The bestselling historian and academic tells Peter Stanford how being brought up Catholic in England made him open to other cultures and faiths

If there is a part of the Christmas narrative that reveals our selective knowledge of the world it surely comes with the three mysterious kings who travel from the East with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In countless school and parish nativity plays, not to mention Christmas cards and cribs, they are decked out in elaborate dressing gowns and makeshift turbans straight out of Aladdin in an effort to look exotic. But who might they have been, and what and where did they represent?

Those wanting to fill in the background could do no better than read Peter Frankopan’s two latest offerings. The historian’s 2015 bestseller, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, shone a light on the neglected and little understood (at least in the West) subject of the history of everything East, from Lebanon to China, along what were the principal trading networks. While its main account post-dates the three kings, it also provides a wider, longer context, told from a radically different geographical perspective, and so gives a new take on the development of Christianity far removed from the usual Eurocentric tale we take for granted, especially at this time of year.

“There is this view that Christianity is a European thing,” says Frankopan, in the flesh an engaging, unbuttoned, outward-looking Oxford academic, “when we are actually the recipients of a different form of colonialism that came from other parts of the world. Yes, we fashioned it, modelled it, and then conveniently forgot the bits we didn’t like, but it is worth being reminded, as my book does, that there were more Christians in Asia than in Europe until about 1400, and that there were Christian churches in Kashgar [today in the western part of China] and Samarkand [in modern-day Uzbekistan] before the first missionaries ever came to England.”