For thousands of years, the East, a land supposedly covered in gold and spices, had captivated Westerners and drawn countless "conquerors" eager to set foot on that mysterious land.
First came Alexander the Great of Greece, then Caesar. Westerners had never felt guilty about being robbers. On the contrary, rulers like Louis XVI, who won battles yet took no benefits, were the ones considered strange.
Rome's symbol was a wolf, and Siena had one too. Legend had it that the city was founded by the son of Remus, one of the twins raised by a she-wolf.
Without Florence's oppression, it was hard to imagine whether Siena would have reached its current scale, or whether its rulers would have become as corrupt and decadent as the other Roman nobles.
Siena had a Piazza del Campo. It was shaped like a scallop shell and divided into nine sections, representing the nine members who had driven the noble rulers out of Siena.
Also in 1260, while Siena and Florence fought a war of twenty thousand against thirty thousand, the Mamluks repelled the Mongol army at Ain Jalut in Egypt.
The Mamluks possessed Egypt's fertile lands and had the strength to defeat the Mongols, yet they did not expand. It was not because the nobles had grown complacent in comfort.
The overland and Maritime Silk Road brought enormous commercial taxes. After the four khanates established their subordinate relationship with the Yuan dynasty, trade routes shifted from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. The Mamluks had no choice but to raise agricultural and domestic commercial taxes. This drove merchants out of Egypt, further increased the burden on farmers, and sparked internal struggles within the Mamluk dynasty.
Relying solely on agricultural taxes made it difficult, though not impossible, to organize foreign expansion. The crucial issue