A History of the World

“Virtue, according to Confucius, is always the highest aim of human life — not comfort, not conquest, not legacy. Virtue.”

“It is worth holding that thought as we move through the following centuries, because the people building empires rarely seemed to remember it.”

“---”

“In 1519, Charles V of the Habsburg dynasty added "Holy Roman Emperor" to a list of titles that was already, by any reasonable measure, excessive. Through a carefully cultivated web of dynastic marriages, he had inherited not only the Habsburg heartlands in Austria and the German territories bordering it, but also the old Burgundian inheritance — an irregular strip of territory running south from the Low Countries, threading awkwardly between France and Germany. In 1516 he had become heir to the Spanish crown as well.”

“Then the Americas arrived.”

“First Cortés in 1521, then Pizarro in 1535 — each prying open the doors to staggering wealth, to vast new territories that European imagination had not yet found the right words to describe. And as if all of this were not already straining the limits of what one dynasty could plausibly govern, Charles's brother Ferdinand — tasked with administering the Austrian lands — found himself, in 1526, inheriting the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary after his brother-in-law, the King of Hungary, died at the Battle of Mohács fleeing the Ottomans, leaving no heir.”

“For a brief, disorienting moment, a universal monarchy felt not just imaginable but almost inevitable.”

“---”

“What unsettled the Islamic world about the founding of the Safavid Empire was not simply the political disruption — it was the theological audacity at its center. Shah Ismail's less educated followers genuinely believed he was God incarnate, a divine being who had chosen the body of a Persian king. Even those supporters learned enough to find that claim embarrassing still insisted on something nearly as radical: that as a descendant of the seventh of the twelve imams, Shah Ismail was the rightful head of the entire Muslim community — not one leader among many, but *the* leader.”

“Claims like this don't arise in stable times. They arise when people need certainty badly enough to manufacture it.”

“---”

“Before the Sufi movement, Islam was largely a religion of cities. This was not incidental — parts of Islamic law, particularly its ritual requirements, were simply difficult to practice in remote rural areas without the infrastructure that urban life provided. The faith had spread through trade routes and administrative centers; it thought in urban terms.”

“The Sufis changed that. When reverence for saints, devotion at their tombs, and the embodied, ecstatic rituals of the dervishes became recognized as legitimate first steps into the Muslim community, ordinary village people could share the same faith as the sophisticated urban scholars — without needing to master the same complexity. Something that had long been present in Hinduism, a layering and diversification of religious practice that made the tradition accessible at many different levels simultaneously, had found its way into Islam.”

“Given the traces of Indian influence detectable in Middle Eastern mysticism, it is not entirely unreasonable to describe the triumph of the Sufi path as, in some sense, the Indianization of Islam.”

“---”

“And underneath all of it — the dynasties, the theological disputes, the mystic movements spreading across trade routes and mountain passes — lies something older and quieter. The grain agriculture and domesticated animals of the Middle East hold a particular place in human history: the first civilizations grew directly from the way of life they made possible.”

“Empires rise and fall. The titles accumulate and then become meaningless. The claims to divine authority are made, contested, forgotten.”

“The wheat field remains.”

“Virtue, Confucius might remind us, was the point all along.”