In William Shakespeare's tragedy, "Othello," there is one riddle:  what religion does Othello profess?  Desdemona says directly:

    By heaven, you do me wrong.

    as I am a Christian!

    But here the frank and honest Othello is hiding something. It is considered that he, a black-skinned Moor, is a Moslem or at least descendent of Moslems. And if one is to follow the traditional history, then there really is no other variant.

 Othello, before he ends his life in suicide,  recalls:

                    . . . And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

                      Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

                      Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

                      I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

                      And smote him, thus.

                             (Stabs himself)

     That is, according to contemporary ideas, Islam already was in the world, since some kind of "circumcised dog" in a turban fought with the Venetian in Aleppo .

    Meanwhile, still rather recently (in historical measurements) the military personnel of many countries have worn the turban. And circumcision, as it will be shown in our book, is a most complex phenomenon, which is characteristic at a definite stage for all of human culture.

    Thus it is impossible to understand who Othello is regarding faith, and it is not clear why he calls the Turk a dog.  But it is not worth accusing Shakespeare of a mistake. Not only he, but also the English in general up to the 17^th century did not mention anywhere in written sources the words:   "Moslem, Islam, Koran, minaret, muezzin, hijra, Caaba." The full impression is that they did not know them. But you know, the sons of an obscure Albion already had visited all the corners of the world and should have known them. No, these words clearly were unknown to William Shakespeare as well as to both Francis Bacon and other great Englishmen of that era.

     They are unknown also to the Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio, upon whose novella the "Moor of Venice" (the "Hecatommithi" collection or "One Hundred Tales."  1566) Shakespeare created his masterpiece.  

      So, perhaps, there still was not an Islam?

      The riddle of Othello grows into one of the cardinal questions connected with medieval times, when modern nations, states and religions were being born.  

    Our book is devoted to this era. Scientific facts are collected in it that prove that now the predominant historical science is Utopian. It was built on false premises and an artificially constructed chronology. There is a multitude of evidence of the fact that all "ancient" manuscripts are literary works of the 15th - 16th centuries and that there never was in reality any "ancient" Rome and Greece as historical science teaches us.  

  We have collected the conclusions of dozens of scientists from various countries that the most ancient monuments of mankind, the pyramids of Egypt , were erected in the period between the 11 and 18^th centuries of our era.

  The processing of written sources on a computer, with a comparative analysis of their authenticity, and the other newest methods of the study of history, which were found by the scientists, allows the contention that:  in the 13 - 14^th centuries of our era, the first world war in history broke out. It ended with the formation of a colossal empire with a capital in Istanbul , which at that time was called Jerusalem .  Its territory included a large part of Europe, Asia, all of the civilized regions of Africa and Japan .  There is basis to say that the Aztec civilization also was included in the Empire's composition.

    Its subjects named their country Israel and practiced a religion which approximately is set forth in the Old Testament. They named their faith catholic.              

     Having existed for 70-80 years, the empire broke up. The violent creation of states began and the formation of peoples and nations in the modern meaning of these words.  

An objective political need arose for the writing of one's own history, in comparison with a history common and characteristic for an empire. It was necessary to find or to create the proper historical roots, one's own antiquity, which was not the same as the antiquity of the neighbors. In which connection, the more deeply these roots went into the centuries, the more legitimate those or the other rulers looked in the eyes of the subjects. It was as if their authority was sanctified by the centuries.      

  And then the primary framework of modern historiography was invented.  A hunt was launched for manuscripts which were declared as ancient. The main body of sources on the history of antiquity appeared over only 2 centuries - the 15th and 16th.  How this happened is well known not only to critics of traditional historiography, but also to the traditionalists themselves.

   The ancient manuscripts appeared according to a scheme which is well seen in the example of one of the brightest forgers of that time, Poggio Bracciolini. He, an author of historical and moralistic books, was in the full sense of the word the dominant influence of his century.  Many found it possible to define the first half of the Italian 15th Century as Poggio's century.   Florence raised a statue to him, which was carved by the sculpture Donatello.

     With the cooperation of the Florentine scholar and book collector Niccolo Niccoli, Poggio Bracciolini established a kind of permanent study of ancient literature and attracted a whole series of collaborators and partners to the business.

      Poggio Bracciolini and Bartolomeo di Montepulciano made thefirst of their "finds" in the era of the Council of Constance.  In a forgotten, damp tower of the St. Gall monastery, in which a prisoner would not survive even three days, they chanced "to find" safe and sound a heap of ancient manuscripts:  essays by Quintilian, Valerius Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus, Nonius Marcellus, Probus and others.    After some time, Bracciolini supposedly discovered fragments "from Petronius" and "the Bucolics" of Calpurnius.   

        Poggio's clients were the Medici, the aristocratic families of England , the House of the Dukes of Burgundy, Cardinal Orsini, Colonus, the wealthy such as Bartholomeo de
Bardis, and universities.  He became very rich on "ancient" manuscripts.  

     One would think it was impossible to forge archaeological finds. But one can find just that which is needed and there where it is needed.

   The excavations of Herculaneum began in 1711, and in 1748, the excavations at Pompeii .  They bore an advertising and commercial nature.  There was no discussion of any scientific research. The first excavations in Athens were made by the English "Society of Amateurs" in 1743-1751. It was as it was called - a society of amateurs, and it is not suitable to speak about the scientific level of the excavations. But even this is not the main thing. The archaeological expeditions which followed purposefully destroyed all the discoveries that contradicted the established views on history. In the best case, they declared them as erroneous.

        Sculptors also created a supposedly ancient history.  The facts are well known when some of them buried statues of their own creation in the ground and several years later informed the world about the fact that they found in their own vegetable gardens the imperishable works of the ancient masters .

      The history of Russia and China is full of distortions and fictions.  For political and many other reasons, legends were constructed of the Tatar Mongolian yoke in Russia and the centuries old struggle with the Huns in China.  Both that and the other are simply untrue.  And so, we shall try to explain in the pages of this book what it was in fact and why the Great Wall was built in China in the 15th and 16th centuries.

        Thehigh-minded direction of traditional European history was developed in the 16th-17th centuries, in the era of the Reformation and the Counter-reformation.  

      The slogan of Nicolo Machiavelli, "The end justifies the means" and the appeal of Martin Luther, "He who is not with us is against us" became the main principles of the greatest historians of that time. The originator of the modern chronology, Joseph Scaliger (Bordone), brought up by his philosopher father in the spirit of "paper will endure all, provided that it is beautiful," Henry IV Bourbon's court chronicler, was right after his master first a Catholic, then a Huguenot.  He composed a "continuous" chronology of the French royal dynasties, in order to legitimatize and perpetuate the rights of the Bourbons, who had destroyed the previous Valois dynasty.  All the rest of world history was called up only to serve as a background for this purpose.

    The Austrian Cuspinian (Johann Spiesheimer) carried out the same work for the Hapsburgs, deriving their uninterrupted genealogy from Julius Caesar.  The history of Great Britain in the editions of the father and son lords-chancellor Bacon became the most "pseudo-scientific," which were provided moreover with brilliant "PR" in the form of Shakespeare's narrative plays.  The peaceful unification of England and Scotland under the crown of the new Scottish dynasty of the Stuarts predetermined also an "uninterrupted legitimate" history of the dynastic replacement of Scottish rulers over 1,200 years.

    The Roman Catholic Church, which was alarmed by the preservation of its political influence, took in the process of the creation of a pseudo-scientific "worldwide secular" history the most active participation, in particular, in the person of the Jesuit monk, Dionysius Petavius.  The adoption itself in Europe of a modern chronology by a decision of the 1563 Council of Trent became an important turning point  - onlyin this year was it declared that it was coming up on namely 1,563 years since the birth of Christ, and all sources which contradicted this were ordered to be burnt.  At the same time, the "Book of Popes" also appeared which recorded somehow the uninterrupted succession of the Roman Popes from the 4th through the 9th centuries (to Pope Nicholas I.)  

   Even business created a modern historical tradition.  From the middle of the 15th century, by the efforts most of all of the Florentine Medici bankers, history became the object of an extremely profitable business - starting from "holy relics" and ending with "ancient manuscripts."  The most glaring example is the "Donation of Constantine," the forgery of which Lorenzo Valla proved right in the middle of the 15th century.  

    At this time an important event in civilization occurs - the appearance of printing, which stimulates the unsatisfied market demand for books.  Well, and there where demand is, there also are supplies. An abundance of just discovered "ancient" manuscripts and chronicles becomes the most widespread. .  

    As a rule, they stop suddenly "somewhere in antiquity." A typical example is the chronicle of the Saxon Grammatica, which breaks off in 1185 and is discovered in 1514.  This chronicle also was fixed into the foundation of the history of the Scandinavian countries.  A certain Gall Anonim wrote a similar "ancient Polish" chronicle that ranges to 1113, and it was discovered in that very same 16th century.

      During the 16th and 17th centuries, their own chronicler appeared in every European monarchy.  "History is necessary to the prince of such that it allows him to most effectively rule his people," thus the founder of political science, Niccolo Machiavelli formulated a thesis which defines even today the relationship of authority to history.    

    Up to now, very rarely is the research of history free from political sympathies and antipathies and the wish that it not begin to play up in a positive sense the role and significance of the people among whom the researchers count themselves.   Thus, the brilliant Russian mathematician and revisionist historian, Anatoly Fomenko, attaches all development of civilization to Slavic roots, and the Turkic writer M. Agaji - to Turkic.  The Western historians Otto Rahn, Guido von List and many others have gone along the very same path.  

      Book authors suppose such an approach is in error.   They stand in that position, that still very recently, several centuries ago, people did not consider themselves either Turks or Russian, or Jews or French, nothing again in the present meaning of these definitions.There existed a period when they were not divided in creed, inasmuch as being the subjects of one empire, they professed one and the same religion - monotheism.  Protojudiasm became a starting position for the creation of worldwide religions - of the main driving force in mankind's spiritual life for the centuries ahead.

   And this book, relying on the evidence of the past and those reconstructions which the critics of traditional historiography suggest today, speak of the empire and its ideology.