Sublime
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In the middle of this terror, Tughluk decided to send an embassy to China. As his ambassador he chose Ibn Battuta, the man whom he had nearly executed only a few months before. Battuta was still living as a dervish when the Sultan’s emissaries arrived before his cave. The Sultan [had] sent me saddled horses, slave girls and boys, robes and a sum of
... See moreWilliam Dalrymple • City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
Much of what was known in the Latin West about the intellectual life of the classical world was transmitted to it by Muslim scholars in Spain.35 The commercial life of the Muslim world had been far more advanced than that in much of Europe. Prestige goods and luxury wares, as well as silver and gold, flowed west into Europe, not the other way
... See moreJohn Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
contemporaneous with the triumphs of Vasco da Gama or Albuquerque in the Indian Ocean, or of Cortés and Pizarro in the Americas, were the consolidation of Ming absolutism, the emergence of a new world power in the Ottoman Empire, the reunion of Iran under the Safavids, the rapid expansion of Islam into South East Asia, and the creation of a vast
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