The World

Manikongos, Borgias and Columbuses

ISABELLA AND FERDINAND: CONQUERORS OF ISLAM, SCOURGE OF THE JEWS

Red-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, pious and acute, Isabella was the antithesis of her thin-spermed half-brother Enrique, who harassed her to marry a rash of unsuitable husbands – including a hunchbacked Englishman (the duke of York, future Richard III). Isabella defied him and, as the family feud went against Enrique, he recognized her as heir.

Isabella meanwhile secretly negotiated her own marriage. She had known her candidate since childhood: Ferdinand of Aragon was playful, handsome and cunning but he was a double cousin: his father, Juan, king of the maritime Aragonese empire of Catalonia, Sicily and Sardinia, was a Trastámaran and his mother was Castilian; and their marriage would unite two kingdoms. It was a lot to arrange: Isabella also had to fix papal dispensation for consanguinity. Just eighteen years old, she enjoyed the drama, signing cryptic messages as The Princess. She was both an excited teenager planning an elopement and a hard-headed politician designing her future reign, in both of which she would perform God’s work.

When Enrique ordered ‘that I be captured and deprived of my freedom’, Isabella sent a note to Ferdinand redolent with romantic conspiracy, ‘Order me and I’ll do it.’ Ferdinand replied with a gold necklace adorned with ‘seven fat rubies’. ‘To run the same risks she is running’, the seventeen-year-old Ferdinand, king of Sicily, wearing disguise, galloped by night to Valladolid to fulfil their assignation, accompanied by five horsemen.

On the road, they met an urbane Spanish cardinal who had rushed from Rome with the bull permitting the marriage. The deliverer was Rodrigo Borgia, whose libertinism and vulgarity horrified Isabella. The Borgias, minor Aragonese nobles, had already flourished in Rome: Rodrigo’s uncle, Calixtus III, had promoted him to cardinal. Borgia proved a masterful Vatican player. When Paul II suffered a coronary (according to his enemies, while being sodomized), Borgia delivered the tiara to Sixtus IV, who backed Isabella. She was informed of Borgia’s ‘uncontrollable passions’ and his ‘depraved games’ featuring naked mudwrestling ‘courtesans, Jews and donkeys’ – but he was her cardinal.

In October 1469, she spotted Ferdinand riding into Valladolid – ‘That’s him! That’s him!’ – where they swiftly married. ‘Last night in the service of God, we consummated the marriage,’ announced Ferdinand. Isabella added, ‘This subject is embarrassing and hateful to noblewomen,’ but ‘our actions are the evidence we must present’. The bloody sheets were displayed.

Ferdinand ‘loved [her] greatly although he also gave himself to other women’. Suffering regular pangs of jealousy, Isabella tolerated his mistresses and bastards. Four infantas arrived fast. Keen to conceive a son, they consulted their Jewish doctor Lorenzo Badoc before the birth of Infante Juan. They kept the kingdoms separate but agreed never to overrule each other. Ferdinand was a lover of ‘all kinds of games’ whose ‘special gift [was] that whoever spoke to him wanted to love and serve him because he talked in such a friendly way’. He was happy to take Isabella’s advice because, wrote a courtier, ‘he knew she was so very capable’.

On Enrique’s death, the couple created a new entity, Spain, but they had to fight for it. Afonso the African and his Portuguese troops invaded, joining their other enemies. ‘You can freely kill them without any punishment. I’m just a weak woman,’ Isabella announced, rallying her knights, but ‘If there’s danger, it would be better to take it like medicine and for it to be over in an hour than to suffer a prolonged illness,’ adding, ‘If you tell me women shouldn’t talk about this, I answer: I don’t see who’s risking more than me!’ At sea the Portuguese routed her Castilians at the battle of Guinea, winning the gold and slave trades, the first European clash for Africa; but on land Isabella expelled Afonso. Spain was home to many Muslims and 150,000 Jews. The latter had been there since Roman times, though many more had converted to Catholicism; these conversos were now the subject of suspicion as alien subverters of Christendom.

Isabella’s itinerant court, moving between Seville, Toledo and Valladolid, was pious and prim yet not joyless – she enjoyed dancing, music, singing and dressing up, sporting dresses of scarlet brocade and gold. She knew the Jewish leaders well: the octogenarian Abraham Seneor was a veteran adviser, and her doctor was Jewish. But in 1478 she asked Pope Sixtus for her own Holy Office of the Inquisition, appointing her childhood confessor, the ascetic Tomás da Torquemada, as grand inquisitor. The couple sought denunciations of secret ‘Judaizers’ who were tortured on the rack and by waterboarding, their property seized. Then if they were declared to be ‘relapsed’, these relapsos – not practising Jews but Christians found to have secretly practised Judaism – were dressed in coned sanbenito caps and gowns at public ceremonies known as autos-da-fé – acts of faith, ritualistic penitential sessions. From 1481, these were witnessed by the monarchs and nobility. If guilty of relapsing, recalcitrant heretics were ‘relaxed to the justice of the secular arm’ and incinerated naked and alive outside the city. If they confessed, they were garrotted before burning.^*

Enriched by the estates of the dead and the elimination of ‘this heretical crime’, Isabella, confirmed in her belief that Castile was riddled with Judaizing heretics, was enthusiastic. The Seville Inquisition dealt with 16,000 cases, and 2,000 were executed in the first ten years. Isabella then turned to the Muslims.

In 1481, a posse of Islamic Granadan horsemen captured a Castilian town, an embarrassment that accelerated Isabella’s crusade to eliminate the rich but chaotic amirate of Granada. Ferdinand commanded in the field, while Isabella arranged the supplies, financed by her Jewish advisers Samuel Abulafia and Isaac Abravanel.

On horseback, power-dressed to maximum effect, Isabella delivered provisions to the military camps while overseeing the negotiations that encouraged civil war among the Granadans. In this she was aided by the capture of Amir Muhammad XII who, leaving his son El Infantico Ahmed as a hostage, became their vassal. The Muslims won some skirmishes – ‘I heard what happened with the Moors,’ she wrote. ‘I am greatly displeased’ – and in 1487, while the monarchs were besieging Málaga, a Muslim tried to assassinate them. After he had been killed by Isabella’s guards, the man’s body was catapulted into Málaga. When the city fell, Isabella enslaved everyone, distributing as many as 11,000 slaves. As the war dragged on, the queen in 1489 visited the siege of Baza, where her entourage was joined by a rumpled Genoese sailor who had just arrived in Castile.

Son of a Genoese weaver, taverner and cheesemonger, Cristóbal Colón – Columbus – had sailed with Genoese traders to England, Iceland and Guinea. A compiler of apocalyptic prophecies and travel books – particularly those of the Bible and Marco Polo respectively – he was visionary, loquacious, insecure, mendacious and shamelessly pushy, but also a tough and enterprising sailor, obsessed like so many, then and now, with the coming end of the world. Columbus was married to Felipa Perestrello, daughter of the late Madeiran potentate, who had shown him family papers suggesting the possibility of western access to the Indies – and given him an entrée to the Portuguese court.

Columbus presented the vigorous new king, João II, Isabella’s cousin, with his vision of a world-changing voyage.

THE MANIKONGO OF KONGO AND EL HOMBRE OF PORTUGAL

João was a good fit for Columbus: as great-nephew of the Navigator, he had accompanied his father Afonso the African on his conquests. Inheriting an overextended crown aged twenty-six, betrayed by overmighty grandees, he beheaded one cousin, the duke of Braganza, and invited another, the duke of Viseu, to his chamber for ‘an act of private justice’: there he personally gutted Viseu before killing all his associates. No wonder Isabella always called him El Hombre; for the Portuguese he was O Príncipe Perfeito.

In 1482, he built a castle on the Gold Coast, São Jorge da Mina (The Mine, still standing), as a base for the gold trade which now provided a quarter of royal revenue.^* Around 8,000 ounces of gold a year were sent to Lisbon, rising to 25,000. The Portuguese inserted themselves into the local slave trade, buying around 500 slaves a year from Oba Ewuare’s Benin. Some were sold through Elmina or Cape Verde to Akan kings of Denkyira, who used them as porters and labourers; others were sold to Europeans to work on São Tomé, Madeira and Canaria.

While Isabella fought Granada, El Hombre dispatched a courtier, Diogo Cão, to push further south, where he penetrated the Congo River and heard of the powerful Kongo kingdom inland. Cão started to negotiate with the manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu, who saw the Portuguese as useful allies. In 1491, Nzinga gave João II’s delegation a magnificent welcome – 3,000 warriors with bows and parrot-feathered headdresses, dancing to drums and ivory trumpets, who escorted them to his capital Mbanza. There, holding court, he agreed to an alliance with Lisbon in return for his own baptism, taking the Christian name João I of Kongo, while his son Nzinza a Mbemba became Afonso. Their vision of Catholicism was a syncretic merging with their own religious customs, a royal cult linked to the sacred power of the manikongo, suffused in baKongo spirituality. When Portuguese priests demanded he dismiss his harem, João changed his mind, but his son Afonso, a regional governor in his thirties, went on to study Catholicism. On his father’s death in 1505, aided by his mother, Afonso bid for the throne and defeated his anti-Christian brother in a battle in which he was aided by a vision of St James. Creating a Portuguese-style nobility with titles, family crests and Christian religious-military orders, he learned to read, built schools for biblical studies and founded a capital of stone palaces and churches. Using Portuguese muskets and horses, he expanded his kingdom, keeping some of his captured slaves to work on his own plantations, giving hundreds to the king in Lisbon while selling thousands to Portuguese merchants.

But this was not the only choice for African kings. Oba Esigie of Benin traded captives and pepper with the Portuguese, but devised a wiser relationship, strictly maintaining his independence.^*

In 1488 El Hombre sent a squire, Bartolomeu Dias, to sail round Africa’s southern tip, which he named Cape of Storms (later Cape of Good Hope), opening a route to the spicy riches of the Indian Ocean – just at the moment when Columbus may have proposed his own voyage in the opposite direction – though there is no evidence he spoke to João. But the Iberian courts were one big vicious family. João had just married his son to Isabella’s eldest daughter – so Columbus moved on to the Trastámarans. Around 1482, he had arrived in Seville to find a place to educate his son, visiting the Franciscan convent La Rábida, where he met the brilliant, well-connected friar Antonio de Marchena, who encouraged the idea of sailing to India across the Ocean Sea (Atlantic) – enabling a Last World Emperor to conquer Jerusalem. This was Ferdinand, who as king of Aragon had a claim to Jerusalem (a fief of Naples). Marchena introduced him to the aristocrats who launched him at court.

Columbus dispatched his brother to propose the plan to the new English king, Henry Tudor. Insecurely established and notoriously miserly, Henry demurred, thus missing an opportunity to create an earlier English empire. Columbus therefore trailed after the Spanish monarchs. Just after the birth of her youngest daughter Catalina, Isabella listened to the fascinating and frequently preposterous Genoan. Often she and Ferdinand burst out laughing at his performances, moments he mentioned proudly in his letters.

Just as the monarchs called an end to their crusade, leaving Muhammad XII with Granada as a tributary city state, he defied his Christian patrons. They moved in for the kill. As they besieged the city, Isabella resided in an almost caliphal tent in camp. When she went to view the battlements, Arab knights sortied out; she watched as 600 were killed. Granadans were now eating ‘horses, dogs, cats’. Finally the amir negotiated peace with the monarchs’ general, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, who spoke fluent Arabic.

On 2 January 1492, Isabella, dressed theatrically in Arab morisca style in al-juba (an all-embracing cloak), knee-length skirt, long sleeves, brocaded silk, accompanied by Ferdinand and their son Juan, themselves in Arab gear, together with their retinue, including the white-haired Columbus, watched Muhammad XII ride out towards them. The amir doffed his hat, unstirrupped one foot and leaned forward to kiss the queen’s hand, until she magnanimously waved this aside and handed over his son El Infantico Ahmed, receiving in return 400 Christian slaves and the city keys. After taking his leave, Muhammad paused at the top of the hill – the Moor’s Last Sigh – to look back on 700 years of al-Andalus as the Catholics celebrated mass. While the Granadan nobility sailed for Morocco, the Trastámarans now had around 400,000 Muslims to add to their 150,000 Jews.^*

Appreciating the feverish millenarian exhilaration of this moment, Columbus requested an audience. Finally he had timed it perfectly.

ANACAONA, THE ADMIRAL AND THE QUEEN

In the Santa Fé camp, awaiting their entrance into Granada, the monarchs listened to Columbus’ magical vision of an oceanic empire, and Ferdinand as the Last World Emperor and King of Jerusalem. While the Portuguese were coining gold in Guinea, Isabella had only the Canaries. The monarchs were minded to back Columbus, but the expulsion of the Moors encouraged a radical solution to the Jewish problem, which may have been Ferdinand’s idea. They asked Torquemada to draft an order of expulsion for all Jews. The spirit was not entirely new: the Crusades had launched a spree of Jewish massacres. English, French and Austrian Jews had already been expelled. The plague had unleashed a spasm of anti-Jewish violence, and there had been a Castilian massacre in 1391. But Spain was home to the world’s biggest Jewish community.

‘Why do you act in this way against your subjects?’ asked their Jewish courtier Abravanel. ‘Impose strong taxes on us!’

‘Do you believe this comes from me?’ protested Isabella. ‘It is the Lord who put this idea into the king’s heart.’ The Jewish leaders tried again with Ferdinand, who blamed God and wife. ‘We worked hard without success,’ recalled Abravanel. ‘It was the queen who stood behind him and hardened his resolve.’ He offered 30,000 ducats in return for withdrawing the expulsion decree.

‘Judas once sold the son of God for thirty pieces of silver,’ cried Torquemada, laying a crucifix before the monarchs. ‘Your majesties think of selling him for a second time for 30,000! Well, here he is, sell him!’

On 31 March 1492, just after the monarchs had taken up residence in Granada’s Alhambra Palace, they issued their decree ‘send[ing] all Jews out of our kingdoms’ and ordering that they should ‘never return’. Either they must convert or they must leave, without exception, in four months’ time. Confronted by the most traumatic experience in Jewish history between the fall of the Jerusalem Temple and the Holocaust, many Jews including their leader Seneor chose to convert. But tens of thousands (including the family of this author) refused to betray their faith, first losing all their property – either it was stolen or they were forced to sell – then leaving el-Sefarad, their homeland for over a thousand years. Some, suffering the predations of people smugglers who prey on migrants, embarked on voyages to Islamic Morocco or to the mercantile cities of Italy and Flanders. But they found the greatest safety in two eastern kingdoms: in Poland–Lithuania, which, due to its own spirit of idiosyncratic tolerance, starting with the Statute of Kalisz back in 1264, was now the freest country in Europe, and in the Ottoman sultanate, Mehmed having already invited Jews to settle in Constantinople. His son welcomed the Sephardi Jews. ‘You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,’ observed Bayezid II, ‘but he’s impoverished his own country and enriched mine.’ Thousands settled in Constantinople and Thessalonica. But initially many Jews, including this author’s ancestors, tramped across the border to Lisbon, paying a tax to João.

Exhilarated by this stringent anti-Jewish action, on 17 April the monarchs recalled Columbus, who after praising them for expelling ‘the Jews from all of your kingdoms’ and unleashing the Inquisition, again proposed his voyage. Finally he was commissioned to sail, receiving 10 per cent of revenues in perpetuity and the titles admiral of the Ocean Sea, viceroy and governor of any lands he might discover, all hereditary because he hoped to found a dynasty. After the death of his wife, he brought up his son Diego, but his new teen girlfriend Beatriz Enríquez also delivered a son, whom they named Fernando after the king.

On 3 August, Columbus set sail in three little ships with ninety sailors of many races, including Pedro Alonso Niño, a free African, an experienced pilot. On 12 October, they struck land in the Bahamas, then sailed on to Cuba and Haiti, where Columbus encountered local peoples: friendly and peaceful ones whom the Spanish called Taínos, and hostile and martial ones whom they called Caribs. The admiral was convinced this was the Indies and so called all the inhabitants los Indos.^*

Isabella ruled that her Christian free subjects could not be enslaved. Columbus initially applied this principle to the peaceful Taínos, who were instead forced to work as indentured labourers while the cannibalistic Caribs were enslaved. Returning home to report to the monarchs with gold artefacts and a group of Taínos, he stopped off at Lisbon and boasted of his finds to a jealous King João, who considered having him liquidated. Back in Spain, he presented his treasures and prisoners to the monarchs, who were excited: ‘We have recently brought about the discovery of some islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea that’s part of the Indies.’ Appointing the two Columbus boys as pages to the heir Don Juan, Isabella sent the admiral back with seventeen ships, funded by money taken from the Jews, filled with colonists and soldiers to found a colony. On his four voyages, Columbus landed at Jamaica, Costa Rica and Panama, but Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic) was his headquarters, where he appointed his brother Bartolomeu as adelantado – military governor – and where they founded a town, Santo Domingo. But first Hispaniola, divided into chieftainships, had to be conquered; in response, the kasike of Maguana, Caonabo, tried to destroy the Spanish. Quickly the Columbuses exploited rivalries to recruit Taíno auxiliaries, while Spanish men seized local women as sex slaves or partners. The Columbuses led 200 Spanish troops and Taíno auxiliaries with war dogs against Caonabo, who was captured but died on the voyage to Spain. His widow, Anacaona (Golden Flower), fled back to the court of her brother Bohechío, kasike of the western Xaragua. Together they made peace with Bartolomeu Columbus and recognized Isabella. When her brother died, Anacaona ruled as kasike.

Columbus was determined to make a fortune. Nicknamed Pharaoh by his underlings, he turned out to be a thin-skinned, narcissistic tyrant. He sent 4,000 enslaved Caribs for sale in Spain, explaining that the settlements could be ‘paid for in slaves taken from these cannibals; we think they’ll be finer than other slaves once freed from their inhumanity’. Isabella disapproved, fearing that enslavement would undermine evangelization, but already Columbus’ depredations were provoking native resistance and Castilian resentment. Taíno rebellions were repressed. Rushing back to justify himself to Isabella, he mixed Christian mysticism with auric promises and whining insecurity, denouncing her courtiers who ‘criticize and belittle the enterprise’. The monarchs backed Columbus: ‘Your Highnesses’ reply was to laugh and say I shouldn’t worry about anything.’ Columbus returned to Hispaniola. But his misrule now provoked Castilian mutinies.

Finally Isabella sent a courtier, Francisco de Bobadilla, to find out what was going on and to help Columbus. Bobadilla arrived to find a heart of darkness – hanged bodies swinging from gibbets, the Columbuses hunting Spanish rebels, lording it over estates of Taíno slaves, cutting off tongues, ears and noses. The tropical colonies became a sexual playground for Spaniards: Columbus admitted their paedophilic depravity – ‘A woman can be had for a hundred castellanos … and there are plenty of merchants on the lookout for girls of nine or ten years old, currently the most expensive group.’ Columbus was arrested and sent back to Spain. His slaving offended against Isabella’s morality. ‘What power does my admiral have to give any of my vassals away?’ she asked, though she allowed the sale of more slaves while ordering, ‘You will ensure that the Indians are well treated as vassals.’ Instead these ‘vassals’ were installed as forced labour on plantations – encomienda – for Columbus and his henchmen. Yet Bobadilla proved no better. In 1502, Isabella sent Nicolás de Ovando, who arrived with thirty ships carrying 2,500 settlers. Among these were two settlers who would play major roles in the Americas: a young friar, Bartolomé de las Casas, and an ambitious youngster from Extremadura, Francisco Pizarro. The latter’s cousin, Hernán Cortés, missed the trip because he was caught in bed with a married woman and managed to fall out of the window – but he soon joined them. Ovando planted sugar cane; the Taínos were set to work on estates, treated as sex slaves and killed, often for little reason.

In 1503, Ovando and 300 solders approached the realm of Anacaona, kasike of the Xaragua, who welcomed them in style, but something went wrong. Fifty Spaniards were killed in the fighting. Anacaona was hanged, her people slaughtered. Ovando’s massacres showed his subordinates Pizarro and Cortés how to handle local rulers, but they appalled his priest, de las Casas.

The Taínos were hit by smallpox and other pathogens brought by the Spanish, to which they had no resistance. They perished fast, ceasing to exist as a separate race, though DNA analysis of today’s inhabitants reveals they interbred with the Spanish. Only their words – canoe, hammock, hurricane and tobacco – survived. The Spanish were infected with syphilis, which they brought back to Europe where it raced through the population.^*

When she learned that Columbus had been arrested, Isabella released him and reimbursed him, but he was bitter. ‘I have established the sovereignty of the king and queen over a new world,’ he wrote in one of the first uses of the phrase ‘new world’, ‘so that Spain once reputed to be a poor kingdom is now among the richest.’ This was not true. While Portugal was booming, little gold had been found in the Caribbean. So many Taínos died that Ovando imported the first black slaves from Spain.

Back in Castile, Isabella remained grateful to Columbus, dispatching him again with his brother Bartolomeu and son Fernando on a final expedition, though he was banned from returning to Hispaniola. He made it to Honduras. On the voyage, the admiral sent Bartolomeu to capture a Maya trading canoe from Yucatán, looting it then sending it back, allowing its survivors to carry news of the arrival of pasty, red-bearded giants that would reach the ears of the Supreme Speaker of the Mexica at that empire’s zenith.

After being stranded in Jamaica for a year, Columbus returned to Castile in November 1504 in exhausted despair. ‘Today,’ he told Isabella, ‘I don’t even own a rooftile in Castile. If I want to eat or sleep, I must go to a tavern … I’ve been treated as a foreigner. I was in your court seven years and everyone I talked to about this enterprise treated it as a joke. Now even tailors are asking to make discoveries. I came to serve you when I was twenty-eight and now I don’t have a single hair that isn’t white. I’m sick.’ He was right: even tailors were becoming ‘discoverers’, including his Florentine friend Amerigo Vespucci, a Medici protégé, who in 1502, after two voyages, realized that the Indies should ‘properly be called a New World since our ancestors had absolutely no knowledge of it’.^*

Isabella’s empire was challenged by João el Hombre, who claimed it was rightfully Portuguese, but the queen was backed by her ally, Rodrigo Borgia, the Valencian cardinal who, thanks in part to her backing, got lucky. ‘I am pope! I am pope!’ Rodrigo cried when he won the election in 1492. As Alexander VI, he was determined to make the Borgias into European potentates – and to have fun in the process.

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES: POPE ALEXANDER AND THE BORGIAS’ CHESTNUT ORGY

Alexander VI was ‘handsome, with a very cheerful countenance and genial bearing, gifted with the quality of being a smooth talker. Beautiful women were attracted to him and excited by him in quite a remarkable way, more strongly than “iron is drawn to a magnet”.’ Even as a young cardinal, he had been reprimanded by Pius II for taking part in an ‘orgy’ in a Sienese garden with ‘several women wholly given over to worldly vanities … We’ve heard the dance was indulged in all wantonness.’ As vice-chancellor to five pontiffs he was an expert in the dark arts of Roman power and pleasure: he had four children by his long-time paramour Vannozza dei Cattanei (a Mantuan girl who later owned a Roman tavern named The Cow).

Alexander did not have long to wheedle and carve out a family fiefdom, quickly promoting his eldest son Giovanni to gonfaloniere of the papal armies and procuring a dukedom for him from the Catholic monarchs while raising his eighteen-year-old son Cesare to cardinal scarlet. He cut expenses and lived austerely, existing on that Catalan delicacy the sardine, but he loved women. At the age of sixty-two, the pope fell in love with Giuliana Farnese, then eighteen, La Bella Giulia, who, nicknamed the ‘bride of Christ’, moved into a palace with the pope’s daughter Lucrezia. At the Palazzo Apostolico, Borgia parties usually featured lascivious cardinals (some ancient, but many of them teenagers) and young prostitutes playing ingenious games designed to show off the latter to the former. When Cesare organized a party at the Vatican, fifty girls danced naked, then chestnuts were scattered which the courtesans, illuminated by strategically placed candelabra, ‘picked up, creeping on hands and knees, while the Pope, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia watched’. This was according to the papal master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, who, though keen to blacken the Borgias, was describing a scene that might seem believable at a frat-house party but not at a Renaissance court. The games ended with a papal gang bang. ‘Prizes were announced for those who could perform the act most often with the courtesans.’

The pope tried to keep his Spanish patrons happy, yet when Isabella demanded he persecute and expel the Jews in Rome, Alexander refused. Ferdinand and Isabella were determined to hold on to southern Italy, but to the north a young French king was equally determined to reclaim Naples, an ambition encouraged by the Borgias’ enemy, Cardinal Giulio della Rovere, the nephew of the late Pope Sixtus. Stuck in the middle, the Borgias chose what seemed to them the only possible option: duplicity.

Alexander’s position had been complicated by the death at the age of forty-three of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who on his deathbed received a Dominican priest, Girolamo Savonarola, prior of San Marco, who listened to El Magnifico confess his sins. The forty-year-old Savonarola, tiny, cadaverous, bald, hook-nosed with droopy lips, bushy eyebrows and green eyes that ‘sometimes gave forth red flashes’, was already the author of On Contempt for the World and the deliverer of sex-obsessed sermons that warned against the evils of sodomy and adultery. Savonarola prophesied the Sword of the Lord loomed over Florence and warned that armies would cross the Alps like ‘barbers armed with gigantic razors’.

Sure enough, in autumn 1494 the French army hoved into view under the youthful King Charles VIII, who ruled a kingdom that, after a hundred years of conflict with England, had emerged as a single state, the most populous in Europe (15 million people, against England’s 3.7). Charles was ‘hideous and small, his ill-made mouth hanging open and hands twitching with spasmodic movements’, but the French indulged his womanizing, calling him L’Affable.

Pietro de’ Medici, twenty-two years old, Lorenzo’s eldest – and stupidest – appeased King Charles by surrendering Pisa and Livorno, which so outraged the Signoria and the people that the Medicis were driven out of Florence. When the French arrived, Savonarola hailed Charles as ‘Chosen of God’. Crying, ‘Repent, O Florence, while there is still time,’ Savonarola asked God’s advice: ‘The Lord has driven my ship into open waters. The wind drives me forward. I spoke last night to the Lord: “I will speak – but why need I meddle with the government?”’

‘If you make Florence a holy city,’ answered God, ‘you must give her a government which favours virtue.’

To rapt and terrified congregations, Savonarola fulminated: ‘Behold the Sword has descended; the scourge has fallen. It is coming. It has come!’ His high-pitched screech of a voice was so terrifying that Michelangelo said he could still hear it forty years later. ‘It’s not I who preach,’ claimed the Dominican, ‘but God who speaks through me!’ The Messenger of God warned Florentines to show virtue, desist from gambling, carnivals, scent, cosmetics and sex, reject the Medicis and the Borgias – and the pagans Plato and Aristotle. In a frenzy of apocalyptic commands, he and his followers, the Wailers, presided over a terror of virtue. His reign demonstrates how a small but determined clique of self-righteous, self-selected extremists can dominate a society, rewarding their supporters with spoils and destroying those deemed unvirtuous – a template for authoritarian ideologies ever since. They can always be foiled by the will of the majority, but they flourish when others fail to organize or lose their courage. Savonarola’s ‘blessed bands’ – posses of righteous children and teenagers – forced Florentines to kneel, pray and fast and to sing hymns aloud, then shaved their own heads as virtuous signals. Attractive women were denounced as prostitutes – ‘pieces of meat with eyes’, said Savonarola – and were whipped in public; fashionable women retired to convents. Wailers smashed mirrors, fans, rouge pots and cosmetics. Books and paintings were burned in ‘bonfires of the vanities’ on a pyramidal scaffold.

Leaving Savonarola as sacred dictator of Florence, Charles, dubbing himself Le Victeur, marched southwards, occupying Rome, where Cardinal della Rovere urged him to depose Alexander. Instead Borgia held his nerve, encouraging Charles to take Naples, which proved a victory too far. Alexander negotiated support from the Habsburgs and Trastámarans. Le Victeur had overreached. Charles fled back to France, leaving among his splendid belongings a pornographic ‘book in which were painted nude images of the king’s mistresses’.

Now Alexander was ready to deal with Savonarola, whose hold on Florence was wavering. Alexander excommunicated him. Savonarola threatened his critics: ‘Seats are prepared in Hell. Tell them the rod has come!’ Challenged to prove his relationship with God by walking through fire, he was saved by a rainstorm, but the people then arrested him. He was tortured with the strappado, found guilty of heresy, then hanged in chains and burned; his ‘legs and arms gradually dropped off’ until only ashes remained. The Medicis longed to return but a rival, Piero Soderini, opposed to their regal style, reasserted republican power, his policies devised by the twenty-nine-year-old Niccolò Machiavelli, playful writer and cynical diplomat.

Alexander planned a kingdom for his eldest son Giovanni, duke of Gandía – until the young man was found in the Tiber with his throat slit and nine stab wounds. It revealed something about the family that among the endless list of suspects were two of the duke’s own brothers, Joffre, incensed at fraternal cuckolding, and Cesare, who was jealous of the paternal favourite and also sleeping with his wife. Alexander was broken: ‘We loved the duke of Gandía more than anyone else in the world; we’d have given seven tiaras to recall him to life.’

Cesare stepped forward, renouncing the scarlet and soaring like a vicious star. Appointed gonfaloniere and duke of Romagna, he was exceptional – flashy, indefatigable, murderous, priapic, fathering at least eleven children. His ambition was boundless, his motto ‘Caesar or nothing’. Behind all this lurked the stiletto and the garrotte: as Machiavelli put it, Cesare believed it was ‘better to be feared than loved’.^* Even his proud father took the view that ‘The duke is a good-hearted man but he can’t bear an insult.’ When Alexander told him to tolerate animadversion, Cesare replied, ‘The Romans can publish slanders but I’ll teach them to repent.’ Murder was his tool: ‘Every night four or five men are discovered assassinated , bishops and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke.’ When his brother-in-law Alfonso, duke of Bisceglie, cousin of Ferdinand and Isabella, crossed the family – who no longer needed a Spanish ally now they were allied to France – his Spanish hitman Don Micheletto strangled him in the Vatican.

Cesar conquered his principality of Romagna, moving so fast that ‘he arrives in one place before it’s known he has left another’. Micheletto strangled some captured commanders and bisected others: ‘Ramiro this morning was found in two pieces on the public square,’ wrote Machiavelli. ‘It has pleased the Prince who shows he can make and unmake men as he likes.’^*

Yet Borgia success was shallow, dependent on the ageing Alexander, who in May 1499 orchestrated a further French invasion by the new king Louis XII in return for arranging Cesare’s marriage to Charlotte of Navarre. Louis made Cesare duc de Valentinois, nicknamed Valentino for his love affairs, but the king disdained his preening as ‘vainglory and foolish bombast’. On his wedding night, Cesare boasted he gave himself ‘eight marks for his virility’, though actually the young syphilitic required aphrodisiacs – which were secretly replaced by laxatives, an escamotage that led to a very different sort of ejaculation. The syphilis started to rot Cesare’s face, eating his nose until he was forced to wear a leather mask to conceal the decay.

Queen Isabella lectured Alexander with ‘great love’ on her ‘displeasure and disgust’ at his outrageous ‘parties’, but he delivered on the things that mattered, so favouring Castile over Portugal in his bull Inter caetera that the two had to negotiate a more realistic carve-up of the world in the treaty of Tordesillas. Now the Catholic Monarchs had bigger plans.

Isabella was negotiating a double marriage with the Habsburgs that would create the first world empire.

* Practising Jews were not burned by the Inquisition: Jews and Muslims were outside its jurisdiction, which only covered self-identifying Christians who were accused of judaizing, secretly indulging in Jewish rituals. In the half-century after 1480, perhaps 2,000 such conversos were executed. Jews and Muslims could be punished only by the king.

* It was far from a conquest: the Portuguese started building on territory controlled by feuding Akan warlords. João negotiated with an Akan omahene (king), Kwamena Ansa, a vassal of the small kingdom of Egyafo, who impressed the Portuguese with the amount of gold he was wearing in bracelets and necklaces. But when Kwamena saw the Portuguese building on a sacred cliff, his archers and swordsmen wearing crocodile helmets forced them to retreat and build on land he specified.

* In 1504, when Esigie’s father Oba Ozolua died, two of his sons fought for the throne; the neighbouring Igala rebelled and invaded. But Prince Esigie was advised by his mother, Idia, who served as his consigliera and priestess in his campaign to destroy the brother and the invaders, for which he rewarded her with a new title of Iyoba, queen mother. The Iyoba received her own capital, regiments and court, but she was forbidden to see her son again. Perhaps the beautiful bronze bust of Idia’s face – now in a Berlin museum – was not only for religious purposes. Perhaps Esigie missed his mother.

* The Granadan aristocracy included a courtier, Moulay Ali al-Rashid, his wife, the former Spanish slave Zohra Fernandez, and their daughter Aisha, who would become the pirate queen of the Mediterranean.

* This was an ancient world of connected islands settled first in the seventh millennium BC. Around 500 BC, as new DNA research shows, they were invaded by conquerors from the mainland who massacred them: the Taínos of Haiti, Cuba and Jamaica, ruled by chieftains (kasike in Taíno, cacique in Spanish), were their descendants. The islands were known vaguely to the Mexica. While the Spanish believed there were millions of Taínos, it is likely they were far fewer, perhaps no more than tens of thousands. The Caribs gave their name to the sea and to the word cannibal, given their taste for eating enemies. Bahama, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica were Columbus’ version of their Taíno names.

* The disease – passed by sexual contact and manifesting in three states, starting with genital sores and culminating many years later in facial swellings and decay along with degeneration of the nervous system leading to insanity – was first recorded during the French invasion of Naples two or three years later. The Neapolitans called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease. One of the few diseases named after a fictional character, the name was coined by the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro for his syphilitic shepherd boy in his poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis or The French Disease). It raged for the next four centuries, cured only by the invention of antibiotics. On the islands, Columbus saw ‘men and women with a half-burned weed in their hands, being herbs they’re accustomed to smoke’. His sailors were the first Europeans to sample tobacco.

* Vespucci’s grandfather, also Amerigo, was chancellor of Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent and he himself had worked for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who sent him to run his Seville office. There he first helped to finance Columbus’ voyages, then became a sailor himself on voyages recorded in his published letters to the Medici, before King Ferdinand appointed him to run the House of Contracts in Seville. In 1507 a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named the continent after him, a honour he may never have known about. The oddity is that Waldseemüller used Vespucci’s first name: why did he not call the new continent Vespuccia? It is just as resonant as America.

* Later, in retirement, Machiavelli used his experience of Cesare Borgia and Ferdinand of Spain to write The Prince, his guide to the practice of power. It was not published until after his death.

* Cesare appointed Leonardo da Vinci as architect and chief engineer. While devising new fortresses and military vehicles that resembled tanks and helicopters, Leonardo also sketched Cesare himself.