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This essay isn’t based on a subscriber request, but since it’s been in the news recently I had the idea to take a brief look at the history of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, or the Ayasofya Mosque if you prefer. One of the most important buildings ever constructed, both in terms of its prominence and its design, the Hagia Sophia has for nearly 1500 years been the jewel of a city that served as the capital of two massive empires. That’s quite a legacy.

It’s commonly known that it was Emperor Justinian I (d. 565) who commissioned the building of the modern Hagia Sophia in the sixth century. But the modern Hagia Sophia (the name means “Holy Wisdom” in Greek) was the third church to stand on that site. The history of the site prior to Justinian can be found in French Byzantinist Raymond Janin’s La Géographie Ecclésiastique de l’Empire Byzantin, though if your French is anything like mine you’ll be looking elsewhere. There’s a nice little book called Hagia Sophia: A History written in English by an author named Richard Winston, who along with his wife Clara was one of the most prolific translators of German writings into English in the 20th century. It’s not perfect, but this is a pretty niche topic and as far as I can tell it covers the basics appropriately.

We know that the first Hagia Sophia, perhaps better known as the Magna Ecclesia or “Great Church,” was completed in 360, during the reign of Emperor Constantius II (d. 361). What we don’t know for certain is whether Constantius commissioned its construction. There are indications that his father, Constantine I “the Great” (d. 337) may have commissioned it, but the record is not conclusive. Constantine did have several churches (and pagan temples, it should be noted) constructed as he was building up his grand new imperial capital, including the nearby Hagia Irene (“Holy Peace,” also known as the Ecclesia Antiqua or “Old Church”), which unlike the Hagia Sophia was [SPOILER ALERT] never converted into a mosque. It got to serve as an Ottoman armory instead, fairly ignominiously, though it does survive to the present day and is a museum now.

Constantius’s church was destroyed by an angry mob—a fairly common occurrence in Byzantine history—that formed after Emperor Arcadius (d. 408) deposed and exiled the popular archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom (d. 407), in 404. Its remains were lost to history. Arcadius’ son and successor, Theodosius II (d. 450), commissioned a new Magna Ecclesia/Hagia Sophia to be built on the same site in 415. Some of its marble blocks have survived, but the full church was burned down by another angry mob (told you) during the infamous Nika Riots in 532. Justinian quickly ordered the construction of a new church, but he demanded something more than a simply rebuilding of the previous structure. Indeed, Justinian wanted the grandest basilica in the world, which is what he ultimately got.

In case it’s not obvious I am not an architect, so I can’t really tell you all the interesting features that go into making the Hagia Sophia one of the most striking buildings in all of Europe and the largest cathedral in Christendom until it was surpassed by Seville’s cathedral in the 16th century. It was the first building known to employ its specific type of dome and was, when it was built, believed to hold the largest interior space in the world, making the dome’s construction all the more impressive. It’s considered the archetype of Byzantine architecture, which is pretty amazing considering the empire continued on for about 900 years after its construction. It was completed in 537, though earthquakes in 553, 557, and 558 caused cracks in the dome and eventually caused part of the building to collapse. The collapse exposed some flaws in the initial design and construction process, so the rebuilding process was in fact a significant renovation that raised the height of the dome and used lighter materials in its construction. The building was reconsecrated in 562. Justinian’s successor, Justin II (d. 578, abdicated in 574), commissioned the cathedral’s first mosaics.

The history of the Hagia Sophia is to some degree the history of the Byzantine Empire, which is a bit too expansive to cover in whatever space we have left. Its images and icons came and went during the first period of iconoclasm in the late 8th century, and then the backlash, then the second period of iconoclasm in the early 9th century, and the backlash to that. It was brutalized by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and then served as a Catholic cathedral during the Latin Kingdom period, which ended with the Byzantine restoration in 1261. The Palaiologos dynasty, which restored the empire, invested heavily in restoring the cathedral, which had definitely seen better days by the time the Latin Kingdom came to an end. And there were earthquakes. So many earthquakes. Each weakened the structure and many caused parts of it to collapse. The Byzantines always rebuilt, and ultimately these renovations continually strengthened and improved on the original structure, as well as adding new artwork and other features to it.

Its relatively brief interlude as a Catholic cathedral aside, the Hagia Sophia had remained the preeminent house of worship in Orthodox Christianity from its completion in 537. Until, of course, the Ottomans showed up in 1453. During the siege the Hagia Sophia served as both a refuge and a place for residents to pray for deliverance. It’s said that priests continued administering rites in the cathedral right up to the point when Ottoman soldiers burst through the doors. According to legend, the two priests performing services in those final moments vanished, to reappear when a Christian army finally regained Constantinople from the Muslims. If that’s true then those guys have been stuck in limbo for a really long time now. I hope they get cable in there or wi-fi, something.

Whatever pillaging went on in 1204 was probably nothing compared to what the Ottoman soldiers did, although to be fair the degradation of the Byzantine Empire and another series of earthquakes had left the cathedral in pretty dismal shape to begin with, at least according to a number of 15th century visitors to Constantinople whose accounts have survived. Sultan Mehmed II “the Conqueror” (d. 1481) claimed the building and almost immediately had it converted to a mosque. Just as he knew Constantinople was the capital the his empire had been missing, he surely understood the significance of making the grandest cathedral of the Byzantine Empire into the grandest mosque of the Ottoman Empire. In the process of conversion, the cathedral’s movable artifacts and relics were removed and much of its mosaic and marble artwork, deemed unacceptable because of Islamic prohibitions on depictions of the human form, was covered in plaster.

Mehmed invested in restoring the Ayasofya (as it’s known in Turkish) to a degree that the late, decaying Byzantine Empire simply hadn’t been able to do, establishing a religious endowment (waqf) to provide a steady stream of money to finance renovation and upkeep. The structure’s final major architectural features, its four minarets, were added over time. An initial, wooden minaret constructed by Mehmed no longer exists. The red minaret was probably built by Mehmed’s successor, Bayezid II (d. 1512), though it may have been built by Mehmed himself. The other three minarets are built of limestone, but one is clearly skinnier than the other two. That one was definitely built under Bayezid, while the others were built under Selim II (d. 1574), by the most famous architect in Byzantine history, Sinan (d. 1588).

As under the Byzantines, the Ayasofya was restored and renovated several times under the Ottomans, its condition having been eroded by the passage of time and damaged by earthquakes. Its most significant restoration was undertaken under Abdulmejid I (d. 1861) in the late 1840s, led by two Swiss-Italian architects. By that time, though, it had been overtaken as Constantinople’s chief mosque. That honor now rested with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka the “Blue Mosque”), built practically next door in 1616 under Sultan…wait for it…Ahmed I (d. 1617). Ahmed’s reason for building a new great mosque when he already had a perfectly good great mosque was, to be honest, vanity. He commissioned the project in 1609, right after the Ottomans had suffered an embarrassing defeat in the 1603-1608 Ottoman-Safavid War. The mosque was meant purely as a reassertion of Ottoman Exceptionalism, or the 17th century equivalent. And because the Ottomans had just lost the war, it had to be built with treasury funds rather than spoils, which was fairly unusual for Ottoman building projects at the time.

Anyway, I digress. In 1935, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, decreed that the Ayasofya’s use as a mosque be discontinued and that the building be turned into a museum. This served multiple purposes for Atatürk, in that it immediately created a new tourist attraction for his young nation and reinforced his staunchly secular inclinations. The conversion necessitated another restoration project, mostly to remove all the plaster that was covering up the building’s artwork. Another major restoration project was undertaken starting in the late 1990s, with the support of the World Monuments Fund. Over this time, the Ayasofya became one of the most popular tourist destinations in Turkey.

Now it’s becoming a mosque again, with religious services slated to resume there later this month. Turkey’s Council of State, its highest administrative court, ruled earlier this month that Atatürk’s decree was unlawful, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan placed the Ayasofya’s administration under the Turkish government’s religious office, the Diyanet. We’ve covered some of the considerable international condemnation of the move, which in some respects is the culmination of Erdoğan’s hybrid religio-nationalist politics. Erdoğan’s government has been slowly reclaiming Ottoman mosques-turned-museums around the country, though for obvious reasons none of those conversions attracted the attention that this one has. In some ways the international backlash has only given Erdoğan more incentive to keep going, since that way he gets to perform for his nationalist base.

Practically I have no idea what’s going to happen to the Ayasofya now. In the abstract there’s no reason it couldn’t continue to serve both as mosque and tourist destination, as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque does—and, frankly, as bad as Turkey’s economy is these days, there’s incentive for Erdoğan to ensure it continues serving both functions. He’s said the mosque will remain open to the public except during prayer times, which is the general rule throughout Turkey. This is no different from any number of cathedrals and other Christian houses of worship across Europe. There is a legitimate concern about the fate of all the artwork, but there are simple ways to cover those things at prayer times that would still leave them available to tourists at other times.

But until the new status quo is actually implemented there’s no way to determine what the change will really mean for the structure. And as I said in the newsletter earlier this month, Erdoğan’s government doesn’t have a good track record here. Its conversion of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon has been badly managed, resulting in the destruction of much of that structure’s historical heritage. Obviously the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon is not the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and there will be a lot more attention paid to how this conversion is managed. But if past performance is indicative of future results, the future of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia isn’t looking so great.

Symbolically, there’s something to be said for taking a museum that celebrated the Hagia Sophia’s long history as an iconic Christian and Muslim structure and turning it into a mosque at the behest of a far-right nationalist government that views the building less as a symbol or even as a house of worship than as a trophy of conquest. It’s very 2020 in that way.

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I’m very bad at predicting which stories are going to become A Big Deal and which aren’t, so I try not to do too much of that in the regular newsletter. My tendency is to overestimate the likely impact of things that strike me as important and if I made a fuss about all of those things I think it would make this whole operation more alarmist than either you or I would like. That said, Friday’s New York Times report that a unit inside Russia’s military intelligence apparatus (the “GRU” if you’re still in a Cold War-era mindset) offered Taliban-aligned forces in Afghanistan bounties to kill US and other coalition soldiers seems like it’s gotten some traction.

In addition to the initial Times report, the Washington Post claimed on Saturday to have “confirmed” it, although as we’ll see below I’m not sure what the word “confirmed” is supposed to mean in this context. There have been scores of other pieces on this story that I’ve seen, but these two appear to be the main ones in terms of adding information to the mix. At the non-informational end of the spectrum, if (like me) you spent an unhealthy portion of Saturday Online, you probably saw a lot of chatter about this story. So it probably warrants a closer look. Here are my thoughts at this point, which are not comprehensive and may change should new information come to light or should I realize I’ve been an idiot about some part of this.

What is the story?

As the Times has reported, the story is that a Russian military intelligence unit, called “Unit 29155,” “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan.” Such is the conclusion, reached “months ago,” of the US intelligence community, according to unnamed “American intelligence officials.”

…and?

And what? That’s pretty much the entire story. There’s no indication as to when this alleged program was implemented, no indication if it’s still in place (the Taliban has stopped attacking coalition forces anyway, under the terms of its February agreement with the US), and no indication if these bounties were offered to all Taliban factions or just some (the Taliban is not as monolithic as it’s usually portrayed). We apparently don’t know if any bounties were ever collected or if any US/coalition deaths are even suspected of having resulted in a payout. We also don’t know if anybody in the Russian government outside of “Unit 29155” knew about the program, let alone how high that knowledge reached into the Kremlin. Assuming, again, that there actually was a bounty program.

Isn’t it safe to assume there was a bounty program?

I don’t know about you, but when the same newspaper that brought us such gems as “U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS” and “BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS” (the corrections at the end of that one are quite something) tells me that it’s got a Major Scoop that’s based on nothing but anonymous intelligence sources, I figure it’s OK to maintain a little skepticism. I don’t mean to single out the Times, which (leaving the editorial department’s travails aside) does do good reporting and may well be on to something here. But hopefully the past 20 years or so have taught us to be somewhat discerning about this stuff.

There are other sourcing issues. The Times says that the claims its sources are making are “based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” Who were these captured militants and criminals? How do we know their apparent confessions have any credibility? While we’re on that subject, who captured them and who interrogated them? The CIA may not be in the business of “enhanced interrogation techniques” anymore, but it doesn’t seem to have any problem with our allies engaging in that sort of thing, and Afghan security forces definitely engage in it. If this information was obtained via torture, then that undermines the entire story.

Didn’t you say the Washington Post had “confirmed” the story?

No, I said that they said they’d confirmed it. If you read their piece you’ll note that it, too, is based on anonymous intelligence sources, just like the Times. Maybe they’re different anonymous intelligence sources. I have no idea. But all they seem to have really confirmed is that some members of the US intelligence community are claiming that a Russian military intelligence unit offered bounties to Taliban fighters. There’s no independent reporting that would verify those claims, as far as I can tell.

OK, but if you had to guess…

On one level it seems plausible. In fact it’s one of the things that people the DC foreign policy establishment regularly dismisses as “isolationists” have been warning about for several years. One of the effects of open-ended, aimless US military deployments in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is that they leave the soldiers on those deployments vulnerable to countries that may be of a mind to hurt the US without doing anything so serious and so overt that it might trigger a war.

In Afghanistan, you can take your pick of potential adversaries—China, Iran, and Russia being the big three. And we know that Russia and Iran, at least, have been working with the Taliban in other ways, for example supplying them with arms and other resources. There are justifications for this support. One is that the Taliban is opposed to the Islamic State (at least at the organization level, if not always at the factional level) and is definitely the lesser evil in comparison. Another is that the Taliban will probably have a major role in the post-war Afghan government and so its neighbors are inclined to cultivate a relationship with it. But part of the thinking is also that, by supporting the Taliban, Moscow and Tehran can inflict some harm on the United States.

Wait, this is all starting to sound familiar.

What, you mean this isn’t the first time you’ve heard of a country arming and aiding Afghan extremists who happen to at war with a geopolitical rival? I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

So what-

Wait, sorry—before we move on I should also note that part of this story doesn’t make sense to me. While offering bounties to the Taliban seems like it’s up “Unit 29155’s” alley (see below), there’s an unanswered question, which is “why would a Russian military unit offer to pay Taliban fighters to do something they’ve been happily doing for free?” I can’t answer that, and neither (apparently) can our friends the anonymous intelligence officials, since the NYT notes that “the motivation remains murky.”

The Times’ sources offered several suggestions, like revenge for the attack on a Russian mercenary unit by the US and Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province in 2018 or a general desire to cause trouble for the US, but those motivations don’t address the basic fact that Taliban fighters already had a strong interest in killing coalition soldiers, and incentivizing them with bounties probably wouldn’t have made much difference. I’m sure they wouldn’t turn down the cash, but it’s hard to believe that there was a large number of Taliban members who weren’t interested in fighting until some Russian operatives started paying them.

In general the “why” behind this story is not very clear. Do the Russians want to raise casualties to drive the US out of Afghanistan? There’s never been a strong indication from Moscow that it supports a US withdrawal, and from a geopolitical perspective it actually benefits Russia for the US to remain bogged down there. Even if their goal were to force a US withdrawal, Trump already wants to leave Afghanistan anyway so why bother inflaming things? Maybe the goal is to get the US to stick around by undermining US-Taliban peace efforts, either because the Russians don’t like what they see of a post-war Afghanistan or because they want the US to keep spilling blood and treasure there. Or maybe there’s no goal other than causing trouble.

So what is this “Unit 29155” anyway?

The existence of “Unit 29155” is the subject of another largely anonymously sourced New York Times article, from last October, along with some work by other outlets like Bellingcat. It is allegedly housed within the “Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” also known by the acronym “GU.” It is more commonly known by its Soviet name, the “Main Intelligence Directorate,” and acronym, “GRU.” It was established in 1942, although predecessor organizations went back well before that.

The GRU is Russia’s military intelligence service, akin to the Defense Intelligence Agency in the US. Because it was never really broken up after the fall of the Soviet Union, unlike the KGB (which was divided into separate foreign and domestic intelligence services), the GRU is probably the strongest and certainly the largest intelligence organization in Russia today.

Unit 29155, and I’m dropping the quotes because I think it’s reasonable to assume it exists though I wouldn’t take that as ironclad, is purportedly one of a few units within the GRU tasked with conducting “destabilizing” operations with respect to the US and Europe. The others mostly seem to operate in more of a cyber or at least online capacity, so what sets this unit apart is that it engages in more kinetic kinds of operations. It’s been implicated in a “destabilization campaign” in Moldova in 2014 and an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016, neither successful as far as I can tell though the purpose may have been to create chaos more than anything else. It’s also alleged to have been behind the attempted murder of a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015 and former GRU officer Sergei Skripal in London in 2018, both also unsuccessful. There’s also an allegation that it’s been fueling the Catalan separatist movement.

While Unit 29155 doesn’t seem to be very good at achieving its objectives, it does seem pretty capable when it comes to causing mayhem, which is probably more valuable than achieving any specific operational goals. And it’s always possible that the unit has been successful in operations that are still secret.

What are the subjects of this sordid tale saying?

As you might expect, everyone is denying everything. The Russian embassy in Washington issued an angry rejection on Twitter that alleged that the NYT story sparked “direct threats to the life of employees of the Russian Embassies in Washington D.C. and London.” The Taliban also called the allegation “baseless” and suggested it was defamatory. How dare these reporters besmirch the good name of the Taliban, is I guess what they’re saying. Obviously neither of these denials means very much, since you’d expect both to deny the report whether or not it was accurate.

Additionally, the Trump administration is denying that Donald Trump was ever briefed on the bounty claim. Which brings us to probably the most incendiary part of the Times story.

“Dangerous Donald” is at it again, eh?

Yeah, sure, whatever. There are two potential scandals here. One is the alleged existence of the bounty-for-killing program itself, which we’ve covered. The other is Donald Trump’s alleged response to being informed of its alleged existence.

I won’t pretend to understand the Trump administration’s approach toward Russia, which has coupled heavy anti-Russian sanctions at an institutional level with Trump’s obsequiousness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin at a personal level. It is true that Trump has been dragged into at least some of those sanctions by Congress. It’s also true that he’s accepted Putin’s denial that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, though obviously that’s a self-serving thing for Trump. A lot of the “Trump loves Putin” narrative rests on unconvincing suppositions like “Donald Trump criticizes NATO, and this helps Putin in some indeterminate way” or on Trump’s personal conduct when in Putin’s presence. There seems to be no doubt that Trump is a little dazzled by Putin, as he seems to be with most powerful authoritarians. But US-Russia relations are ebbing, not improving, under Trump, and that’s having some troubling effects on, for example, bedrock arms control treaties.

Still, the NYT’s description here doesn’t paint Trump in a very good light and will fuel more speculation that he’s Russia’s Man in Washington:

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

Again, the administration is denying that Trump was ever briefed on this story, which boggles the mind if true because you would obviously brief the president if there were credible information that the Russian military was paying bounties for dead US soldiers. So either their denial is a lie, which is likely, or it indicates a couple of alternatives. One is that this intelligence isn’t compelling enough (at least not yet) to take to the president, which frankly means it shouldn’t have been taken to the New York Times either. The other is that Trump either doesn’t want to know or somebody in either the White House or the intelligence community decided it would be better if he didn’t know. That latter possibility is actually more troubling than the notion that Trump was briefed and opted to do nothing. There are explanations for not responding that don’t have anything to do with being enthralled to Vladimir Putin. Maybe the administration is still trying to figure out what’s really going on, or is trying to calibrate an equivocal response, for example, though I understand the reluctance to give this White House any benefit of the doubt.

Since we’re approaching the end of this post, let’s assume that Trump was briefed and has opted to do nothing. I’m sympathetic to the notion that if Barack Obama were still president we’d already be on to the Senate impeachment trial by now. But I’m not sure it makes sense to take drastic action over a story that is as sketchy and unconfirmed as the one the Times reported on Friday. I mean, screw Donald Trump, who is an abomination, and if this hurts his reelection chances so be it. (One of the interesting aspects of this whole story to me is the question of whether the intelligence community, or some part if it, is leaking it to the media with the intention of hurting Trump’s reelection chances, but I digress.) But before we all succumb to the urge to Do Something here I think much more investigation is warranted, both of the allegation itself and of Trump’s alleged response to it.

Could you do an essay on the Mongol invasions of Iran and the lasting psychological impact this has had nearly 800 years later? I can't read Farsi but I have seen what look like interesting books on the topic. As an aside its wild to me that bustling cities like Otrar were just wiped off the face of th…

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You've touched a little in some asides in your podcasts about how the French and British ran their interwar 'mandates' (i.e. colonies) and post-war puppet states in the middle east.

One of my areas of deep interest is colonial divide and rule tactics and their ongoing legacy, and whilst I'm very familiar with how the British used them …

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Would love an essay on the Jadids or other Central Asian Islamic modernists- thanks!

The Islamic world’s struggle with the reality that, by the 19th century, Christian Europe had clearly surpas…

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Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! As today is the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the “New World,” I thought it appropriate to examine his impact on the Old World—specifically on the part of the Old World controlled by Muslim powers in 1492. I wrote this essay many years ago at my previous website based on notes from various grad school lectures, and have since rewritten and beefed it up a bit with some additional material.

Europeans had been trading with the “Far East” for centuries before the advent of Islam. Ancient Roman luxuries have been found at ancient Chinese sites, for example, and vice versa. Of more importance to Rome than its trade with China was its trade with India, via the Red Sea and Egypt (or, if you’re inclined to believe early Muslim historians, via a massive yet somehow mostly unnoticed international trade hub at Mecca).

The arrival of Islam, and with it a brand new empire stretching all the way from Iberia to India, didn’t really complicate those trade routes too much. In terms of overland trade the caliphate simply stepped in where the various Persian empires had been, and while the loss of Egypt hurt the Roman (or Byzantine, if you prefer) Empire, there was too much money to be made for the new Arab/Muslim bosses to just shut that Red Sea trade down. This state of affairs continued for centuries, with the caliphate and the Byzantines, and briefly the Latin Crusaders, in a state of almost perpetual war, but usually prepared to keep trade routes open in order to make some scratch. My point is that the commercial relationship between Europe and “the Orient” was already millennia old by the 15th century.

Then along came the Mongols in the 13th century, eliminating the caliphate altogether and creating a network of Mongolian khanates stretching from Eastern Europe to China and Korea. If you count those khanates as one entity (which is problematic given the level of infighting between them, but not completely inaccurate), it was the greatest contiguous land empire (by “contiguous land empire,” I basically mean “leave the British Empire out of this”) the world has ever seen.

These khanates (like the Ilkhanate in Persia/Iraq and the Golden Horde on the Russian steppes) rarely got along with one another. But if there was one thing the Mongols loved more than fighting and conquering it was trading and making money, so they made sure that it was mostly smooth going for overland traders on the East-West “silk road” (or roads, since there were actually a few different routes). Having most of Eurasia under Mongolian control actually made traveling far easier, since not only was security pretty tight but merchants could also do helpful things like depositing their hard currency at one end of the empire in exchange for paper banknotes (obviously a lot easier to lug around than coins) that were redeemable wherever the Mongols were in control—which was almost everywhere, except for India.

It’s in the Mongol period that we hear of European travelers—missionary-diplomats like William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, or merchants like Marco Polo and company—making the overland trek from Christian Europe all the way to Mongolia or China. The Mongols never conquered Egypt, which by this point was under the control of the Mamluk dynasty, but the Mamluks also were keen to keep trade routes to Europe open. In fact, their whole sultanate depended on it—both on the commercial sea routes through the Red Sea to India and on the north-south slave trade. The Arabic word mamluk means “owned,” or when applied to people “slave,” and the Mamluk political hierarchy was perpetuated by the succession of slave soldiers to high office and on to the throne. Those slaves were usually purchased from the Eurasian steppe and/or the Caucasus, mostly via European traders.

As it happens, the Mongols were better at conquering than they were at ruling, and their various khanates in the Middle East and across Eurasia were already breaking apart and collapsing around a century after they’d been established (the Black Death and some unwelcome environmental changes didn’t help). That breakdown brought with it a lot of unwelcome insecurity for traders along the Silk Roads, who were frequently beset by thieves and marauders. The plague contributed to the loss of Eurasian cohesion as well, both for its direct effects and the contributions it made to breaking apart the “Pax Mongolica.” The hope of a unified trans-Eurasian empire was briefly revived by Timur in the late 14th century, when his campaigns reunified the Ilkhanate, extended his empire’s reach into India and Central Asia, decimated the Golden Horde (taking out their competing, more northernly, Silk Road route in the process, probably by design), and crushed (temporarily) the nascent Ottoman Empire that had been harassing what was left of the Byzantine Empire.

Timur, like any good Mongolian conqueror, liked to make money, so he restored trade routes and promised safe travel to merchants on his territory. Unfortunately for the merchants, Timur died on his way to conquer China in 1405, and while his son and successor, Shahrukh, was a better Muslim than Timur had been, he wasn’t nearly as good a conqueror. The empire Timur (re)built started losing territory very soon after he died, and really began to fall apart when Shahrukh died in 1447.

The biggest beneficiary of Timur’s death was the aforementioned Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were thrown into an interregnum/civil war after losing the Battle of Ankara to Timur, but once that was over they quickly rebuilt their former strength and then some. The empire grew to absorb most of Anatolia and the Balkans, and finally ended the Roman/Byzantine Empire in 1453 when its army captured Constantinople. The Ottomans, who now controlled the western terminus of the Silk Road (we’re basically down to one Silk Road at this point, since Timur put an end to the northern route), were pretty fond of money as well, so they weren’t really a threat to close down trade with Europe. However, they had also just conquered the most important city in Christendom and were a clear threat to march right into the heart of Europe.

The Ottomans also became a serious naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, something no Islamic entity—Arab, Mongolian, or otherwise—had ever done before. This meant that European merchants (Venetians, primarily) no longer necessarily controlled maritime shipping lanes. Venice was the dominant European player in the eastern Mediterranean, which meant that European merchants looking to trade with lands to the east usually had to contract with Venetian shippers on relatively unfavorable terms. Meanwhile, Muslim Iberia was in the process of falling (or reverting, if you prefer) to the Christians, creating new Christian kingdoms at the far edge of the Mediterranean who were very well-placed to consider, say, sailing around Africa to open trade routes to the East that didn’t cross any Muslim territory. The fact that the new Iberian kingdoms were all competing with one another only raised the stakes in that game. Their exploratory voyages had started even before the Ottomans took Constantinople, with Portugal exploring the African coast in the 14th century in order to bypass the Trans-Saharan trade routes and access West Africa’s abundant gold and slave wealth directly.

The year 1492 is notable not only for Columbus’s voyage, but for being the year when the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia (Granada) fell to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and laid the foundation for modern Spain. The Ottomans were still ascending, having crushed the Aqqoyunlu confederation in 1473 (which had made diplomatic overtures to Venice about attacking the Ottomans jointly), and wouldn’t be seriously challenged until the rise of the Safavid Dynasty in Iran in 1501 (and even that challenge was one they would effectively put down by 1514).

By 1517, the Ottomans had defeated and absorbed the Mamluk Sultanate, gaining control of the Red Sea trade route in addition to the Silk Road—this only added urgency to the European search for alternatives. With the “around Africa” route increasingly the purview of Portuguese sailors, who would get to India that way by the end of the 15th century, the Spanish monarchs were naturally intrigued by the idea that someone could sail across the ocean to the west and wind up in China, bypassing both the Ottomans and the Portuguese. This route hadn’t been tried before because most learned people—correctly, as it happens—thought that the world was far too large for such a journey to be possible.

Enter Columbus. If you’re still laboring under the idea that Columbus boldly challenged the prevailing contemporary wisdom that the world was flat and ultimately proved himself right, you should know that this pleasant tale is completely fictional. Europeans had understood that the Earth was spheroid since ancient times. Columbus did challenge prevailing wisdom, in that he was convinced that the world was far smaller than was generally believed. He proposed that making a western trip to the “Far East” was well within the range of contemporary sailing vessels. He was completely wrong, and prevailing wisdom about the size of the planet was surprisingly close to correct. Had the Americas not been in the way, Columbus and his crew would almost certainly have starved to death before they got anywhere near East Asia.

Of course, in 1492 I suppose there was enough uncertainty about the size of the Earth that a guy like Columbus could get a hearing at court—one court, at least. Whether he was an especially persuasive pitch-man or was the kind of guy a wealthy ruler would have been willing to pay to go away for a very long time, his appeal got the proto-Spanish monarchy’s attention. With the Muslims finally removed from the peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella (mostly Isabella) decided to embrace Columbus’s math in order to best Portugal’s commercial strength. And possibly also because they wanted him to go away. Based on some of the historical accounts of Columbus’s later behavior, I don’t think we can discount that as a motive.

The Ottomans felt the effects of the discovery of the Americas, at least to some degree. For most of the 16th century and into the 17th century Europe was hit by something called the “price revolution,” which was essentially a massive (by 16th century standards) inflationary trend. Historians used to believe that it was the influx of large amounts of silver (especially) and gold from the Americas that devalued currencies all over Europe and caused this inflation, but nowadays scholars believe it was more complicated than that. It’s suggested that the bigger culprit was that Europe’s population finally started expanding again—after remaining stagnant for decades following the Black Death—and also rapidly began to urbanize. I’m not an economist, so I can’t give you a detailed explanation here, but the upshot as I understand it is that all these new people and all that urbanization increased the demand and/or velocity of money, and that’s what started the inflationary trend. At any rate, I think most of those scholars still agree that the influx of American silver contributed to the price revolution, even if it wasn’t the main cause.

The Ottomans suffered a severe economic downturn in this period. A steady stream of imperial surpluses became a steady stream of imperial deficits starting around the late 16th century. Turkish historian Şevket Pamuk’s research estimates that prices in Istanbul rose around 500% between the end of the 15th century and the start of the 18th. The main Ottoman silver coin, the akçe, went through a major debasement in around 1585, which (according to Pamuk) was the main driver of the inflationary trend, but he notes that this debasement was itself brought on in part by the economic strain of the price revolution. The fact that European trade with India no longer relied on either of the two routes the Ottomans controlled probably contributed as well.

Where the traditional view was that the Ottomans were uniquely hard hit in the 16th and 17th centuries, contemporary scholars argue instead that their downturn was more or less in keeping with the trend in Europe and maybe with a trend that swept the whole world. There’s a term for this, thanks to Eric Hobsbawm: “The General Crisis (of the 17th Century).” It’s far from a historical consensus, but the argument goes that for a host of reasons unrelated to New World precious metals, governments and societies across Eurasia hit a proverbial brick wall. Europe was wracked by wars and civil wars involving, for example, England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Spanish Empire (the “Thirty Years’ War” encompasses a lot of this, though not all of it). Japan was wracked with agricultural struggles and several peasant uprisings. The Ming Dynasty collapsed in China.

Among historians who agree with the General Crisis theory, one of the most common explanations involves a period of global cooling that reversed the post-Black Death population growth and actually caused (especially when you couple it with all of those wars) a substantial population decline. That population growth, if you recall from above, had contributed to the runaway inflation of the price revolution, and the sense you get here is of a lot of shocks happening one on top of the other until systems start to break down under the strain.

There were other causes for the Ottoman economic crisis, specifically wars with the Safavids and Habsburgs, a major slowdown in the empire’s pace of territorial expansion, and a change in land management from productive hereditary land grants (which encouraged landlords to manage their grants for long-term productivity) to destructive tax-farming (which encouraged bidders to extract as much money as they could, as quickly as they could, from a parcel of land before it was taken away from them). Pamuk’s work incorporates these other factors and shows that the impact of the new American silver on the Ottoman economy was more limited than previously believed. He’s also shown that the by the early 18th century the Ottoman economy was probably back on solid ground, though whether it ever completely recovered from the shock remains a matter of some conjecture.

In case you’re interested, elsewhere in the Islamic world in this period things weren’t quite so difficult. The 16th-18th century period is known as the age of the “gunpowder empires” because the Islamic world was dominated by three large imperial units—the Ottomans, the Safavids in “Greater Iran” (Iran plus some of the Caucasus plus most of Afghanistan plus occasionally Iraq), and the Mughals in modern (northern) India and Pakistan—whose militaries were all organized to one extent or another around, you guessed it, gunpowder weapons.

The Mughal economy thrived in this period (and in general for much of that dynasty’s lifespan), owing mostly to the fact that India, along with China, was one of the two great eastern terminal points for European trade. It’s estimated that India’s economic output at this time accounted for slightly over a fifth of the world’s total economic output (by comparison, the US and China each top out at around 16% of total global GDP nowadays), and because its goods were so highly prized in foreign markets it tended to accumulate precious metals/specie rather than having to spend it, so it wasn’t affected by price shocks the way the Ottomans were. If anything, the arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean via the African route only increased the demand for and trade in Indian goods, and the arrival of New World silver increased Europe’s ability to pay for them, all good things for India’s economy.

The Mughals also benefited in the 16th-17th century from a series of capable rulers, from Akbar (r. 1556-1605) to Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) to Shah Jahan (r. 1627-1658). Though whether their effectiveness helped strengthen the empire or the empire’s strength is the reason we think of them as “effective” today is one of those chicken-and-egg questions that probably can’t be resolved.

The Safavids were comparatively poorer than either the Mughals or the Ottomans, and had only one truly important product to offer the world market: silk, the production of which may have come to Iran from China via our friends the Mongols. The Safavids actually had a very productive run from the late 1500s through the early 1600s, partly because of European exploration and Ottoman struggles. The arrival of European traders in India via the passage around Africa meant that the Safavids no longer needed to rely on overland trade to Europe via the Ottomans, with whom they were frequently at war. Instead, they could ship their silk via the Mughals, with whom they had generally good relations until the mid-17th century, to European traders in India. At the same time, Ottoman economic weakness forced the empire to give the overland Safavid silk trade (usually conducted by Armenian merchants) fair treatment even when the Ottomans and Safavids were at war.

Like the Mughals, the Safavids also benefited from strong political leadership in this period, in the person of Shah Abbas I (r. 1588-1629), the dynasty’s only truly great monarch—though the same chicken-and-egg question we asked of the Mughals applies to him as well. Once he died the drop off was precipitous, and not only did relations with the Mughals decline, but as the 17th century wore on European merchants grew tired of dealing with the Safavids and began to fill their silk needs elsewhere.

One final word, and it’s about the slave trade.

It’s easy to lose sight of this when you’re talking in benign terms about “trade routes” and economics and inflation, but so much of this economic system was underpinned by the trade in human beings that it’s irresponsible not to at least point that out. The slave trade was as much a north-south trade as east-west, with Circassian and Central Asian slaves finding their way south to Mamluk and later Ottoman Egypt, while African slaves were traded across the Sahara to North African principalities and beyond, in addition to being taken to the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade is really beyond our purview here, but the trans-saharan trade, and the slave trade in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia, is crucial.

The gunpowder empires depended on enslavement, with the Ottomans conscripting sons from Christian families in the Balkans to serve at court and in the army/Janissary Corps, and the Safavids taking slave soldiers from Christian kingdoms in the Caucasus (in an effort to mimic the Janissaries). The Mughals likewise enslaved non-Muslim Indians (mostly Hindus, obviously), selling some abroad, and also traded for slave soldiers from Central Asia.

The Ottomans also dealt in African slaves, though usually for more menial farming and household duties. African eunuchs in the imperial palace could rise to positions of great influence at court—the Kızlar Agha (“chief of the girls”), who ran the palace harem and was frequently one of the two or three most powerful people in the Ottoman court, was usually African. This is why you’ll sometimes see that position described as the “chief black eunuch.” Yes, there was a “chief white eunuch,” the Kapı Agha, who oversaw the gate between the inner and outer Ottoman courts and thus controlled outside access to the sultan. This was a very powerful position, but later in Ottoman history—when the harem became the most influential part of the palace—it was eclipsed by the Kızlar Agha. In general, however, African slaves were treated worse in the empire than European slaves. Slaves in some of these systems could expect eventual manumission and even a pathway to high office, and in that sense had an experience that could be quite a bit different from slaves in the Americas. But those factors shouldn’t detract from the general ugliness of the system.

One question that people frequently ask is what’s going to happen after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dies—or, at least they …

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Can you give a primer on the history of the Church of the East (aka the Nestorian Church), particularly its influence in the Mongol Empire?

I gave my best extremely layman’s effort in trying to explain what …

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Can you give a primer on the history of the Church of the East (aka the Nestorian Church), particularly its influence in the Mongol Empire?

So there’s a fair amount to this question that I think we have to cover, starting with what in the heck the Church of the East actually is, which means talking about Nest…

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My deeply subjective sense is that there are a lot of elections happening this year. I figured maybe it would be a good idea to track some of the (in my opinion) more important of them, including a few that have already happened.

JANUARY

January 21 (and February 6): Bangsamoro Autonomy referendum, Philippines

A huge majority (nearly 89 percent) in several parts of the Mindanao region voted to ratify the Bangsamoro Organic Law, which had passed parliament last summer. The result is the formation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which will come into full effect in 2022 with the formation of a new government that is largely autonomous from Manila and controls the majority Muslim Bangsamoro region:

The idea is to put an end to the Muslim insurgency that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has been conducting since the 1970s. Former rebel leaders have already assumed roles in the transitional government that will manage the region until elections in 2022. With ISIS’s presence growing in the southern Philippines, however, the establishment of this autonomous region isn’t going to completely eliminate violence on Mindanao and its surrounding islands.

FEBRUARY

February 3: Presidential election, El Salvador

Nayib Bukele of the center-right Grand Alliance for National Unity won, which is noteworthy if for no other reason than he’s the first Salvadoran president not to come from one of the country’s two largest parties (ARENA and the FMLN) in 30 years.

February 23: General election, Nigeria

President Muhammadu Buhari and his All People’s Congress retained the presidency and both houses of parliament fairly handily.

February 24: Constitutional referendum, Cuba

By a 91 percent majority (make of that what you will), Cuban voters approved a new constitution that, among other things, legalizes private property and foreign investment, brings back the post of prime minister, and sets both age and term limits on the presidency.

February 24: Presidential election, Senegal

Incumbent Macky Sall easily won reelection.

MARCH

March 24: Presidential election, Comoros

Incumbent Azali Assoumani was supposed to be term limited, but a 2018 constitutional referendum lifted term limits and ended the practice of rotating the Comorian presidency among the country’s three islands. Comoros isn’t exactly a world power, but the referendum and Assoumani’s reelection unsurprisingly has caused considerable bad blood, especially on the island of Anjouan, Comoros’s second-largest island, which now may never wrest the presidency from Grand Comore again. There were uprisings on Anjouan after the referendum last year and there’s already been one since the election this year.

March 24: General election, Thailand

In the first election since Thailand’s 2014 military coup, anti-junta parties technically “won,” but because the country’s new “civilian” political system has been designed to give the military substantial control over the political process, it’s likely that the junta will remain in power but now with the veneer of democratic legitimacy.

March 31: Local elections, Turkey

I wouldn’t have included this—local elections aren’t really our thing here—but Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party lost its long-time holds on the mayoralties of Ankara and (probably) Istanbul. The losses were a symbolic blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who nationalized the election and suffered for Turkey’s weak economy, though they do little to weaken Erdoğan’s stranglehold on power.

March 31 (and April 21): Presidential election, Ukraine

Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, who literally plays a Ukrainian president on TV, easily won the first round of Ukraine’s actual presidential election, taking around 30 percent against incumbent Petro Poroshenko’s roughly 16 percent. Zelensky is the prohibitive favorite to win the April 21 runoff against the deeply unpopular Poroshenko.

APRIL

April 9: Parliamentary election, Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his first serious political challenge in some time in the form of Blue and White party boss and former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz. Some recent polling suggests that Blue and White will win more seats than Netanyahu’s Likud party, but Netanyahu’s right wing coalition will collectively win somewhere between 63 and 66 seats, which for them is a comfortable majority in the 120 seat Knesset. So Netanyahu will likely remain in office, unless his legal troubles really catch up with him.

Yeah, I know

April 11 (to May 19): Parliamentary election, India

Polling has suggested that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling National Democratic Alliance coalition might have a bit of a fight on its hands to retain its majority. A weakened Indian economy is the big hurdle for Modi. The late February military clash with Pakistan bolstered Modi’s numbers considerably, but there’s been some evidence in very recent polling that his boost might be wavering a bit. I’d expect Modi to eke out a win but it’s not a lock.

April 17: General election, Indonesia

Any general election in a country as big as Indonesia is important, but polling suggests this one is likely to be uneventful. Incumbent President Joko Widodo has a substantial lead over challenger Prabowo Subianto, and Joko’s governing coalition in parliament will most likely remain intact.

April 18: Presidential election, Algeria

This one isn’t happening anymore. But I figured we should mention it anyway, since it was this election, and the possibility that Abdelaziz Bouteflika might run for a fifth term even though he’s been a near vegetable since his 2013 stroke, that spurred hundreds of thousands of Algerians to protest for political change. Bouteflika resigned under that pressure earlier this week, starting a 90 day clock for an election.

April 28: General election, Spain

Polling indicates that the ruling Socialist Party will win the election but will be short of a majority and will have to cobble together support among several smaller parties in order to retain control of the government. Of greater alarm is that Spain’s far-right Vox Party looks certain to enter parliament, the first far-right party to do so since Francisco Franco kicked the bucket in 1975.

MAY

May 8: General election, South Africa

It would be the political upset of the century (so far) if the African National Congress and incumbent President Cyril Ramaphosa didn’t retain control of both the presidency and the National Assembly.

May 18 or before (and November 2 or before): Federal election, Australia

By contrast, head to head polling indicates that Australia’s ruling, center-right Liberal-National coalition government is about to be toppled by the Labor party. Labor has been in the opposition since losing the 2013 election.

May 23-26: Parliamentary elections, Europe

The European parliament doesn’t really have much power and its internal coalition politics are ridiculously unwieldy, so the outcome here isn’t that big a deal. The center-right coalition that has the majority now should retain it. What’s noteworthy here is that, because Brexit has become such a massive dumpster fire, the United Kingdom may find itself having to hold elections for a parliament it’s planning to leave as soon as it can figure out how to get out the door. The European parliament can’t do anything unless all member states have a legal delegation, and until the UK finally leaves it is obliged to participate in the parliamentary process. The Brexiteers never intended things to drag on to the point where this would be an issue, but here we are.

May 26: Federal election, Belgium

Polling has consistently shown the Belgium’s ruling coalition losing its majority, and that was before the Flemish N-VA party quit the coalition in December. Now polling shows the coalition getting hammered. But most of the intrigue surrounding Belgian elections happens after the votes are counted, when the country’s approximately 7.8 million political parties negotiate with one another to try to form a majority coalition. So at this point the ultimate outcome of the vote is unclear.

JUNE

June 16: General election, Guatemala

Polling suggests that the presidential side of this election is a three-way battle between former first lady Sandra Torres of the center-left National Unity of Hope party, Zury Ríos of the conservative Valor party, and former attorney general Thelma Aldana of the centrist Semilla party.

June 17 or before: General election, Denmark

Polling has Denmark’s Social Democrats comfortably ahead but short of a majority. If it wins it would appear the party plans to form a minority government, but even if it doesn’t form a coalition it will need to make some concessions to other left/center-left parties in order to secure their support.

JULY

July: House of Councillors election, Japan

I had initially gone with “nothing” here but I suppose this counts. Japanese voters will elect 124 of the 245 members of the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Japanese legislature, at some point in July. The Liberal Democratic Party’s ruling coalition holds around 2/3 of the seats that are up for grabs, so it’s at greater risk. But the coalition would need to lose 30 seats to lose its majority, and even if it did it has a large enough majority in the lower House of Representatives to overrule any vote the House of Councillors takes. So the stakes are not huge.

AUGUST

Nothing, as far as I can tell. Who wants to vote in August, anyway?

SEPTEMBER

September 28 (moved from July): Presidential election, Afghanistan

This could very well wind up being a rematch between President Ashraf Ghani and “Chief Executive” Abdullah Abdullah, whose 2014 contest was so close and so bitter that the United States had to step in and broker a settlement that created the make-work “chief executive” job as an incentive for Abdullah to drop his challenge to Ghani’s apparent victory. That’s assuming the election will happen at all. Ghani is facing some pressure to cancel the election and dissolve his government in favor of a transitional arrangement that could handle peace negotiations with the Taliban. The Taliban, of course, refuses to recognize or meet with Ghani and his government.

OCTOBER

October: Parliamentary election, United Arab Emirates

Just kidding. This is not an important election.

October 6: Parliamentary election, Tunisia

This election will be a test for Prime Minister Youssef Chahed, who has broken with President Beji Caid Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes party and will run at the head of a new party, Tahya Tounes. Chahed is an austerity guy and as such he’s not all that popular these days, so he may be looking at a very bad day here.

October 6: Parliamentary election, Portugal

Polling puts the ruling Socialist Party of Prime Minister António Costa well ahead of the main opposition Social Democratic Party, somewhere around 37 percent to the Social Democrats’ 27 percent. So the Socialists will probably emerge as the largest party in parliament. The big question is whether they’ll get to a majority of seats without the need for coalition partners. Costa is running a minority government at the moment and he would definitely like to change that.

October 20: General election, Bolivia

Incumbent President Evo Morales may eke out a win against former President Carlos Mesa, but polling indicates it will be close.

October 21 or before: Federal election, Canada

Polling is noisy here but the most recent surveys seem to all show the opposition Conservative Party moving into a slim lead. The corruption scandal hanging over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau probably isn’t helping his poll numbers.

October 27 (presidential runoff on November 24): General election, Argentina

Polling in the presidential race has former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and incumbent Mauricio Macri getting into the runoff on November 24. Macri and his austerity are pretty unpopular at this point, but so is Kirchner, so this would probably be the best outcome for Macri in terms of maximizing the chances of holding on to his job. Hypothetical Kirchner-Macri runoff polling is all over the map, and some indicate a large number of undecideds still out there.

October 27: Parliamentary election, Ukraine

Polling indicates that Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, formed last March, could emerge as the largest single party in the Ukrainian parliament, with the center-right Fatherland party close behind. Ukrainian elections also see most of their action after the voting when the coalition talks start, and since Servant of the People is new and its politics haven’t entirely solidified yet it will throw an interesting complication into the mix. Ukrainian politics are largely right-wing and seem driven by personality almost as much as policy—for example, ideologically Fatherland and Petro Poroshenko’s Solidarity party should probably be natural allies (they’re coalition partners now, in fact)—but because Poroshenko and Fatherland party leader Yulia Tymoshenko hate each other it’s not certain they’ll keep working together.

October 29 or before: Parliamentary election, Greece

The ruling Syriza party is polling well behind the center-right New Democracy Party, as voters tired of having austerity forced on them from abroad for the past several years opt for…a party that will do austerity without being forced, I guess? The most interesting thing here is that New Democracy is pro-EU and has as much support as it does, despite the thrashing Greece has taken at the hands of the International Monetary Fund and German bankers.

NOVEMBER

November or before: Parliamentary election, Poland

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) will likely remain the largest party in parliament, but polling has been all over the place in terms of seat projections and so it’s unclear whether PiS will retain its parliamentary majority. Most recent polls project a hung parliament, which means lots of fun coalition talks and potentially a snap election. Why vote once when you can vote twice?

November 10 (and November 24): Presidential election, Tunisia

Incumbent Beji Caid Essebsi suggested just this weekend that he’d rather not run for reelection and, I mean, the guy is 92 so yeah. Note that he hasn’t said he won’t run, just that he doesn’t want to run. Obviously it’s difficult to say much about this race without knowing whether he’ll be in it.

DECEMBER

December or before: Presidential election, Romania

Only incumbent Klaus Iohannis is known (or at least pretty certain) to be running. Romania’s other major parties haven’t selected their candidates yet. So it’s too soon to say much here. Still, Iohannis appears to have commanding first round polling leads against all his potential opponents.

December 9: Presidential election, Sri Lanka

Other than incumbent Maithripala Sirisena no other candidates have even declared here, so it’s far too early to say what’s going to happen. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has expressed interest, and after Sirisena’s attempt to oust Wickremesinghe last year went over like a lead balloon, that could be a very interesting matchup.

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I loved your essay on the wars of consolidation of the present Saudi state with a focus on the Ikwhan. It stopped, perfectly reasonably, before WWI. I’d love a follow up essay on from that point on, covering the conquest of the Hejaz, the Ikwhan revolt and suppression, and question of whether resentments sewn in 1927 made a…

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You occasionally refer to the Gunpowder Empires. Could you elaborate a bit on where this concept comes from and what it actually describes?

The first thing we need to say here is that the “Gunpowder Empires” were the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, moving west to east. from around the start of the 16th …

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If you haven’t covered it, what’s the history of Socotra? What’s going on with the island during the current war (and past wars) — has there been fighting on the island?

Which is totally fine! Eccentric is part of what we do around here. But Socotra, a moderately-sized island (the name also a…

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I would want to know more about Arab trade in the Indian Ocean. I know a bit how it spread Islam to Indonesia/SE Asia and down the east African coast but not a whole lot else (what were they trading? with whom? for what? who were the Arab traders?). If this is too vague you can focus on the religious aspect(s). 

…

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Can you write a bit about the Ottomans during the Crimean War? I know the allied forces were mostly France, England, and a little bit of Piedmont-Sardinia, but I’ve never really heard much of what the Ottomans were doing, other than getting their navy annihilated by the Russian…

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