Sultans of Swag

The decades-long, jewel-encrusted one-upmanship between Kaiser Bill and Abdülhamid II, for example, served as stage dressing for an intricate political negotiation involving German military advisers and the Baghdad Railway - a web of intrigue whose fallout extended to the Armenian genocide and World War L A radiant green velvet kaftan from sixteenth-century Iran is embossed with elaborate silver embroidery in an ornate geometric latticework studded with taboo figurative cameos - which may have been a deliberately provocative gesture when gifted by the Shah Muhammad Khudabandah to Ottoman Sultan Murad ??, as it was given in the middle of a war in which Iran lost substantial territory to the Ottomans. [...] gifts include an astounding array of lamps and candlesticks, a fabulous mosque-shaped Qur'an chest made from walnut and inlaid with ebony, ivory, and mother-of-pearl, and sections of the enormous, elaborately embroidered veil, or kiswa, that drapes the Ka'ba - the great black cubical building that is the most sacred architectural site in Islam - and is traded out annually at the time of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required of the faithful.