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For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

it killed an estimated one-third of the European population

started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.

Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.

Khan was the name given to male rulers of the Mongols, Tartars, or Turkic/Altaic peoples of Central Asia, with female rulers called khatun or khanum.

it spread to Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Persia through the expansion of the Mongols and other tribes.

The first known use of the word "khan," meaning ruler, came in the form of the word "khagan," used by the Rourans to describe their emperors in 4th to 6th century China. The Ashina, consequently, brought this usage across Asia throughout their nomadic

Mongol leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227) rose from humble beginnings to establish the largest land empire in history.

the Mongols controlled between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles, an area about the size of Africa

but he also granted religious freedom to his subjects, abolished torture, encouraged trade and created the first international postal system

He received ordination as the most powerful lama in Tibet only to turn his back on monastic life. As a young adult he spent evenings in taverns with his friends and enjoyed sexual relations with women. He is sometimes called the "playboy" Dalai Lama.

a young man who was sensitive and intelligent, even if undisciplined.

After a childhood locked away in a country monastery with hand-picked tutors, his assertion of independence is understandable. The violent end of his life makes his story a tragedy, not a joke.

Throughout history, few names have inspired such terror as "Tamerlane." That was not the Central Asian conqueror's actual name, though. More properly, he is known as Timur, from the Turkic word for "iron."

vicious conqueror, who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. On the other hand, he is also known as a great patron of the arts, literature, and architecture.

The child's father, Taragay, was the chief of the Barlas tribe. The Barlas were of mixed Mongolian and Turkic ancestry, descended from the hordes of Genghis Khan

n the days of tension that have followed the U.S. airstrike that took out Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani, an old trope about the Middle East has reared its ugly head. On Wednesday on Fox News, former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated it when she claimed that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.”

This trope is frequently turned to by those who would have the world believe that war in the Middle East is somehow innate and inevitable. But a look at the history of the region reveals that it’s simply not true. People in the Middle East haven’t “been killing each other” at any rate that exceeds average human levels of conflict. Indeed, the region that lays claim to being the “cradle of civilization” had developed quite, well, civilized and complex systems of compromise and coexistence that allowed its diverse peoples, faiths and ethnic groups to live together over very long periods of time.

In fact, imperial systems like those that ruled the Middle East for most of its history — spanning vast swathes of the globe and encompassing an immense diversity of ethnicities, faith traditions and customs — have of pragmatic necessity had to develop systems of accommodation, ways to avoid war.

Modern genetic analysis suggests that the Bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis or Y. pestis. Chief among its symptoms are painfully swollen lymph glands that form pus-filled boils called buboes. Sufferers also face fever, chills, headaches, shortness of breath, hemorrhaging, bloody sputum, vomiting and delirium, and if it goes untreated, a survival rate of 50 percent.

It is possibly passed to humans by a tarabagan, a type of marmot. The deadliest outbreak is in the Mongol capital of Sarai, which the Mongols carry west to the Black Sea area.

Mongol King Janiberg and his army are in the nearby city of Tana when a brawl erupts between Italian merchants and a group of Muslims. Following the death of one of the Muslims, the Italians flee by sea to the Genoese outpost of Caffa and Janiberg follow on land. Upon arrival at Caffa, Janiberg’s army lays siege for a year but they are stricken with an outbreak. As the army catapults the infected bodies of their dead over city walls, the under-siege Genoese become infected also.

geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians.

Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for.

many populations of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East have segments of African origin in their genomes that were inserted at times between A.D. 650 and 1900, according to the geneticists’ calculations. This could reflect the activity of the Arab slave trade,

James Waterson introduces the slave warriors of medieval Islam who overthrew their masters, defeated the Mongols and the Crusaders and established a dynasty that lasted 300 years.

They destroyed the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer, and saved Syria, Egypt and the holy places of Islam from the Mongols. They made Cairo the dominant city of the Islamic world in the later Middle Ages, and under these apparently unlettered soldier-statesmens’ rule, craftsmanship, architecture and scholarship flourished. Yet the dynasty remains virtually unknown to many in the West.

The Mamluks’ opportunity to overthrow their masters came at the end of the 1240s, a time when the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, set up by Saladin in the 1170s, had reached a modus vivendi with the Crusader states; skirmishing, rather than outright war, was the order of the day in Syria and the Holy Land.

The Kamakura Period in Japan lasted from 1192 to 1333, bringing with it the emergence shogun rule.

Society, too, changed radically, and a new feudal system emerged.

Zen Buddhism spread from China as well as a rise in realism in art and literature, favored by the ruling warlords of the time.

On August 18, 1227, Mongol leader Genghis Khan died from unknown causes while leading a military campaign in China.

According to legend, Khan’s soldiers murdered anyone who witnessed his funeral procession back to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, as well as the 2,000 people who attended his funeral, before being executed themselves on the orders of Khan’s successors.

Via the Internet, Lin’s Valley of the Khans project invited interested members of the public to join the search for Khan’s tomb by visiting a National Geographic website and scanning thousands of high-resolution images of Mongolia taken from orbital satellites.

The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.

So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged

When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,

His theorem runs as follows. There is no biological reason why the West came to dominate. People in large groups are much the same everywhere – lazy, greedy and scared, and always looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, “in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, settling in greater cities”. He portrays the rise and fall of empires as amoeba-like movements, in which individuals have little long-term influence. Collapses follow the same cruel pattern: conquest, riches, babies, competition, starvation. The struggle to control the core brings in people from the margin, who then take over – viz the Phoenicians, the Mongols, the Goths, the Huns.

Geography, Morris argues, is the main reason why the West rules. An early lead was established at the end of the last Ice Age by nomadic hunter-gatherers from Africa who settled in an agriculturally benign area known as the Hilly Flanks (modern Israel, Syria, Iraq). Farming replaced foraging; from then on, Western rule by 2000 was “a long-term probability”. Not that China didn’t catch up. In fact, for 1,200 years (between 550 to 1776), China pulled ahead of the West. Marco Polo described China’s commerce as being “on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it”. Sound familiar? Long before we did, the Chinese had compasses, paper, guns – and maritime superiority. Between 1405 and 1433 a fleet of 300 ships sailed as far afield as East Africa. So why weren’t there Chinese conquistadors? Geography again. America was twice as far away as from Europe – and in 1424 long-distance voyages were banned.

If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west.

rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

t it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography.

The young prince Babur, descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's, finished his conquest of northern India in 1526

Babur was a refugee from the fierce dynastic struggles in Central Asia; his uncles and other warlords had repeatedly denied him rule over the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Fergana, his birth-right. Babur was able to establish a base in Kabul, though, from which he turned south and conquered much of the Indian subcontinent.

Babur called his dynasty "Timurid," but it is better known as the Mughal Dynasty - a Persian rendering of the word "Mongol."

Few substances in history have had as profound an effect on human history as gunpowder, yet its discovery in China was an accident. Contrary to myth, it was not simply used for fireworks but was put to military uses from its time of discovery. Eventually, this secret weapon leaked out to the rest of the medieval world.

Ancient alchemists in China spent centuries trying to discover an elixir of life that would render the user immortal.

mixed 75 parts saltpeter with 15 parts charcoal and 10 parts sulfur. This mixture had no discernable life-lengthening properties, but it did explode with a flash and a bang when exposed to an open flame.

refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.

The Silk Road extended approximately 6,437 kilometers (4,000 miles) across some of the world’s most formidable landscapes, including the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains.

With no one government to provide upkeep, the roads were typically in poor condition. Robbers were common. To protect themselves, traders joined together in caravans with camels or other pack animals. Over time, large inns called caravanserais cropped up to house travelling merchants.

That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.

if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.

Khazar, member of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century ce established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia.

the Khazars were originally located in the northern Caucasus region and were part of the western Turkic empire (in Turkistan)

y the beginning of the 7th century, the Khazars had become independent of the Turkic empire to the east.