Word: wars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
Temujin was born clutching a blood clot the size of a knucklebone. His name was war booty, taken from a captive rival by his proud warrior father and tacked on like a medal to his firstborn son. But history echoes with another of his names, a title Temujin would receive 39 years later. In 1206, by acclamation of all the Mongols, he became Genghis Khan, the "Oceanic Ruler" who in the next two decades would father an empire that rolled across Eurasia, linking the Pacific Ocean to the Blade Sea as it amassed kingdoms as loot and nations as slaves...
...Christian shadow. A generation before, European Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, massacring its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The Franks, as they were called, then occupied four militarily aggressive states in the Holy Land. The great Syrian leader Nur al-Din predicted that expelling the invaders would require a holy war of the sort that had propelled Islam's first great wave half a millennium earlier, but given the treacherous regional crosscurrents, such a united front seemed unlikely...
...wrest the Holy City from him, and he returned to Europe. The city, always Islam's third holiest site, became even more central to the faithful. Saladin's family ruled less than 60 years longer, but his style of administration and his humane application of justice to both war and governance influenced Arab rulers for centuries. His tolerance was exemplary. He allowed Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem after its fall. The great Jewish sage Maimonides was his physician. Woven into chivalric legend as the worthy foeman, Saladin, scimitar flashing or compassionately sheathed, galloped from Dante into romances by Sir Walter Scott...
...Mongols by dispersing clansmen among regiments in an army that used death as discipline and looting as reward. Conquered peoples were divided among the armies, swelling the ranks of fighters. Similarly, the technology of the conquered cultures was absorbed like more booty and enrolled in an intercultural war of conquest. Thus the elaborate catapults developed in Central Asia were deployed against the stout walls of China. And the explosive bombs and rockets pioneered in China were used in Mesopotamia and Europe...