely conquer and loot—he believed that it was his destiny to liberate, reform, and bring modern ideas to the backward nations of the world. He had brought with him a team of more than 160 scholars. In three years, he gave Egypt the kind of reforms that this country had not seen for several centuries. He turned the traditional Egyptian society on its head. 

Egypt got a postal service. In Cairo and other urban areas street lighting and sanitation was created. A modern mint was established. A French trading company came up. There was creation of plague hospitals, and printing presses with typescript for French, Greek, and Arabic. Slavery was abolished. The dhimmi system was abolished, and the Ottoman and Mamluk social hierarchy came to an end. Though the Egyptian elite remained unconvinced of Napoleon’s intentions, many of his reforms worked so well that they were not abolished after he left the country. 

It can be argued that Napoleon led to the rise of Egyptian nationalism through his support of Egyptian scholarship. He encouraged the study of Egyptian culture before the time of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire. He funded several scholarly works on ancient Egypt. This led to the rise of the new discipline of Egyptology. In July 1799, a young engineering officer, Pierre-François-Xavier Bouchard, who had arrived in Egypt with Napoleon, discovered the Rosetta Stone, which played a significant role in the deciphering of ancient Egyptian language.

Genghis Khan: The Excellent, Noble King

Genghis Khan was viewed as an “excellent, noble king” before the onset of the Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century), when the Western historians started presenting him as a “brutal pagan.” But the post-Enlightenment Western historians were wrong about Genghis Khans and his Mongols. The Mongols were not savages. They did not cause death and destruction purposelessly. They had a plan to build a great empire, and they were successful. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous empire in history. The Mongols usually killed the ruling classes in the places that they conquered in order to subdue the local population—all empires of the Middle Ages (and even the modern age) can be accused of using such strategies. 

In his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford offers a different perspective on Genghis Khan. Weatherford argues that it is a mistake to see Genghis Khan as a savage and sadistic warlord who caused death and devastation wherever he went. He attributes several aspects of the Renaissance to Genghis Khan, such as the spread of paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, paintings, and musical instruments such as the violin. He says that Genghis Khan was religiously tolerant and deeply interested in learning about the moral philosophy of other religions. He used to consult Buddhist monks, Christian missionaries (Nestorian and Catholics), Islamic preachers, and Taoist monks. In Mongol culture men and women had equal rights. There are several instances of women acquiring powerful positions in Mongol politics. Weatherford suggests that the Mongol Empire was an inspiration for the Age of Discovery in Europe. 

Here’s an excerpt from Weatherford’s book: “The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.”

Galileo and The Medici

The Medici family played an important role in Galileo’s life. Galileo was the son of a poor descendent of a Florentine noble family. He wanted to become a painter but his father felt that painting was not a worthy profession for a man of noble birth. So Galileo studied medicine. He began his career in 1589 as a teacher of mathematics in the University of Pisa. His colleagues were unable to bear his sarcasm and independence, and they made it clear to him that if he decided to resign, they would gladly accept his resignation. 

In 1592, Galileo moved to the University of Padua where he taught geometry, mechanics, and astronomy for eighteen years. Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had once been Galileo’s student, invited him to Florence where he could do his studies and experiments in a rich environment without having to worry about the interference from his detractors. Galileo accepted the offer and he spent the final years of his life under the protection of the Medici. Cosimo gave Galileo the title of court mathematician. This position brought Galileo the freedom to present his radical ideas in astronomy and mathematics. He made a powerful case to support the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. 

In his 1610 book Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo honored his Medici benefactors by naming the four moons of Jupiter, which he had discovered through his telescope, Medicea Sidera (Medicean stars), in reference to Cosimo and his three brothers.

The Ottoman-Safavid Wars

In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans and the Safavids had an apocalyptic view of the conflict between them—each power was convinced that the religious truth was on its side and that the other side was indulging in heresy and had to be annihilated. Both sides wanted to claim the religious leadership of the Islamic world. Safavid Iran arose in the early sixteenth century after the fall of the Timurid Empire, which was founded by Tamerlane. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, contributed to the rise of the Safavid dynasty by his victories over Uzun Hasan, one of the descendants of Tamerlane. With the Timurid Empire gone, the Safavids had the space to grow their empire. 

The Safavids wanted Shiaism to be recognized as the fifth school of Islam, but that was not acceptable to the Sunni Ottomans. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottomans and the Safavids fought several wars over religious reasons, and over the control of the South Caucasus and Mesopotamia. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East today is to some extent influenced by the conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids.

In 1514, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I issued a fatwa in the name of Sunni Islam against Shia Iran, then ruled by Shah Ismail. Selim transformed his war against Iran into a Holy War by declaring that the Safavids were heretics and must be annihilated. As he marched through the cities in Anatolia, his forces beheaded every Shiite between the age of seven and seventy. This led to the greatest massacre in Ottoman history. The forces of Shah Ismail fought bravely but Selim’s forces had the upper hand in the battle. The Safavids survived the defeat by moving their capital to Qazvin in 1555 and then from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1598—this ensured that the Safavid ruling elite was beyond the reach of the Ottoman forces. The Safavids adopted the strategy of continuous guerrilla warfare which was immensely damaging to the Ottoman economy. 

In 1548, Suleiman the Magnificent launched a campaign against Iran. His army laid waste to large parts of Persia and conquered most of modern Iraq, including the city of Baghdad, the historic seat of the Abbasid caliphate, which was of religious importance to the Shi'ites. In 1555, Suleiman the Magnificent and Shah Tahmasp, the Iranian Emperor, negotiated the Treaty of Amasya to draw a border between their empires and end their conflict. But in 1577, the Ottoman sultan Murad III discarded the treaty. He was determined to destroy the Safavids. His ambition condemned the two empires for fifty years of bloodshed. Between 1578 and 1639, the Ottomans and the Safavids fought three wars. For a  brief period, 1588–1629, Baghdad came under direct Safavid rule. 

In 1638, Murad IV took the leadership of the Ottoman military and he captured Revan and Tabriz from the Safavids. In 1638, he captured Baghdad after a siege of forty days. On 17 May 1639, both sides signed the Treaty of Zuhab which settled the Ottoman–Persian frontier, with Iraq ceded to the Ottomans. The Safavid Empire went into decline towards the end of the seventeenth century, and the Ottomans took advantage of their problems to usurp several territories in Georgia, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Armenia. But in the eighteenth century there was the rise of Nadir Shah who deposed the last members of the Safavid dynasty and became a Shah himself. During the Ottoman–Persian War of 1730–1735, Nadir Shah forced the Ottomans to accept Persian hegemony over the Caucasus.

Weakened by the unending conflict with the Safavids and other powerful forces in the Middle East, the Ottomans could not defend their lengthy northern border in Europe which they shared with the Habsburg empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Orthodox Russia. They were doomed after the eighteenth century (perhaps from the middle of the seventeenth century). It is surprising that they continued to be a geopolitical power in the twentieth century and it took a world-historical event like the First World War to break apart their empire.

Civilization is a Children’s Project

The average life expectancy four thousand years ago was twenty-five years. Before that it was even less. This implies that the world we live in is the creation of young adults (many of them were children by modern standards). 

Mankind’s achievements in the prehistoric age—from the invention of wheel, to the discovery of agriculture, domestication of cattle, development of languages, rise of the world’s first primitive religions, mythologies, philosophies, and political systems—was the outcome of the labor and enterprise of people who would be of ten to thirty-five years. A few people in the prehistoric age would live to the age of fifty or even ninety, but the lifecycle of most would plateau at thirty-five. 

In the prehistoric period, which encompasses 99 percent of human existence on this planet, the young adults were the driving force of civilization. 

In the modern age, the situation has changed. In the last three hundred years, there has been a rise in average life expectancy—this has ensured that the forces of civilization are in the hands of older people. The average age in Japan is currently forty-eight years; in the USA it is thirty-eight; in Germany it is forty-five; in the UK it is forty. But when Japan, the USA, Germany, and the UK were in a high-growth phase, their average age was much lower.

The young adults are often the best barbarians. The older generations are often the best utopians. History tells us that the barbarians are often the creators of new civilizations, whereas the utopians are often the destroyers of old civilizations.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement to Divide the Ottoman Empire

After capturing power in Russia, the Bolshevik government led by Lenin and Trotsky went to extraordinary lengths to discredit the policies of the deposed government of Tsar Nicholas II. Trotsky, then People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, published dirty secrets of the Tsar’s regime in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. In late November 1917, he published documents related to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Russia, England, France, and Italy to partition the territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The agreement signed on May 16, 1916, was based on the premise that these four nations would defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.  

The Sykes-Picot Agreement stipulated that the Ottoman territory outside the Arabian Peninsula would be divided along the Sykes-Picot line into areas of British and French dominance. Britain would get the areas where today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq are located—they would get the ports of Haifa and Acre to enable them to have direct access to the Mediterranean. The areas where southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are located today was to be France’s share. Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople (which was of great importance to the Orthodox Tsarist regime for religious and historical reasons) and the Turkish Straits. Italy was to receive southern Anatolia.  

Under the secret Constantinople Agreement (also known as the Straits Agreement), ratified by Russia, England, and France in 1915, the territories of Constantinople and the Dardanelles had already been promised to Russia in the event of their victory in the First World War. The leaking of the Sykes-Picot Agreement caused a major political scandal in Europe, Asia, and the USA.

The Sick Man of Europe

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia coined the phrase the “sick man of Europe” to define the Ottoman Empire. He used this phrase in a series of confidential letters, written in 1853 to the British ambassador Sir George Hamilton Seymour. 

Nicholas I was the first world leader to realize that the Ottoman Empire had become ossified and weak. He asserted in his letters that the Ottomans do not possess the military capability to defend their vast territory and economic interests. He predicted that the fall of the Ottomans was imminent. He invited the British to join his government in the exercise of drawing plans for dividing the Ottoman territory among the traditional European powers and the emerging powers in the Middle East.

The British Establishment of that time was taken by surprise by the Tsar’s view. They, like the French and other West European powers, believed that the Ottomans were a powerful empire and, notwithstanding the few military defeats that they had suffered in the last two centuries, they would continue to exist forever.

The Russo-Ottoman Wars of the Eighteenth Century

During the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, Catherine the Great, Tsarina of Russia, concocted a plan for driving the Ottomans out of the territory held by the former Byzantine Empire and placing her grandson Constantine on the imperial throne of Constantinople. 

More than three centuries after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans were defending themselves against another orthodox Christian power: Tsarist Russia. The Russian forces were largely victorious in the war and they were in a position to annex Ottoman territory in Europe and the Middle East. But the complexities of European politics of that time were such that the West European powers feared that the balance of power in Europe could tilt permanently in Russia’s favor if they allowed the Russians to dominate a significant part of Ottoman territory. Austria and other West European states intervened diplomatically to place a limit on the territorial gains that the Russians could expect from their victory.

The Ottomans and the Russians signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. Russia returned the territories of Wallachia and Moldavia to the Ottomans. Catherine negotiated and got the guardianship of the Orthodox Christian holy sites and the right to protect Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire—this provision ensured that the Russians had a ready-made excuse to interfere in Ottoman territory whenever they thought that the time was ripe. A second war between the Russian and Ottoman empires was inevitable.  

In 1783, Russia annexed Crimea and Kabardia. In May and June 1787, Catherine and her new ally, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, held a triumphal procession in New Russia and the annexed Crimea. The Ottomans saw the triumphal procession as a violation of their territory—they ordered the Russians to evacuate Crimea. In August 1787, the Ottomans declared a war on Russia with the aim of reversing the losses of the earlier Russo-Turkish war. While this war was being fought, the Ottomans became involved in another war with Austria in 1788. Both wars were fought concomitantly till 1792. Caught between two wars, the Ottoman situation became militarily hopeless. Their logistics collapsed, and they were forced to negotiate.

The Treaty of Jassy, signed between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1792, established Russian dominance in the Black Sea region. The Ottoman aim of reclaiming Crimea had failed. If the West European powers and the Orthodox Russian Empire had not been distracted by the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, the fate of the Ottoman Empire could have been much worse during the second Russo-Turkish War.

Ottomans, Seljuks, and their Land of the Rum

When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he adopted the title Qayser-i Rum (Caesar of the Roman Empire), and he gave the name “Rumelia” (land of the Romans) to the Ottoman Empire’s possessions in southeastern Europe (the Balkans). The Seljuk dynasty, which can be seen as a geopolitical predecessor of the Ottomans in the Levant, used the title “land of the Rûm" (land of the Romans) to refer to Anatolia (much of modern-day Turkey), which they had conquered after defeating the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

The Qayser-i Rum: The Caesar of the Roman Empire

The Ottomans had been trying to conquer the Byzantine Empire since the early 14th century. Osman Ghazi had laid a siege to Nicaea in 1301. He defeated the Byzantine army, but failed to capture Nicaea because of the arrival of a mercenary army of 8000 troops led by Roger de Flor. Osman was succeeded by his son Orhan in 1324. Orhan captured several cities belonging to the Byzantines in northwest Turkey. He took advantage of the civil war, which followed the death of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos in 1341, and captured the peninsula of Gallipoli, which he fortified to gain control of Dardanelles. Orhan’s son Murad I became the sultan in 1362 and continued to pursue the policy of expanding the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. 

When Murad I was killed in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the sultanate passed into the hands of his son Bayezid I Yildirim, who took the title Sultan-i Rum (Rum being an old oriental name for the Roman Empire). Bayezid had his brothers strangled to prevent any disputes regarding his succession. He blamed the death of his father to Byzantine and Serbian treachery, and was determined to conquer Constantinople. In 1394, he laid siege to Constantinople and ordered the Byzantine emperor to surrender. The Byzantines pleaded before Pope Boniface IX, who called a crusade to vanquish the Ottoman forces. Sigismund of Luxembourg, the King of Hungary, who later became the Holy Roman Emperor, and knights from France, Germany, Venice, and Genoa, answered the pope’s call. Bayezid defeated the crusader forces in the Battle of Nicopolis, before bringing back his army to once again besiege Constantinople. 

Bayezid's heavy artillery did not cause much damage to the ancient wall which protected Constantinople. But he would have found a way to enter the city, if he had not been forced to lift the seize in 1402 due to the appearance of the army of Tamerlane, the Prince of Destruction, who had fought several wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe and had the reputation of never being defeated. 

Tamerlane and Bayezid had been insulting each other in letters for some time. In one of his letters, Tamerlane wrote: “Believe me, you are but pismire ant: don't seek to fight the elephants for they'll crush you under their feet. Shall a petty prince such as you are contend with us? But your rodomontades (braggadocio) are not extraordinary; for a Turcoman never spake with judgement. If you don't follow our counsels you will regret it.” Tamerlane’s army marched into Syria in 1400, killing most of the inhabitants of Aleppo and Damascus. They sacked Baghdad in 1401, slaughtering 20,000 people, and on July 20, 1402, they marched into Anatolia. In the war that followed, Bayezid was defeated and captured. He died in Tamerlane’s prison. 

With Bayezid death, there was a period of respite for the Byzantine Empire since the Ottomans became entangled in a succession related civil war. Four of Bayezid's sons, Süleyman Çelebi, İsa Çelebi, Mehmed Çelebi, and Musa Çelebi, were the main contenders for the throne. Mehmed Çelebi was victorious. At his coronation in 1413, he took the name Mehmed I. When Mehmed I died in 1421, the power went to his son Murad II who began his reign by besieging Constantinople. But the Byzantines managed to coerce Murad’s younger brother Küçük Mustafa, who was only thirteen years old, to rebel against the sultan and besiege Bursa. Murad was forced to abandon the siege of Constantinople and rush to Bursa to deal with his rebellious brother. He defeated Mustafa’s army and executed him. 

In 1451, Murad II was succeeded by his son Mehmed II who achieved the dream of his ancestors by conquering Constantinople in 1453. After the conquest, Mehmed II took the title, Qayser-i Rum (the Caesar of the Roman Empire). According to some historical accounts, Mehmed II used to say: “I have conquered New Rome. Now it is time to conquer Old Rome.”

The Split in the Orthodox World

In the fourteenth century, the Orthodox Russians realized that the Byzantine Empire had surrendered itself to not just papal authority in Rome but also the Ottoman sultans. They accused the Byzantine Emperors of abdicating their leadership of the Orthodox world by accepting papal and Ottoman overlordship. 

The Byzantine Empire of Nicaea had recaptured Constantinople in 1261, but their military power was inadequate for settling the territorial disputes in which they were involved in the Middle East and southeastern Europe. Their weakness forced them to solicit military support from the Ottoman sultans. The Ottomans arrived in Europe on the invitation of the Byzantines—in the Byzantine civil war between 1341 and 1347, one of the Byzantine factions used the support of Orhan Ghazi, the Ottoman Sultan, to gain an upper hand in southeastern Europe. Once the Ottomans had got a taste of European politics and warfare, they decided to expand into Europe. In 1354, they captured Gallipoli, and in 1361, they won Adrianople in the Balkans. 

In 1274, Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, the founder of the dynasty that would rule the Byzantine Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, pleaded before the Latin Church for military assistance. In 1366, John V Palaiologos visited the Hungarian Kingdom and pleaded for help. The Hungarian King agreed to help on one condition—John V should convert to Catholicism. In October 1369, John V became the first Byzantine Emperor, in seven hundred years, to travel to Rome, where he converted to Catholicism in St Peter's Basilica and acknowledged the pope as the supreme head of the Church. But his acceptance of Catholicism did not hinder John V from accepting the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan Murad I in 1371. In 1376, Murad I helped John V suppress a civil war.

The Russians were appalled by the Byzantine attempts to merge Orthodox Christianity with Catholicism, and they were suspicious of the Ottoman sultans. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Orthodox Christianity was split into Russian and Greek (Byzantine) branches. The Russians claimed that they were the true representatives of Orthodox Christianity and the inheritors of the Roman Empire. The Russian Emperors started viewing Moscow as the third Rome, and they assumed the title of Caesar (Tsar in Russian).

The Twilight of Dwaraka and the Metaphysical Disintegration of a Yuga: Reflections on the Mausala Parva

When the divine retires, even memory becomes myth.

The Mausala Parva, the sixteenth book of the Mahabharata, stands as a somber and haunting coda to an epic shaped by heroism, dharma, and cosmic war. Set thirty-six years after the cataclysm of Kurukshetra, it chronicles not only the demise of Krishna—the divine architect of destiny—but also the unraveling of his clan, the Yadavas, and the inundation of the fabled city of Dwaraka. What unfolds is not merely a historical denouement, but the metaphysical disintegration of a yuga.

The destruction is both literal and allegorical. The mighty Yadava clan, once unparalleled in strength and splendor, is undone by internal strife—a drunken civil war ignited not by foreign invasion or divine wrath, but by ego, pride, and the slow corrosion of prosperity unmoored from restraint. In the Mausala Parva, dharma decays not through external defeat but through internal decay. It is a portrait of entropy in moral and political order.

Krishna’s death is strikingly unceremonious. The Supreme Being, incarnated to restore cosmic balance, meets his end not on a battlefield but in the forest, felled by the arrow of a hunter who mistakes his foot for a deer. His elder brother Balarama, too, withdraws to the forest and dissolves into the ocean, while their father Vasudeva dies grieving the fratricidal war of his sons. The divine exits not with thunder but with silence.

When Arjuna arrives in Dwaraka, he finds not a city, but a requiem. The mighty kingdom—built on the sea, shimmering with opulence, protected by Krishna’s presence—has already met its fate. Nature, once held at bay by divine will, has reclaimed its due. In a passage as elegiac as it is vivid, Arjuna recounts the final submergence:

“The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. I saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city. Dwaraka was just a name; just a memory.”

What is most unsettling in this vision is the swiftness—the erasure of grandeur not by conquest, but by time. The Mausala Parva does not offer dramatic lamentation; rather, it presents an existential stillness, where the silence after destruction is more deafening than the clash of arms.

The end of Krishna’s era marks the end of Dvapara Yuga, the third age of the cosmic cycle, and signals the fading of divine intervention in human affairs. In response, the Pandava brothers—Arjuna, Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva, and Yudhishthira—renounce their crowns and worldly attachments. With Draupadi, they embark on the Mahaprasthanika—the great departure—towards the Himalayas, in pursuit of heaven, in pursuit of liberation.

The Mausala Parva is thus not merely a chronicle of destruction—it is a meditation on impermanence. It reminds us that even divine kingdoms dissolve, that dharma is cyclical and mortal, and that all stories, however grand, must make peace with their ending. In the fading of Dwaraka and the vanishing of Krishna, the epic confronts us with the ultimate truth: that what remains, in the end, is not empire or lineage—but memory, myth, and the search for meaning beyond the ruins.

On Richard Lionheart’s Crusade

After mentioning that Richard Lionheart’s life came to a close when he was hit by a stray arrow shot from a rebel castle in France on 26 March 1199, Steven Runciman uses a single sentence to deliver his judgement on Lionheart’s life: “He was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.” (A History of the Crusades III: The Kingdom of Acre; Chapter III, “Coeur-de-Lion”)

Lionheart was not fully committed to the war for the Holy Land—his first priority was to safeguard the interests of his empire in England and France. He arrived in Acre on 8 June 1191 and departed for Europe on 9 October 1192. During his sixteen months that he spent in the Levant, Lionheart acted like a shrewd political operator and a pragmatic military commander. He carried out long negotiations with Emperor Saladin even as they were trying to defeat each other in a series of battles. He and Saladin delighted in being respectful and generous to each other. Lionheart realized that with the kind of military commitment that Western Europe could make in the Levant, Saladin and other oriental forces could not be defeated. 

After a siege that lasted for about two years (started by King Guy in August 1189), the crusaders conquered Acre on 12 July 1191. Lionheart played a decisive role in the success at Acre. In September 1191, Lionheart defeated Saladin in a battle north of Arsuf. Towards the end of May 1192, the crusaders had taken all the coastal areas that they had lost to Saladin. In January 1192, and then for the second time in June 1192, the crusaders were just ten to twelve miles from Jerusalem, which was largely undefended since most of Saladin’s forces were committed to other parts of the battlefield. On both occasions, Lionheart refused to besiege Jerusalem. He believed that even if the crusaders managed to conquer Jerusalem, they would not be able to hold it while Saladin was the ruler of Egypt and Syria. 

Lionheart’s struggle to make it back to England proved to be as perilous as his struggle against Saladin. The ship in which he left Acre was wrecked by a storm near Venice, forcing him to continue his journey overland. To evade his European enemies, he was traveling in disguise, but he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold accused Lionheart of the murder of Conrad of Montferrat and locked him in a castle. On 28 March 1193, Lionheart was handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in a castle in Germany. After the payment of a ransom, Lionheart was released on 4 February 1194. On his release, King Philip of France sent a message to John, Lionheart’s brother: “Look to yourself; the devil is loose"

A View of the Mahabharata’s Lunar Dynasty

The Mahabharata is the history of the Chandravansha (the Lunar dynasty), which originated with Soma, the Moon God. The son of Soma was Chandra. Chandra had a son called Pururava who ruled the kingdom of Prayaga, whose capital was located at Pratisthana. Pururava’s eldest son Āyu had a son called Nahusha. Nahusha married Viraja and they had six or seven sons. The second son was Yayati. According to another legend, Nahusha married Ashokasundari, the daughter of Shiva and Parvati, and she gave birth to Yayati and a hundred daughters. 

Yayati had five sons: Yadu and Turvasu, through his first wife Devayani; Druhyu, Anu and Puru, through his second wife Sharmishtha. When Yayati became old, he continued to lust for the pleasures of a youthful life. He summoned his five sons and asked them to temporarily loan him their youth. Four of his sons refused. They were cursed by Yayati that they would never be kings—this curse impacted the Yadava dynasty too, since one of Yayati’s five sons was Yadu. Puru, Yayati’s youngest son, agreed to loan his youth to his father. After enjoying the pleasures of the senses for a thousand years, Yayati returned to Puru the youth that he had borrowed from him, and made him the king. The lunar dynasty goes forward with Puru. 

Puru’s son Duhshanta married Shakuntala and they had a son called Bharata (the founder of the empire called Bharatavarsha). Bharata had a grandson called Kuru, whose descendent Pratipa had a son called Shantanu. Shantanu married Satyavati and they had two sons: Chitrangada and Vichitravirya. Krishna Dvaipayana (Veda Vyasa) had been born through a union between Sage Parashara and Satyavati. A union between Shantanu and Ganga had resulted in the birth of the powerful warrior Bhishma. Krishna Dvaipayana fathered Dhristarashtra on Vichitravirya’s first wife Ambika, and Pandu on Vichitravirya’s second wife Ambalika. He also fathered a son called Vidura on Vichitravirya’s maid. 

The hundred Kourava brothers were the sons of Dhristarashtra, and the five Pandava brothers were the acknowledged sons of Pandu. Since Kuru was the common ancestor of both the Kouravas and the Pandavas—in terms of bloodline, the five Pandava brothers too were Kouravas. Krishna was born in the Yadava branch of the Lunar dynasty.

The Fourth Crusade: The 1204 Sack of Constantinople

The claim that the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 is not the complete truth. The crusaders didn’t sack Constantinople. They engineered a regime change in the Byzantine Empire, at the behest of a powerful faction in Byzantine politics and some Venetian and French nobles. Here’s a brief account of the Fourth Crusade:

Pope Innocent III was elected on 8 January 1198. On 15 August 1198, he launched a new crusade (the fourth one). By the summer of 1200, a sizable crusading army had taken shape. Instead of taking a land route, which experience of the past crusades had shown was fraught with danger, the crusaders decided to take the route that Richard Lionheart and Philip II Augustus had taken during the Third Crusade. They planned to sail across the Mediterranean to Palestine.

The French Barons who were leading the Fourth Crusade entered into an agreement with Enrico Dandolo, the half-blind octogenarian Doge of Venice. Dandolo agreed to build ships for ferrying about forty-thousand crusaders, including the knights and their horses, across the Mediterranean for 85,000 silver marks. Pope Innocent III had exhorted the crusaders to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but without informing the Pope, the French Barons and Dandolo decided that the crusaders would conquer Egypt first. 

The crusaders had to arrive at the Venetian port no later than June 1202, but most of them were late. By August 1202, only eleven thousand men had gathered, and to make matters worse, they didn’t have enough money to pay the shipping charges to the Venetians. The Venetians suggested that they would postpone the payment if the crusaders helped Venice conquer its enemy, the Croatian port town of Zadar. Zadar was under a Christian king, and several crusaders, who thought that they were going to fight for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, were appalled by the idea of attacking a Christian state. But most crusaders went ahead with the new plan. They conquered Zadar for the Venetians in November 1202. 

From Zadar, the crusader ships should have gone to Egypt—that is what the general mass of crusaders had been expecting. But the crusaders found themselves in Constantinople. Who made the decision to navigate the ships towards Constantinople is one of the great mysteries of history. A powerful faction of Byzantine politics certainly had a role to play. 

Alexius Angelus, son of the deposed and blinded Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelus, had reached Europe before the Fourth Crusade departed from Venice. He offered to clear the Fourth Crusade’s entire debt to Venice, and equip the crusaders with enough manpower and funds to ensure the success of their campaign to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, if they reinstated his father on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. He also offered to end the schism between Orthodox Christianity and Latin Christianity. 

A deal must have been struck between some leaders of the Fourth Crusade and Alexius Angelus. This deal must have enjoyed Venetian support, since they controlled the shipping routes and without their cooperation the ships carrying the crusaders could not be diverted to Constantinople. The Venetians were in a position to gain a lot of commercial benefits if the regime change operation in Constantinople was successful. It is possible that the deal had German and French support since Alexius Angelus had meetings with German and French nobility before he arrived at Venice. Who was not part of the deal? Pope Innocent III and many of the crusaders. 

On June 24, 1203, the Fourth Crusade had reached Constantinople. They demanded that Isaac II Angelus and his son Alexius Angelus should be restored to the throne. When Alexius III, who was then the Emperor, refused, the crusaders went on a rampage. In July 1203, Alexius III fled from the city. Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus were proclaimed the joint rulers of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders had accomplished their mission. But now a new problem arose—the two new Emperors were unable to honor the lavish promises that they had made to the crusaders and the Venetians. This led to a rapid deterioration in the popularity of their regime. 

The two Emperors were arrested on 27 January 1204—apparently without the knowledge of the crusaders. Isaac II Angelus died soon after his arrest (perhaps due to poisoning). On 8 February 1204, Alexius III was killed by strangling. Despite the failure of Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus to honor their commitments, the crusaders interpreted the deposition and murder of the two Emperors as a coup. They besieged Constantinople for more than a month. On 12 April 1204, they managed to enter the city. For three days, they rioted, vandalized, and looted, causing significant damage to life and property in Constantinople. 

The two regimes that the Fourth Crusade toppled were Christian: Zadar and the Byzantine Empire. The Fourth Crusade never went to Palestine. The crusaders never marched towards Jerusalem. They stayed in Constantinople and founded a new kingdom to which they gave the name Romania. They first offered the imperial crown to Enrico Dandolo who refused it. Baldwin I was crowned as the first emperor of Romania on 9 May 1204. The surviving members of the Byzantine Empire’s aristocracy founded their own empire in Nicaea, where they awaited for an opportunity to win back the empire that they had lost.

On Viking Wisdom

“Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No land for the lazy wolf. No battle’s won in bed.” ~ A viking saying (Edda of Saemund the Wise, a collection of the sayings of Odin). This viking saying makes sense—a nation that does not awake early to the political realities will lose its land and culture. 

The vikings were not doctrinaires. Their religious and cultural tradition was oral. But they were good political thinkers. There is a lot that can be learned from their history. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, they played a major role in awakening the West from the slumber in which it had fallen after the end of the Western Roman Empire.

Kant: The Spectator of the French Revolution

Kant was a supporter of the idea of a French Revolution before 1789, the year when the French Revolution commenced. He thought that the revolution would lead to the rise of a culture of liberty, science, and reason in Europe. He was shocked when he learned of the massive violence that the revolutionaries were unleashing in France. To his close associates, he used to say with agitation that the revolutionaries were children with weapons who had gone out of control. 

In her book Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt writes: 

“[Kant’s] final position on the French Revolution, an event that played a central role in his old age, when he waited with great impatience every day for the newspapers, was decided by this attitude of the mere spectator, of those "who are not engaged in the game themselves" but only follow it with "wishful, passionate participation," which certainly did not mean, least of all for Kant, that they now wanted to make a revolution; their sym­pathy arose from mere "contemplative pleasure and inactive de­light.”

On The Political Influence Of Books

“Is it this simple to influence the world. If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare." But — this little book must be true to its title.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe in 1844. 

I disagree with Edgar Allan Poe. It is not simple to influence the world. A book can influence the world only if it appears at the right place, at the right time, and is discovered by the right kind of politicians. Marx could become known as the great revolutionary philosopher of the twentieth century because politicians like Lenin and Trotsky decided to use the tenets of Marxism to build a ruthless revolutionary army which went on to overthrow the tsarist regime in Russia. The success of Lenin and Trotsky in overthrowing the Russian monarchy turned Marxism into the twentieth century’s most lethal political weapon.

Without the revolutionary actions of politicians like Lenin and Trotsky, a philosopher like Marx has no power to influence the world.

Religion and Science

It is not possible to refute God and religion by using the methods of science and technology. This is because a belief in God and religion is not the mark of an irrational, uneducated, and naive mind, as the atheists claim. The religious people are often more well-read, rational, philosophical, and brilliant than those who reject religious belief. 

To prove God’s existence, the religious thinkers develop philosophical (theological) theories which are brilliant because they are rationally argued. People believe in God because they are driven by a biological instinct to transcend the material world and find a spiritual explanation for the universe. Some of the best philosophers, scientists, discoverers, and innovators in history were people with a religious bent of mind. The idea that religious people cannot make advancements in science and other intellectual endeavors is atheist propaganda. 

The need for God and theology (religion is more fundamental to human beings than the desire for the marvels of technology.

History Does Not Vindicate The Truth

History is made by the historians, not by the people who participate in the political events in any particular age. You might feel certain that the political truth is on your side, that your cause is just, and that though your cause does not enjoy much support today, history will vindicate your political position. But if the historians of the future are against your type of politics, then you won’t find support in the pages of history—you will be discarded by history just as, in the present, you are being discarded by your contemporaries. History is a view of the past developed by the intellectual elites, who are more interested in currying favor with the political establishment than in describing the facts.

The Most Important Historical Events of Three Centuries

In the nineteenth century, the most important historical event was the defeat of Napoleon—this set the stage for the creation of Pax Britannica (the British Empire became the global hegemonic power). In the twentieth century, the most important historical event was the fall of the British Empire —this century was not about the communist movements (the rise and fall of the Soviet Union) but about anti-imperialism. What will be the most important historical event of the twenty-first century? The USA could fall due to a combination of factors—the collapse of the dollar, soaring inflation, political scandals, civil unrest, and military pressure from its geopolitical adversaries. The end of the USA would mark the end of Western power in the world.

Runciman’s Judgement of the Crusades

Steven Runciman concludes the final volume (Volume 3) of his A History of the Crusades with the following judgement on the two centuries of the crusades: 

“The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself is nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

The Battle of the Somme Versus the Iraq War

The Battle of the Somme (during the First World War), which pitted the troops of the British Empire and the French Third Republic against the German Empire, began on July 1, 1916. On this single day of fighting, the British side suffered 57,470 casualties (worst in British history), out of which 19,240 died. But there were no calls for ending the battle in Britain and France. The battle went on for four months (till November 18, 1916 ), leading to over a million casualties on both sides, and the war continued for another two years. 

The majority of the people in the USA and the UK turned against the Iraq war when about 3000 of their soldiers died. In the twenty-first century, for good or for bad, the West is no longer the ruthless fighting machine that it used to be till the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century Westerners are not willing to die in the name of a “Holy War” or “to save their nation”. Yet they want to be regarded as a superpower—but this is not possible. To be a superpower, you have to be prepared to make super-sacrifices. 

I have never supported the Western military interventions in the Middle East in the last two decades, because I have always known that the West could not win against an old oriental civilization defending its home turf. But the people in the West thought that they could win these wars without suffering any casualties.

Some Troubling Facts

Here are some troubling facts: The liberals don’t stand for liberty; they are control-freaks and totalitarians. The conservatives are unintellectual, weak, and pompous; they are incapable of conserving the economy and culture of their nation. The libertarians are a tiny 100 year old cult led by academics; they hold an idealistic and unworkable view of liberty, and are out of touch with reality. The anarchists (anarcho-libertarians) assert that they stand for a state-less society (whatever that means), but in their eagerness to overthrow the state, they support violent revolutionary groups. The socialists, instead of empowering the working classes, destroy them.

The Keynesian Ponzi Scheme

The FED’s balance sheet has soared to $7.923 trillion. Next week it will cross $8 trillion, and by 2022 it is certain to surpass $10 trillion. Add to this the high balance sheets that the central banks in other nations, especially the democratic ones, are running. We are living in the age of the greatest ponzi scheme in history. When this ponzi scheme goes bust, which will be quite soon, it will hit life on this planet with the force of a giant meteor. The world economy will be wiped out. A depression like condition will prevail for up to thirty years. The Western countries, which have a consumer driven economy, will be the hardest hit. But let’s look at the bright picture: With the annihilation of the world economy, we will finally manage to prove that the Keynesian theory of economics does not work.

Kritovoulos: On the Fall of Constantinople

The Greek scholar Michael Kritovoulos, who was in the service of Ottoman Emperor Sultan Mehmed II when the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, wrote a history of the Ottoman Empire. The book contains an account of the siege and fall of Constantinople. Though he was employed by Mehmed II, Kritovoulos was sympathetic to Byzantine culture and its last emperor Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos. He viewed the fall of Constantinople as an event far more worrisome than the fall of the last Crusader stronghold of Acre in 1291. Here’s an excerpt from Kritovoulos’s elegy over Emperor Palaiologos: 

“The Emperor Constantine himself, as I have said, died fighting. He was wise and moderate in his private life and diligent to the highest degree in prudence and virtue, sagacious as the most highly-trained of men. In political affairs and in matters of government he yielded to no one of the kings before him in preeminence. Quick to perceive his duty, and still more quick to do it, he was eloquent in speech, clever in thought, and very accomplished in talking of public affairs. He was exact in his judgments of the present, as someone has said of Pericles, and usually correct in regard to the future, a splendid worker, who chose to do and to suffer everything for the fatherland and his subjects. Therefore, when he saw with his own eyes the evident danger threatening the City, and was able to save himself, he did not choose to do so, although there were many who begged him to, but preferred to die with his country and his subjects, or rather to die beforehand himself, so that he might not see his country captured and all the inhabitants either cruelly murdered or made captive and ignominiously taken away. For when he saw the enemy pressing in on him and coming into the City through the broken wall, he is stated to have cried aloud this last word: “The city is taken and it is useless for me to live any longer.” So saying he hurled himself into the midst of the enemy and was cut to pieces. He was a splendid man and the guardian of the common good, but unfortunate all through his life and doubly unfortunate at its close.” (Source: Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles Riggs)

Kritovoulos’s book includes an account of the past Ottoman conquests. He saw the crossing of the Hellespont (the capture of Gallipoli) in March 1354, by the troops led by Ottoman Emperor Orhan Ghazi, as a symbolic beginning of the Ottoman expansion into Europe. He uses Herodotus’s terminology to describe Orhan Ghaz’s crossing of the Hellespont, comparing that event with Xerxes’s foray into Ancient Greece. He uses the term “Persians” to describe the Ottoman troops.

Crusaders at the Gates: Why Byzantium Feared the West More Than the East

In the medieval imagination of Christendom, a deep cultural fault line separated East from West—one not merely of geography or liturgy, but of identity itself. The Orthodox Christians of the Middle East and North Africa regarded themselves as the cerebral custodians of true faith, the rightful heirs of the Roman Empire’s intellectual and spiritual legacy. To them, orthodoxy was not only a matter of doctrine but of dignity, continuity, and civilization.

In contrast, the Roman Catholics of Western Europe saw themselves as the brawny instruments of divine will—the militant arm of Christendom entrusted with reclaiming the Holy Land from infidels and heretics. They wore the mantle of crusade with pride, believing that history had summoned them to act where the East had failed. To the Latin West, the Eastern Christians appeared effete, overly speculative, and compromised—guardians of a brittle tradition, more interested in metaphysical subtlety than in moral courage or political action.

The disdain was mutual. Orthodox Christians viewed the Latin crusaders not as saviors but as barbarians in chainmail—crude, avaricious, and indifferent to the delicate structures of Byzantine polity and faith. Anna Komnene, daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and one of the most brilliant chroniclers of her age, captured this tension with clarity and disdain. In her great historical work The Alexiad, she wrote of the approaching Frankish crusaders during the First Crusade:

"Alexios had dreaded their arrival, knowing as he did their uncontrollable passion, their erratic character, and their irresolution, not to mention their greed."

Her words, shaped by hindsight and the wounds left by betrayal and devastation, reflect a broader Byzantine sentiment: the crusaders were not brothers-in-arms but a force of disruption. The Franks, welcomed as allies, often behaved like conquerors.

Despite sharing the same sacred texts, the same Christ, and ostensibly the same faith, the rift between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism proved insurmountable. Their visions of Christian duty, governance, and civilization diverged too deeply. One prized tradition, the other action; one emphasized reasoned faith, the other militant zeal. The schism was not only theological—it was psychological, cultural, and ultimately civilizational.

The legacy of this divide would shape the future of Europe and the Near East for centuries. East and West remained estranged, each convinced of its own orthodoxy and the other's deviation. And so, in the crucible of crusade and empire, the brain and the brawn of Christendom drifted irreversibly apart.

Herodotus The Barbarophile

Herodotus was viewed as a Barbarophile (a lover of barbarians) by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans because in his Histories he had disparaged Greek culture while heaping praise on the non-Greek cultures. The Histories contains a glowing account of the achievements of the Egyptian pharaohs and the grandeur of their kingdom, before their lands fell into the hands of the Persians. The book has lot of good things to say about the Persians too. 

Plutarch, who came almost four centuries after Herodotus, wrote an essay, “On the Malice of Herodotus,” which takes Herodotus to task for vilifying the Greek world while falsely praising non-Greek cultures. He accuses Herodotus of being obsessed with non-Greek cultures and ignoring the achievements of Greek culture. He calls Herodotus a “foreigner-lover,” by which he means “Egyptian-lover” and “Persian-lover,” and a lair. Here’s an excerpt from Plutarch’s essay:

“Hitherto no one has dared to expose him [Herodotus] as a liar. Since his principal victims are the Boeotians and the Corinthians, though he spares no one, I think it is proper that I should now stand up for the cause of my ancestors and the cause of truth and show how dishonest this part of his work is; it would, of course, take many books if one wanted to describe all his other lies and fabrications.”

Along with being a historian, Plutarch served as the priest of Apollo at Delphi. Perhaps his antipathy to Herodotus is a result of Herodotus’s criticism of the role that the oracle played in the Persian Wars. Herodotus had suggested that the Delphic oracle was pro-Persian. He gave the Delphic oracle no credit for the Hellenic victory at Platae. But Plutarch believed that the Delphic oracle told the Hellenes where the battle must be fought, and what Gods and heroes must be propitiated in order to ensure victory.

Technology and Tyranny

In the early days of the digital revolution, it seemed that the proliferation of digital technologies would lead to an improvement in the human condition but the industry fell into the hands of nihilists, communists, racketeers, looters, tyrants, and psychopaths who want to control the world and create a global digital utopia. Perhaps it is the fate of all new technologies to become a tool for imposing a new kind of tyranny. 

In his 1945 essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” George Orwell lamented: 

“We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt…”

What is history?

What is history? The best answer is the despairing line that Macbeth speaks when he hears of Lady Macbeth's death: “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.” Emotional motivations, prejudices, jealousies, and chance events play a far bigger role in history than political, economic, and intellectual considerations. Large patterns and regularities are precisely the kind of things which cannot be found in the procession of historical events. We can learn lessons from history, but these lessons are useless in predicting the future.

Victor Hugo: On the Fate of Napoleon

Victor Hugo’s commentary on the fate of Napoleon (from his novel Les Misérables): 

“Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God. 

“Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before. 

“It was time that this vast man should fall. 

“The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. 

“Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on. 

“He embarrassed God. 

“Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.”

Victor Hugo: The Sound of Revolution

In 1831 Victor Hugo wrote that he was hearing “the dull sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under every kingdom in Europe its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris.” In 1847 the sound grew louder. In 1848 the revolution erupted, beginning in Sicily and spreading to France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. Europe was on fire. In 2021, a dull sound of revolution can be heard once again. For which nations the bells of revolution toll this time—we will soon find out.

The Renaissance Humanists Versus The Arabic Scholars

The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to a large-scale rejection of Arabic scholarship. The humanist scholars of the Renaissance quested for the original texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other ancient masters. Most of these manuscripts were available to the European scholars of this period in texts translated into Latin from the previous Arabic translations. The Renaissance humanists rejected the translations which were based on Arabic texts—they claimed that the Arabic translations were missing the real essence of the ancient masters. 

To make their case against Arabic scholarship, the humanists cited the views of the thirteenth and fourteenth century scholars like Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Francesco Petrarch. For his work on Aristotle, Aquinas had gone beyond the Latin translations of the Arabic translations of Aristotle and relied upon William of Moerbeke's Latin translation from original Greek resources. Bacon had complained about the European hacks who lower the quality of scholarship by translating the old texts from Arabic to Latin. Petrarch, a strong critic of Arab culture, complained that the Arabic translations were clumsy and inaccurate, and he often targeted Averroes for propagating a weak version of Aristotle in Europe.

With more original texts becoming available to the Renaissance humanists, they were able to establish that there were significant style-related and philosophy-related deviations between the teachings of the ancient masters and the Arabic translations.

Aristotle’s View of Persian Culture

In his treatise, The Politics, Aristotle’s focus is on the political structure of the Greek city-states, but in some passages he offers a scathing critique of Persian despotism. Persia in those days was a political rival of the Greek city-states, and Aristotle must have felt obliged to comment negatively on their political system. 

His anti-Persian sentiments might also be related to the torture and murder of his friend Hermeias (an associate of King Philip) by a Persian general. 

Aristotle lambasts Persia as a tyranny which keeps its citizens under surveillance and does not allow them to form private associations. He says that such tyranny is acceptable to the people of Persia because, being barbarians, they are “by natural character more slavish than Greeks and they tolerate despotic rule without resentment.” 

In the final passages of The Politics, Aristotle reflects on the role that climate can exercise on people’s political inclinations. In Greek city-states, he says, climate makes people full of energy and lusting to be free. In Persia, the climate is such that the Persians, though not lacking in brains and skill, become denuded of the courage and will to resist tyranny. 

Aristotle’s view of the impact of climate on the human mind finds a reflection in some of the works of Montesquieu and Voltaire.