Titans of History

Ibn Saud meanwhile waited out the war, and when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918, the Hashemites proved no match for him and his Ikhwan fighters. In a series of clashes, Hussain’s ambitious eldest son Prince Abdullah (the future king of Jordan) was defeated by the Saudi forces. Britain was alarmed at the collapse of its ally. Saud had his own problems: the Ikhwan were hard to control and started to raid into Iraq (controlled by Britain), where they especially loathed the Shiites whom they regarded as heretics. In response, the British army and RAF attacked the Ikhwan. Ultimately Ibn Saud managed to suppress the over-mighty leaders of the Ikhwan and then defeated King Hussain’s son King Ali of Hejaz, taking control of all of Arabia and Mecca and Medina in 1924 before finally overcoming the Ikhwan in battle, the last time he commanded in person. Ibn Saud declared himself king of Hejaz and in 1932 he became king of Saudi Arabia. (The Hashemites went on to amass precarious thrones outside Arabia: Faisal was first king of Syria, then Iraq where, his family ruled until 1958. Abdullah’s great-grandson Abdullah II became king of Jordan in 1999).

Ibn Saud had always prided himself on his prowess as a fighter and a lover: he was usually married to three wives, divorcing earlier ones as he married the new. It was said he kept a harem of seventy odalisques and he left around seventy children including forty sons.

The kingdom he created was an absolutist dynastic monarchy combined with a Wahhabi theocracy in which the Saudi king acted as a guarantor of religious purity. The discovery of oil empowered the kingdom, giving it vast wealth, a process that began in 1933. On his death in 1953, Ibn Saud was succeeded by his feckless, inept and inconsistent son Saud, who was deposed by the princes in 1958. He kept the title but handed over power to Faisal who succeeded as king on Saud’s death. Faisal was experienced and shrewd but was assassinated in 1975. The succession then went to Ibn Saud’s sons, King Khalid and then King Fahd. In 1979 fanatics seized the shrine of Mecca, challenging the corruption of the Saudis: as many as 1,000 were killed when Saudi forces stormed the complex and restored order. The real contradiction of Saudi rule was exposed by the 9/11 attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists were overwhelmingly Saudis, most notably their leader Osama bin Laden. Well into the 21st century Saudi Arabia was still ruled by Ibn Saud’s octogenarian sons but power is gradually passing to the next generation.

VILLA & ZAPATA

1878–1923 & 1819–1919

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!

Emiliano Zapata

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were Mexico’s two most celebrated and notorious revolutionary warlords: they were blood-thirsty brigands or murderous psychopaths to some, romantic heroes or radical reformers to others: both were gifted and charismatic but both were also brutal, cold-blooded and ambitious. Both died violently.

Born as Doroteo Arango, somewhere near San Juan del Río, Durango, in 1878, Pancho Villa hailed from peasant stock. After working as a sharecropper in his late childhood, he moved to the city of Chihuahua when he was sixteen, hoping to make his fortune, but when a landowner from his village sexually assaulted his sister, he returned home immediately and killed her assailant in cold blood. With that one act, he consigned himself to a life of banditry and fled for the Sierra Madre mountains. For the next seventeen years, he terrorized those living within or passing through his mountain fiefdom: cattle rustling, bank robbery and murder were his specialties.

Mexico at the time was ruled by the corrupt dictator Porfirio Díaz. Much of the country’s land was ruthlessly exploited by the wealthy owners of large estates (haciendas), leaving the bulk of the population to labor under political repression and grinding poverty. In 1910, the long-serving Díaz stood for “re-election” as president. Opposition to his rule, however, had crystallized around Francisco Madero, the “apostle of democracy,” supported by volunteers known as antirreeleccionista (antireelectionists). When Díaz inevitably claimed victory, Madero proclaimed his Plan of San Luis Potosi, declaring the election fraudulent and calling for an armed uprising. The Mexican Revolution had begun. Villa threw in his lot with the revolution, capturing the towns of both Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez for the Maderoists. Though he claimed a political “awakening,” it is hard to tell whether he believed in the cause or simply sensed which way the wind was blowing, but whatever one believes, the revolution proved to be a turning point in his life.