This is AD 1000 – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is constantly changing. The powerful states we know today—such as Norman England and the fragmented territories that would become France—did not yet exist. The towering Gothic cathedral has yet to rise. With the exception of distant and prosperous Constantinople, few large urban centers dominated.

However, that year, on the other side of the world, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the largest temple in the world.

Completed just 10 years later, it stands 216 feet (66 m) tall and is assembled from 130,000 tons of granite: second only to the Egyptian pyramids in height. At its center is a 12-foot-tall symbol of the Hindu god Shiva, wrapped in gold studded with rubies and pearls.

The brightly lit hall contains 60 bronze sculptures decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. Among his treasury were tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums ripped from the bodies of defeated kings of the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of his time.

He was called the King of Kings, the King, and he belonged to one of the most amazing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family changed the way the medieval world worked, but they are little known outside India.

Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of the many squabbling factions on the Kaveri floodplain, a vast expanse of silt that flows through what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But what sets the Jorahs apart is their endless capacity for innovation. Chola queens were also very prominent by the standards of the medieval world and were the public face of the dynasty.

Chola Queen Mother Sembiyan Mahadevi—Rajaraja’s great-aunt—traveled to a Tamil village and rebuilt the small, ancient mud-brick temple in gleaming stone, effectively converting the The family’s “reinvention” as the foremost devotees of Lord Shiva has earned them a wide following.

Senbiyan prays to Nataraja, the hitherto little-known dancing king of the Hindu god Shiva, who is featured in all her temples. The trend is starting to catch on. Today, Nataraja is one of the most recognized symbols of Hinduism. But for medieval Indians, Nataraja was actually a symbol of the Chola dynasty.

Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared the same public relations taste and dedication as his great-aunt, but with one significant difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 1990s, he led his troops across the Western Ghats, a mountain range on India’s west coast, and burned enemy ships as they anchored in port. Next, he took advantage of the internal unrest in Lanka and established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to have a permanent presence on the island. Finally, he broke into the rugged Deccan Plateau—Italy from Germany to the Tamil coast—and claimed part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were wasted on his great royal temple, present-day Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, this great temple receives 5,000 tons of rice every year from the conquered territories of southern India (it would take a fleet of 12 Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today).

This enabled Brihadeshwara to function as a large Ministry of Public Works and Welfare, a vehicle for the Chola state to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new irrigation systems, expansion of farming, massive New flocks of sheep and buffalo. Few countries in the world can imagine such scale and depth of economic control.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to interior Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, forged an alliance with the Tamil Commercial Company: a partnership between merchants and government powers that would set the stage for the East India Company, a powerful company more than 700 years later. The foundation was laid for the birth of the British Trading Company, which later ruled much of India).

In 1026, Rajendra sent his troops aboard merchant ships and sacked the Malay city of Kedah, which dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices.

While some Indian nationalists claim this was a Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology shows an even stranger picture: the Cholas appear to have had no navy of their own, but under their leadership Next, there was a wave of Tamil diaspora traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the end of the 11th century, these merchants were operating independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they traveled deep into what is now Burma and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.

In the 13th century, under the Mongol rule of China, descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants successfully operated in the port of Quanzhou and even established a Shiva temple on the coast of the East China Sea. It is no coincidence that Tamils ​​formed the largest group of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia under British rule in the 19th century.

Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled South India a cultural and economic behemoth, a link in global trade networks.

The Chola nobles poured their spoils into a series of new temples that sourced quality goods from a truly global economy that connected the farthest coasts of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin used for their bronzes came from Egypt and possibly Spain. Camphor and sandalwood, used as offerings to the gods, came from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples developed into vast complexes of buildings and public spaces, surrounded by markets and boasted rice fields. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri River, now the city of Kumbakonam, there were a dozen temple towns supporting a population of tens of thousands, probably more than most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were surprisingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists interacted with Tunisian Jews, and Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states in India. Many towns in the state developed around Chola-era shrines and markets.

These developments in urbanization and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.

Medieval Tamil metalwork made for Chola-period temples is probably the finest metalwork ever produced by human hand, and the artist’s appreciation of the human body rivaled that of Michelangelo or Donatello. To glorify the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed concepts of saints, history and even magical realism. If the Renaissance happened in southern India, 300 years earlier, then it would have been the Chola period.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes, especially the Nataraja bronzes, can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered around the world, they are relics of a glorious period of political innovation and maritime exploration that connected the globe; of Titanic temples and mythical riches; of merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live on today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author who recently published Lord of the Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire