The World

Incas, Trastamaras and Rurikovichi

THE EARTHSHAKER AND THE IMPOTENT

Just as Motecuhzoma was consolidating his empire, far to the south-west, unbeknown to him, another empire builder, Inca Yupanqui, was creating the Tawantinsuyu, the Four Parts Together, the largest empire of the Americas.

Born in the small kingdom of Cusco in Peru, Prince Yupanqui (Honoured) seized the throne from his father and brother. The family believed they were descended from a sacred and wandering stranger-king. Yupanqui’s father Inca Viracocha named another son as heir, but the two of them abandoned the capital during an enemy invasion. Yupanqui refused to go, rallied the people and defeated the invaders, taking the spoils to his father, who refused to recognize him as senior to the chosen heir and ordered his killing. Rebranding himself as Pachacuti – Earthshaker – Yupanqui seized the throne, humiliating the father and embarking on almost forty years of conquests that subdued most of Peru. He beautified Cusco, building the monumental Golden Temple of the Sun at its centre and the Saqsawaman fortress complex with its zigzag walls above the city, and in the mountains he erected the mysterious but astounding terraced palace of Machu Picchu with its royal quarters and Sun Temple.

When he was too old to fight, his son Tupac Inca Yupanqui expanded along the Andes into Ecuador, building a second capital Quito and embarking on an expedition into the Pacific.

These two charismatic Sapa Incas almost completed the empire in just fifty years. The Sapa Inca – Unique Inca – was the title of the divine monarch whose mission from the Sun was to rule the world, but he was also the Son of the Sun and the Lover and Benefactor of the Poor, though he would eat off gold and silver. Wearing a braided turquoise diadem, with a tassel on his forehead, and pendulous earspools, and bearing a feathered staff and a golden mace, he was guarded by 5,000 Long-Ears in red and white tunics. The coronations of Sapa Incas were celebrated by the strangling of 200 children aged four to ten, whose death rites, designed by Pachacuti, saw the burning of mourning clothes and the slitting of the throats of 2,000 llamas, while ‘A thousand boys and girls will be brought and buried for me in places where I slept or enjoyed myself.’

Pachacuti was the ninth Sapa Inca, a god-king who never died. After death, Inca royalty was mummified and revered alongside a golden statue, a surrogate, sitting in their palaces where attendants served them drinks and dressed them in gold decorations; sometimes they attended important events on their thrones. These long-dead ancestors, kings and queens, advised the Sapa Incas. The Incas deployed armies of around 35,000 soldiers and even, on rare occasions, of 100,000, all wearing multicoloured plumes and gold, silver or copper plates, wielding maces, clubs and bows, and singing songs such as ‘We will drink from the skull of the traitor, we will adorn ourselves with a necklace of his teeth, we will play the melody of the pinkullu with flutes made from his bones, we will beat the drum made from his skin and thus we will dance!’ War and trade were facilitated by pack animals, llamas and alpacas; the empire, 2,500 miles long, was linked by 25,000 miles of roads. Agriculture was aided by sprinkling a natural fertilizer, guano – bird faeces – on the fields that grew maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and tomatoes.

The Incas had 2,000 concubines – quotas of ‘conquered women’ were dedicated as Brides of the Sun. The coya or queen, a sister or cousin of the Inca, was powerful. The Incas were polygynous; noble descent passed through both men and women; and children could inherit from either parent. There was no word for virgin, and premarital sex was not condemned. It was thought unhealthy to repress sexual urges. Only noble children were expected to do so, and then only until marriage. Speaking Quechua, the Incas had no writing but communicated by a system of knots. They sacrificed humans to their pantheon but not on a scale comparable to the Mexica.

Tupac expanded into Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, an aggressive, covetous empire, like that of his contemporaries the Mexica and the Aziz-Trastámara family of Iberia, led by warrior monarchs and martial aristocracies, and inspired by religious cults of conquest, loot and redemption. Their conquests seemed unstoppable – but it was the Iberians who first fell apart in a vicious and farcical family feud.

The masturbation of King Enrique IV of Castile by his doctors led to ejaculation, but the royal Trastámara sperm was ‘watery and sterile’. The physicians and courtiers despaired – so the frottage went on. The sperm was collected in a golden tube and given to Enrique’s queen, another Portuguese princess, Juana, to inject into her vagina in a desperate attempt to inseminate an heir. Their Jewish doctor Samaya supervised proceedings ‘to see if she could receive semen – but she could not’.

Blue-eyed and athletic with his English red hair, elongated jaw, bulging forehead and flat, broken nose, Enrique resembled either a lion or a monkey but, shy, gentle and unpretentious, he lacked the extrovert dynamism necessary to control the warriors of Castile.

His father Juan II was a cheerful, hunt-obsessed half-English poet fancier who married Enrique to Bianca of Navarre, but the groom failed to consummate and, embarrassingly, the bloodied wedding sheets were not displayed. While courtiers gossiped about the shape and alignment of the royal penis and possible homosexuality, his father sent priests to interview Enrique’s lovers, prostitutes who testified that ‘his virile member was firm and produced manly seed’ in fecund profusion. Enrique himself believed it was ‘reciprocal impotence due to malign influences’ – bewitchment – and poor Bianca was sent home to her father. In 1451, King Juan, remarried to a Portuguese princess, had another legitimate child – the infanta Isabella, twenty-six years younger than Enrique.

Worried about Portuguese interference, Juan married Enrique to his Portuguese first cousin Juana: interbreeding was already a problem in the Iberian royal family. But as Enrique was again unable to perform, after seven years the independent-minded Juana made her own arrangements, embarking on an affair – the first of many – with her husband’s mayordomo, Beltrán de la Cueva, leading to the birth of a daughter. Europe’s potentates discussed the Trastámara in gynaecological detail. ‘The queen was impregnated without losing her virginity,’ Pope Pius II was informed by his secretary; ‘the sperm [that was] poured into the entrance had penetrated the most hidden places inside her’. But ‘others believed a man other than Enrique was the father’. The daughter was nicknamed La Beltraneja after her natural father.

This was all the more galling because Enrique’s half-sister Isabella possessed all the qualities of a king except masculinity. It was the need to stop her succession that made Enrique’s sperm so important. Isabella’s youth was spent either in impoverished seclusion with her insane mother or resisting her brother’s shameless attempts to marry her off to inappropriate husbands. Surviving in a dangerous and unstable court, keeping her own counsel, she proved intelligent, secretive and fearless, fortified by fanatical Catholic piety and Trastámara grandeur.

As Enrique struggled to impose himself, and the Portuguese king intervened in the hope of taking the kingdom himself, Isabella secretly started to arrange her own marriage – the marriage that would create an empire. But Enrique’s impotence had empowered the Berber kings of Granada, the last Islamic power in Iberia, which now refused to pay its tribute. Enrique tried to prove his martial machismo by leading attacks on Granada, a kingdom so prosperous that its eponymous capital city was, with 165,000 people, by far the biggest city in Iberia and one of the biggest in Europe. Islam was resurgent: Granada easily fought off the Christian attacks, while at the other end of Europe the Ottoman conqueror was mopping up the last outposts of Christendom.

THE SECOND AND THIRD ROME: CAESAR MEHMED AND SOPHIA OF MOSCOW

As Mehmed waited outside Constantinople, his troops raped women and boys, killed and enslaved thousands. ‘Every tent was heaven,’ boasted an Ottoman soldier, ‘filled with boys and girls, sexual servants of paradise, each a stately beauty offering a juicy peach.’ At the end of the third day, the sultan ended the pillage and entered on horseback, dazzled by the Queen of Cities. In the old Boukoleon Palace – its ruins still stand – he reflected on the transience of empires by quoting Saadi:

The spider is curtain bearer in the palace of Khusrau,

The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.

Visiting Hagia Sophia, he caught a soldier looting treasures and clobbered him with the flat of his sword.

Mehmed was now master of a ruined, half-empty Constantinople. Acclaiming himself Kayser-i-Rum, Caesar of Rome, he converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque and built his own palace on the Forum and a second New (Topkapı) Palace on the site of the Mega Palation, which he demolished.^* As for Halil, his grand vizier, who had foiled all his schemes since 1444, he was beheaded, the first of many viziers to be killed. Henceforth most viziers were not Turks but formerly enslaved Slavs or Greeks, all converted to Islam. At least one of the Palaiologos nephews of the last emperor converted to Islam and rose to grand vizier. Ottoman tolerance has been exaggerated by historians. ‘Tolerance is not the same as celebrating diversity,’ writes Marc David Baer, but ‘a state of inequality’. Jews and Christians existed at the mercy of the ruler, providing they offered total submission, often having to wear special badges and costumes to mark their inferiority to Muslims and suffering bursts of persecution. There were always exceptions: Caesar-sultans do not have friends, but Mehmed’s closest courtier was his physician, an Italian Jew named Giacomo of Gaeta who converted to become Hekim Yakub (Dr Jacob) Pasha, later chief vizier.

The pope called for a crusade to restore the Second Rome, but to the north Mehmed’s conquests contributed to the rise of Russia, transforming the princes of Moscow from recent Mongol enforcers to haughty Orthodox Caesars.

Scarcely resting after taking Constantinople, Mehmed looked to exploit the ruin of the Golden Horde, forming an alliance with Haji Giray, descendant of Genghis and Jochi. Giray founded his own family kingdom, the Tatar khanate of the Crimea, which remained a formidable European power for 300 years, fielding armies of 50,000 cavalry that at various times took Moscow and almost Vienna.

Mehmed and Giray attacked the Italian cities of the Crimea and took over their slave markets. Giray then started raiding Christian Poland, Muscovy and Lithuania to capture fair-skinned slaves. Mehmed galloped around the Black Sea into Wallachia (Romania) where, backed by Radu the Beautiful, he attacked the prince’s defiant brother Vlad, who hated the Ottomans. Vlad made up for his meagre resources by intrepid tactics and eyewatering cruelty, killing Mehmed’s envoys by driving nails into their turbans. In between Ottoman invasions and during three reigns as voivode, Vlad purged enemies, Saxons and Turks, by rectally impaling them in forests of stakes – a practice which shocked even the sultan and earned him the epithet the Impaler, inspiration for Dracula – before he was driven out and replaced by Radu.^*

In 1460, Mehmed mopped up the offshoots of Constantinople; he captured Trebizond and advanced into Greece, which remained Ottoman until the 1820s. There he expelled the last emperor’s brother, Thomas Palaiologos, Despot of Morea, who escaped with his baby daughter Zoë. The girl was adopted by the pope. In a demonstration of how female power could connect and transform, this gifted princess would have a special role in the creation of Russia: in 1472, when she was twenty-three, the pope married her by proxy in St Peter’s to the thirty-two-year-old grand prince of Muscovy, Ivan III. Adopting the Orthodox name Sophia, this Greek-Roman sophisticate arrived in rough, cold Moscow to meet her fearsome husband for the first time.

Ivan had been raised in the toughest school. Moscow’s rise was far from assured. For a long time it looked as if Lithuania, not Muscovy, would unite a Slavic empire. The dukes of Lithuania were the last pagan potentates in Europe until in 1385 the pagan potentate Jagiełło, thirty-three years old, converted to Catholicism to win the crown of Poland by marrying Jadwiga, its heiress.^* While the two monarchies remained formally separate, Jagiełło called himself grand duke of the Lithuanians, king of Poland and lord of Rus, creating a singular Lithuanian–Polish union that became the biggest state in Europe. Jagiełło, who took the name Władysław II, defeated the Teutonic Knights in the north, later swallowing Prussia before expanding southwards, gobbling up the lands of old Rus.

Moscow was eclipsed: its prince Vasili II lost control of his kingdom and family, was captured by the Mongol khan of Kazan and then blinded by a cousin. His son Ivan, aged six at the time, witnessed the blinding. But Vasili the Blind won the family war just by waiting, and his return to Moscow was marked by a savage showdown, aided by Ivan, whom he proclaimed co-ruler. Vasili had emphasized his Constantinople link – his sister was the penultimate empress. Now he and Ivan claimed leadership of the Orthodox by translatio imperii, the transfer of power from Constantinople to Muscovy – later hailed as the Third Rome – aided by his family link, and then Ivan’s marriage to Sophia.

Nicknamed Grozny – Terrible – Ivan was lean, tall, with terrifying eyes, a heavy boozer capable of showy vision and quicksilver action, conquering swathes of the territory of old rivals, Novgorod and Tver. Sophia supposedly encouraged him to stop paying Mongol tribute. Golden Khan Ahmed, taking advantage of fraternal fighting among the Muscovites, attacked with the encouragement of Poland–Lithuania. Moscow was in peril, but Ivan secured the backing of Ahmed’s rivals, the Girays of the Crimea. In October 1480, he faced the Mongols at the River Ugra, a standoff that ended when Ahmed withdrew, marking the eclipse – but not the end – of Mongol power^* and a setback for Poland–Lithuania, which temporarily divided in the 1490s.

Ivan had doubled Muscovy and his own magnificence, now calling himself Autocrat of All the Russias and, for the first time, Caesar – tsar. The Muscovites used the title for both the Mongol khan and the Roman basileus. As a vassal and later successor state to the khans, Ivan and his heirs commandeered the Mongol belief in absolute power of the sacred tsar, his holy mission to conquer, total ownership of the land and control of over all their ‘slaves’ – as all subjects, even nobles, were known. The imperial splendour and Orthodox mission of Constantinople were vital too, but it was the Mongol tradition that is probably key to understanding Russia right into the twenty-first century.

Sophia, princess of Constantinople, could have been a colourless cipher, but not only was the marriage surprisingly successful – she produced eleven children, five sons and six daughters – theirs became a remarkable partnership.

A HIT GONE WRONG: MAGNIFICO AND MICHELANGELO

Although women in Moscow resided in separate quarters, the terem, Sophia – this ‘cunning woman’ – chaired her own council and freely received envoys; moreover ‘The prince acted very often on her suggestions.’ She supervised the commissioning of Italian architects to embellish the Kremlin. Ivan and Sophia looked towards Italy and its arbiters of taste, the Medici. Yet those Florentines had just survived a terrifying assault.

On a Sunday morning in April 1478, the two Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, rulers of Florence, accompanied a visiting cardinal, the city’s archbishop and a fellow banking heir to the cathedral. Unbeknown to the Medici, the young cardinal and the men around them were all assassins. Seven hitmen, including two priests, lurking behind the high altar, pretended to be waiting for the service to begin. At the ringing of the sacristy bell, they drew their daggers and fell upon the Medici brothers.

Dark-eyed with his black hair parted in the middle, Lorenzo de’ Medici, not yet thirty, brought up by humanists and scholars, was already celebrated for his ‘joyful nature’, his kindness to friends, his saucy poetry, his patronage of artists, the pleasure he took in singing, hunting and playing calcio, a football-like game. He was no less admired for his adroit management of Florence amid the perpetual tournament of power between the many city states and larger kingdoms that made up Italy. When his father, Piero, died, the Signoria invited Lorenzo, then just twenty, ‘to take on myself the care of the state as my father and grandfather did’. He hesitated, he said, ‘considering that the burden and danger were great’. Then: ‘I consented unwillingly.’

In 1471, Francesco della Rovere, an energetic, uncouth, toothless fisherman’s son, was elected Pope Sixtus IV and immediately reappointed Lorenzo de’ Medici as his banker. Sixtus enhanced Rome, building the first bridge across the Tiber since antiquity, established the Vatican Library and commissioned a small chapel, named Sistine after himself, inviting Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli to paint its frescoes. Sixtus was an enthusiastic ‘lover of boys and sodomites’ who took his own nephews as lovers. Since priests could no longer marry, popes promoted their nephews as territorial magnates during their short reigns – hence the word nepotism. Sixtus raised six nephews to cardinal. But when he asked the Medici to lend the 60,000 ducats to buy the town of Imola for one of them, Girolamo Riario, Lorenzo refused, hoping to buy it for Florence.

Sixtus was infuriated, borrowed the money from another Florentine family, the Pazzi, and decided to destroy Lorenzo the Magnificent. He encouraged his seventeen-year-old nephew Cardinal Raffaele Riario, along with the young banker Francesco Pazzi and the embittered archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, to murder the Medici and seize Florence. Sixtus tried to cover himself: if Lorenzo were to be killed, Girolamo Riario asked, ‘will Your Holiness pardon who did it?’

‘You’re a beast,’ replied Sixtus. ‘I don’t want anyone killed, just regime change,’ adding, ‘Lorenzo’s a villain.’ The Riarios decided that a visit by the youngest cardinal would lure the Medici to their deaths.

As the sacristy bell rang, a priestly hitman stabbed Lorenzo in the neck but the fit Medici jerked free, swung his sword at the assassins and vaulted the altar rail just as another assassin, shouting, ‘Take that traitor,’ raised his dagger and shattered the skull of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano. The assassins stabbed him nineteen times, so frenziedly that Francesco Pazzi cut himself.

Lorenzo, escorted by his retainers, ran back to the Medici Palace. ‘Giuliano? Is he safe?’ asked Lorenzo as his friends sucked his wound clean, in case the dagger was poisoned. At the Palazzo della Signoria nearby, Archbishop Salviati stormed the seat of government with a posse of Perugian mercenaries, but as the Vacco bell tolled, Medici henchmen ran in and slaughtered them, parading their heads on lances as they hunted for the assassins. Francesco Pazzi’s uncle Jacopo was caught, tortured and hanged, then propped up at the door of the Pazzi Palace where his head was used as a doorknob, while the two murderous priests were castrated. A rope was tied around the neck of the archbishop, who was stripped naked, then tossed out the window where he hung beside the naked Pazzi. As they wriggled and struggled to survive, the nude archbishop sank his teeth into Pazzi’s thigh. A young artist, living at the Medici palace, was fascinated by this: Leonardo da Vinci sketched one of these bodies.

The coup made Lorenzo even more powerful. Sixtus excommunicated him and invited the sinister King Ferrante of Naples, who liked to mummify his enemies and keep them fully dressed in a macabre museum, to overthrow the Medici, but Lorenzo set off for Naples. There was a risk he would end up in Ferrante’s museum. ‘My desire is that by my life or my death, my misfortune or my prosperity, I may contribute to the wealth of our city.’ He returned, hailed as the Magnificent, having delivered peace.

‘If Florence was to have a tyrant, she could never have found a better or more delightful one,’ a Florentine writer later commented. Neglecting his bank – it had lent far too much to the English king Edward IV, who was mired in a civil war between different lines of royal family – Il Magnifico devoted himself to politics. Married to a Roman Orsini,^* he adored his children, writing plays for them to perform, but he was realistic about their talents. ‘I have three sons,’ he said, ‘one good, one shrewd, one fool.’ The fool was the eldest Piero, clumsy and tactless, lined up to succeed to his role in Florence. The good one was the second son Giuliano, but the shrewd one was Giovanni, fat, genial, sybaritic. Sensing that the key to Florence was Rome, Lorenzo married his daughter to a natural son of Pope Innocent VIII, whom he persuaded to make Giovanni a cardinal. ‘You’re the youngest cardinal not only today but at any time in the past,’ he wrote to the boy. ‘Show your gratitude by a holy, exemplary and chaste life in Rome, which is a sink of iniquity.’ The son of his murdered brother, Giuliano, joined the household, also destined for Rome.

Lorenzo founded a neo-Platonic school in the San Marco gardens next to the Medici Palace where young artists lived in an atmosphere of artistic freedom and erotic exploration. One such young protégé was an illegitimate artisan from the Tuscan village of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci, son of a notary, had been arrested in 1476 for sodomy but then released. ‘Police records,’ writes Catherine Fletcher, ‘show the majority of men in later fifteenth-century Florence had or were accused of having sex with other men on at least one occasion.’ Lorenzo admired a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head that Leonardo had made. When in 1482 the duke of Milan asked for a sculptor, Lorenzo sent him Leonardo, who advertised himself as a military engineer, adding that he could also sculpt. Italy was a battlefield of northern dynasties – the French Valois, the German Habsburgs – and local warlords, who enhanced their power with war and art. War came first. Without victory there was nothing for the artists to celebrate and no spoils to pay them with. These warlords were innovators in military technology, improving the velocity and facility of arquebuses and artillery, and fortifications designed to withstand their bombardment.^* Leonardo got the job in Milan – just one of Medici’s protégés.

In 1489, Lorenzo invited Ghirlandaio to send gifted pupils from among his apprentices. Ghirlandaio sent a boy of thirteen whose talents in sculpture were so striking that he exclaimed, ‘Why, this boy knows more than I do.’ Raised in a small Tuscan town, son of an official appointed by the Medici but descended from impoverished nobility, Michelangelo di Buonarroti bristled with family pride yet was attracted to the rough workmanship of marble: ‘Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.’ He was an irrepressible, obstreperous youth, short-fused and often impossible, yet also passionate and witty; his shoulders and chest were muscular from the physical labour of sculpture, his body sinewy and strong, ‘his eyes brown the colour of horn but changeable and flecked with yellow and blue’. In Lorenzo’s school, he was involved in homosexual love affairs with older men, an ephebophilic relationship being a rite of passage in Italy at that time. These sometimes led to fights, one of which saw him getting his nose broken. But he focused on his art, and enjoyed choosing his marble from the quarries. When he crafted a faun’s head in classical style, Il Magnifico was dazzled, asking the boy’s father if the boy could stay. Invited to dine with the Medici family daily, Michelangelo grew up knowing the children, particularly the future pope Giovanni. He was also encouraged to show ‘the results of his labours to Il Magnifico each day’.

The magnificence of Lorenzo impressed Europe, even the Muscovites. When Ivan the Great wished to create a fitting citadel for the newest power in Europe, he and Sophia, raised in Italy, turned to the Medici.

SOPHIA’S KREMLIN; SCANDERBEG’S ALBANIA; BELLINI’S PORTRAIT

The tsars hired one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s architects, Aristotele Fioravanti, who travelled to Moscow and started the Dormition Cathedral, while also serving as an artillery engineer for Ivan’s sieges. When Fioravanti wanted to go home, Ivan arrested him and he perished in prison. But all tsars down to Nicholas II were crowned in the Dormition Cathedral.^*

As befitting a Byzantine, Sophia proved adept at Kremlin intrigue. Her eldest son, Vasili, was half Rurikovich, half Palaiologos, but in 1497 Ivan crowned his grandson Dmitri as grand prince, which drove Vasili, backed by Sophia, to attempt a coup. When it failed, Sophia and son fell from favour, but they somehow destroyed their rivals and Vasili returned to power, crowned as co-ruler, while Dmitri and his mother were arrested. Dynasties have always set women against women and pitted mothers against mothers. Here, Sophia was triumphant. Elena was probably poisoned; Dmitri died in prison. ‘I’ll give the principality to whoever I like,’ said the dying Ivan handing over to Vasili III,^* who would be the father of Ivan the Terrible.

Across the Balkans, Mehmed enforced Ottoman control, incorporating Serbia and Bosnia; only the Lord of Albania, indomitable mountain warrior Scanderbeg held out, backed by Venice until his death when Albania too was subjugated. Mehmed then built a Mediterranean navy to confront Venice, which faced the prospect of losing its empire. When the Venetians made peace, they sent Mehmed a special present in the form of Gentile Bellini, official artist of the doge who, with his brother Giovanni, were Venice’s most famous. Artists, like everything else, existed in dynasties: their father Jacopo had trained the boys alongside the Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna, who then married their sister Nicolosia. Once in Constantinople, Bellini painted the sultan, catching his alert, foxy intelligence – an intelligence crudely demonstrated when Mehmed was said to have won a debate with the artist on the anatomical perspective of his Head of St John the Baptist by beheading a slave.

Having taken the Second Rome, Mehmed turned to attack the first, in 1480 dispatching his fleet from Albania to take Otranto, causing panic in Italy and encouraging a new holy war against Islam that was to earn its first success in Spain.^* There Queen Isabella of Castile created an Inquisition to investigate and purge secret Jews poisoning the purity of Christians and launched a war to eliminate the Muslim kingdom of Granada.

* Constantinople’s population may have been just 30,000, but Mehmed ordered his magnates to sponsor new neighbourhoods, protected Greeks and invited in Jews, who were being persecuted in western Europe. Within twenty-five years, its population was 80,000, of which 60 per cent were Muslim, 20 per cent Christian, 10 per cent Jewish. Mehmed demolished the Church of the Apostles (tomb of Constantine and emperors), built his own mosque complex on top and constructed the Ayyub Ansari Mosque (on the ‘discovered’ site of a Companion of Muhammad who died during the siege of 668), as well as the fortress-arsenal of Seven Towers. Although still called Constantinople by the Turks, it was also known as Istanbul, derived from an old Greek nickname ‘eis ten polin’ (‘to the City’), adapted to Istambol. It remained the Ottoman/Turkish capital until 1923, and its name was officially changed to Istanbul in 1930.

* While the Impaler died fighting, Radu and the Dracula dynasty ruled on as Ottoman clients. For 250 years, the sultans appointed trusted Greek princes, some of them descended from emperors, from the Phanariot district of Constantinople to rule Moldavia and Wallachia, later combined to form Romania.

* Queen Jadwiga was one of the two daughters of Louis the Great, the Anjou king of Hungary and Poland whose widow Elisabeth of Bosnia tried to preserve the kingdoms for the two girls. Maria became queen of Hungary, but her mother Elisabeth overplayed her hand, murdering the male claimant, which led to her arrest and strangling in front of her daughter. Faced with marriage to a pagan, Jadwiga prayed and finally agreed, provided he converted. Jadwiga and Jagiełło were a successful partnership, she dying in childbirth, he ruling the joint kingdoms until 1434, establishing a dynasty that ruled for over a century and provided kings to Hungary and Bohemia.

* Ahmed, khan of the Golden Horde, had been a Eurasian potentate, a Golden prince, married to a Tamerlanian princess. After the debacle on the Ugra, Ahmed was assassinated by his cousin Ibak Khan of Sibir, his wife returned to Herat and the Golden Horde shattered for ever into several kingdoms. In the east, the khanate of Sibir, one of the lesser-known successor states of the Mongol empire, had been founded by Taibuga, a descendant of Jochi, who ruled from a town near today’s Tyumen. On the Volga and on the Caspian, a Golden khan ruled Kazan and Astrakhan. In Crimea, the Girays ruled a buffer state between Ottomans, Poles and Muscovites.

* Like his father, Lorenzo bought slaves with whom he had illegitimate children: these slaves were not from Africa but from Circassia in the Caucasus, probably traded through Genoese and Ottoman traders.

* In 1482, when Leonarda da Vinci offered his services to the duke of Milan, he boasted of his expertise in ‘1. “burning and destroying” enemy bridges; 2; “I make infinite numbers of bridges, mantlets and scaling ladders” for sieges. 3. “I have also types of cannons” 4. “Mines and secret passages” 5. “I will make cannon mortar and light ordinance … that are quite out of the ordinary”’ and only in point 6 does he add: ‘Also I can execute sculpture in marble bronze and clay.’ He did not mention he could also do some painting.

* Next, Ivan and Sophia invited Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario, who built the Palace of Facets and the red crenellations of the Kremlin walls, including Ivan’s Belltower – all of which now appear distinctively Russian but derived from a clever merging of Byzantine and Italian styles. While Ivan’s army was traditionally Mongol-style cavalry with bows and arrows, the Italians brought cannon and firearms.

* It was during Vasili’s reign that Muscovite clergymen started to push the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome in succession to Constantinople.

* Just after taking Otranto in 1481, Mehmed the Conqueror died at the age of forty-nine. In the ensuing showdown, possibly overseen by his son Bayezid II, his grand vizier, the Jewish doctor Hekim Yakub, was accused by the Janissaries of being a Venetian agent: he had just negotiated a peace treaty with Venice. The Janissaries murdered Hekim and looted his palace. Ottoman tolerance had its limits: thereafter there were many more Slavic-born viziers but no more Jews.