The second battle of Panipat is about to begin. Hemu, the Hindu general who has captured Delhi and Agra, commands a force of war elephants and Afghan cavalry. Fourteen-year-old Akbar watches from a distance as his regent Bairam Khan directs the Mughal army. The mist hangs low over the flat fields where Babur, Akbar's grandfather, had won an empire thirty years before.

It is the year 1392, deep in the Russian winter. On the right bank of the frozen Volkhov river, within the trading quarter of Novgorod, stands the Peterhof—a walled compound of timber buildings where German merchants from Lübeck, Bremen, and Visby have lived for nearly two centuries. The gates are locked for the night. Inside, the alderman counts the last candles. Outside, snow drifts against the stockade and the bells of St. Peter's chapel ring for compline. You are among the forty men permitted to winter here.

It is the year 780 CE. On the Altiplano, three thousand eight hundred metres above the sea, frost whitens the raised fields before dawn. The city of Tiwanaku—perhaps called Taypikala by those who built it—stretches across six hundred and fifty hectares of plain. Smoke rises from clay hearths in the urban core, and somewhere a llama bell clinks as a caravan prepares its descent toward the Pacific coast.

It is the year 742, and the sun rises over the outer walls of Chang'an, casting the shadow of the city's grid upon fields of mulberry trees. The drum at the Gate of Bright Virtue has sounded, and the great doors swing open for another day. You stand on the Vermilion Bird Avenue, a boulevard one hundred and fifty metres wide, where Persian merchants lead camel trains from the Western Market and a young scholar from the eastern provinces walks toward the examination halls, his breath visible in the cold morning air.

You are sitting in a longhouse in Iceland, sometime around the year 1000. Outside, the wind moves through volcanic rock and sparse birch. Inside, someone recites from memory the words of the Völuspá, the Prophecy of the Seeress. The poem speaks of nine worlds, held in the branches and roots of an ash tree called Yggdrasil. This is how the Norse understood the shape of everything that exists.

It is the tenth of January, 1356, in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg. Emperor Charles IV, King of Bohemia, stands before the assembled princes of the Holy Roman Empire to proclaim a new law. The document he presents will bind Germany for four and a half centuries. It is called the Golden Bull, and it names seven men who alone will choose every king and emperor until the empire itself dissolves in 1806.

It is the third of June, 1098. Inside the double walls of Antioch, the last defenders of the garrison watch from the towers as Frankish soldiers scale the ramparts by moonlight. The city has been under siege for eight months. The Orontes river flows below the citadel on Mount Silpius, carrying the smell of rotting siege debris downstream toward the Mediterranean, still thirty leagues away.

The high plateau of eastern Anatolia stretches brown and wind-scoured toward the Persian horizon. In late August of the year 1071, a Byzantine army of many tongues and faiths has marched for three months to reach this place. Their emperor, Romanos IV Diogenes, has come to meet the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan near the fortress of Manzikert. The summer heat still rises from the earth in shimmering waves. Somewhere beyond the dust, Turkish horse-archers are watching.

It is the eighth of September, 1404. In a garden palace outside Samarkand, Ruy González de Clavijo, ambassador from the court of Castile, is brought before Timur, the lame conqueror who has made this Central Asian city the wonder of the age. Around them rise domes of glazed tile the colour of mountain lakes, and the air carries the sound of masons' chisels from construction sites that have not paused in thirty years.

The first light is grey upon the canals of Bruges. In the upper storey of a timber-framed house near the Jan van Eyckplein, a man from Lübeck named Hildebrand Veckinchusen has already risen. He washes his hands in cold water, dresses in a woollen robe dyed dark, and descends to the counting house where ledgers lie open from the previous evening.