The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
The new arrivals might have admired the idyllic and naive characteristics of the people they encountered, but they were also proud of their instruments of death, which had evolved from centuries of near-incessant fighting against both Muslims and neighbouring Christian kingdoms in Europe.42
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
This was just one atrocity among many. “I saw…cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see,” wrote the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas of his experiences in the earliest days of European settlement, in a horrified report designed to inform those back home of what was happening in the New World.
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
All the lands from the rising to the setting sun are subject to me, he went on, which did little to recommend the Pope’s God.
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
nothing more than what some historians have called “a tissue of exaggerations, misconceptions and outright lies.”
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Curiosity, in his words, was nothing more than a disease.
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
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.
Peter Frankopan • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
The Puritans who settled New England did so in protest against the changes that had accompanied Europe’s rise and against the affluence that followed. They were reacting to the strange stream of new ideas and goods that made the world seem a very different place—where Chinese porcelain was appearing on household dining tables, where marriage of peo
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