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* The despot of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, who in 1325 inherited a powerful sultanate of northern India from his Turkish father Ibn Tughluq, expanded southwards, persecuting Hindus. He ordered the evacuation of Delhi and moved his capital to Devagiri in Deccan, executing those who resisted. When Ibn Battuta visited, the sultan appointed him a qadi, Islamic judge, but the traveller noticed pieces of executed men dangling over the streets. Ultimately Muhammad’s eccentricities led to revolts by his generals in the north, while two Hindu brothers – Harihari and Bukka Ray – established a new kingdom, Vijayanagara, in the south. Ibn Battuta was lucky to get away alive.

* On the Mahratta girls of India, Ibn Battuta decides that ‘They have in intercourse a deliciousness and a knowledge of erotic movements beyond that of other women.’ It was not just about sex but also about joyfulness: of one of his wives in the Maldives he wrote, ‘She was one of the best girls and so affectionate that when I married her she used to anoint me with perfume and incense my garments, laughing all the while.’

* The Golden khans deployed the Muscovites not only to police and tax Russia but also to repel the rising power in the north, the pagan dukes of Lithuania. When he died in 1377, Europe’s last great pagan monarch, Algirdas, was cremated on a pyre with human and equine sacrifices.

* The real Fiammetta was Maria d’Aquino, King Robert of Naples’s illegitimate daughter. Petrarch also visited Naples as a papal envoy. Both he and Boccaccio wrote about the lurid court where a young girl, Joanna, succeeded her grandfather Robert. Naples had been ruled by the French princes of Anjou, whose descendant Louis the Great now ruled Hungary and much of eastern Europe, later adding Poland. Louis’s brother Andrew was married to Joanna to bring Naples back into the family. Joanna and many of her court resisted the Anjous. In 1345, Joanna acquiesced in the murder of her husband, aged only seventeen, who was half strangled then tossed screaming out of a window with a rope tied around his genitals. Fiammetta too was said to be party to the conspiracy. In 1347, Louis the Great invaded and seized Naples, but spasms of the plague drove him out of Italy. Joanna was restored, but her lover, Louis of Taranto, whom she married, ruled until his death by plague in 1362. When her cousin Charles of Durozza overthrew her, he had her strangled, and then beheaded Fiammetta for her role in the killing of Andrew. Fortunately Boccaccio did not live to see Fiammetta’s end.

* The bacilli travelled to the lymph glands, which swelled up into buboes – hence the name bubonic – that oozed blood and pus as other organs were infected. Internal haemorrhaging filled bags of skin with blackened blood: the Black Death. Victims experienced fever, blood-vomiting and agony, often going to bed well and dying by morning.

ACT NINE

350 MILLION

The Tamerlanians, the Ming and the Obas of Benin

THE OTTOMANS ARRIVE IN EUROPE: TWO CASTLES AND A WEDDING

All these acute observers wondered at the horror that had, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘swallowed many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out’. Petrarch asked, ‘How will posterity believe that there has been a time when … well nigh the whole globe remained without inhabitants? Houses vacant, cities deserted, countryside neglected and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth? … Oh happy people of the future, who haven’t known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables.’

The Destructive Death inspired a new sense of God’s higher power, but also an appreciation of the value of humanity itself, God’s greatest creation. Petrarch, looking back at the light of classical culture, called the intervening centuries ‘the Dark Ages’. He was heralding a new lightness – the celebration of learning and beauty, including that of the human body, that became the Renaissance. While praying to God, Petrarch’s later works placed man at the centre of the world. Boccaccio too celebrated the vivacious genius of humanity in the face of catastrophe, imagining seven women and three young men escaping the Mortality to shelter in a rustic villa outside Florence where they tell a hundred stories of love, sex and absurdity over a period of ten days – The Decameron – which would reveal the ‘human comedy’. (It was Boccaccio who called Dante’s masterpiece the Divine Comedy.)