The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

The heart of the world now gaped open.

febrile.

The great irony, then, was that although Europe experienced a glorious Golden Age, producing flourishing art and literature and leaps of scientific endeavour, it was forged by violence.

The first four centuries of the first millennium, which saw Christianity explode from a small base in Palestine to sweep through the Mediterranean and across Asia, were a maelstrom of faith wars.

As one who witnessed the carnage that followed put it, Jerusalem was soon filled with dead bodies, corpses piled up “on mounds as big as houses outside the city gates. No one has ever heard of such a slaughter.”2 “If you had been there,” wrote another author a few years later, “your feet would have been stained to the ankles with the blood of the s

It was not for nothing that world war and the worst genocide in history had their origins and execution in Europe; these were the latest chapters in a long-running story of brutality and violence.

Maria-Theresa’s succession in the 1740s provoked outbreaks of fighting from the Americas to the Indian subcontinent that lasted nearly a decade. The result when matters were finally settled in 1748 was that Cap Breton in Canada and Madras in India changed hands between the French and the British.

bibulous,

tetchy