Thank you for downloading this episode of this history of the world through objects, which we pick up between 14 and 1500.

As always, we're looking at things that tell us about how societies organize themselves, how they

viewed their place in the world and how they traded with and almost invariably fought

with their neighbors. At regular intervals we've been spinning the globe to see

what's been happening on different continents at the same time and we've seen that

for thousands of years objects have travelled huge distances over land and sea.

But in spite of these connections, the world

before 1500 was essentially still a series of networks. Nobody could take a

global view because nobody had ever travelled round the world

before 1500 nobody could spin the globe.

The programs this week are about the great empires of the world

at that last pre-modern moment

when it was still unthinkable for one person to visit them all,

and when even superpowers dominated only their regions.

We begin with one of the great rulers of the age,

or more specifically with his name, painted across two feet of paper,

refulgent in blue and gold, and proclaiming him ruler of a dynamic and expansive Islamic

empire, an empire that would reconfigure the geopolitics of the entire world.

It speaks of power, glory, magnificence, and there's a statement behind this signature.

It gave you a sense of the imperial, of being part of a whole, of this great and at that time

very successful enterprise that was the Ottoman Empire.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Tuhr of Suleman the Magnificent, made in Turkey between magnificent.

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