The World

Habsburgs and Ottomans

ARCH-SLEEPYHEAD OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE – AND JUANA THE MAD

In August 1496, Isabella escorted her sixteen-year-old daughter Juana on to a carrack at the northern port of Laredo and then watched her sail away to Flanders to marry Philip the Handsome, duke of Burgundy. Almost simultaneously her only son Juan would wed Philip’s sister Margaret.^*

The two foreign spouses were the children of Kaiser Maximilian, ‘the German Hercules’, strapping, blond, blue-eyed, his beard concealing a prominent jaw. He was a late developer, not speaking until he was nine and growing up in a family in crisis.

His father, Frederick III the Fat, the same kaiser married and crowned in Rome forty years earlier, had endured decades of catastrophe, surviving with impressive serenity a desperate siege of Vienna, which he eventually lost. ‘Happiness,’ he said, ‘is to forget what cannot be recovered.’ Nicknamed Arch-Sleepyhead of the Roman Empire, he ate prodigiously, prognosticated endlessly, collected mouse droppings and tended flowers, boring his vivacious Portuguese wife. But his motto – ‘Hold the measure and look to the end’ – was abundantly justified. Outlasting all his enemies, Arch-Sleepyhead reclaimed his territories, promoting the House of Austria with the acrostic AEIOU (Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan – The Whole World is Subject to Austria) – a dream that Maximilian brought to fruition.^*

Nothing like Arch-Sleepyhead, Maximilian grew up into an athletic gallant with a taste for what he called ‘being naked with women’, adding, ‘I have danced, tilted lances, paid court to ladies. Mostly I have laughed heartily.’ This tireless extrovert galloped across Europe to claim the hand of the greatest heiress of the day, Marie the Rich, duchess of Burgundy that encompassed the Low Countries.

Maximilian’s marriage made the Habsburgs, producing the essential son, Philip. Mary loved hunting even when pregnant, but she was fatally thrown. Maximilian was bereft, yet his vision of a universal Christian emperor and Hausmachtpolitik – family power – was irrepressible. ‘After serving God,’ he said, ‘I place the advancement of my dynasty above all things.’ Among his many schemes of family promotion, he decided after the death of his wife that he should be pope and started to bribe cardinals, promising his daughter Margaret that he would ‘never again pursue naked women’ and signing off, ‘Maxi, your good father, future pope’. It was not to be, but this multifaceted empire demanded perennial wars, with the German Hercules fearlessly modelling his exquisite gold-trimmed armour.^* The struggle between Habsburgs and Valois, Germany and France, for the strategic Burgundian borderlands would extend into the twentieth century, but it began now. Maximilian fought France, he fought in Italy and in Germany – seventeen campaigns altogether. But war requires money, not just courage. There were many soldiers but only one Fugger the Rich.

Always broke, the kaiser depended on Jacob Fugger, a dour red-headed banker from Augsburg, who started in textiles but then persuaded the king of Hungary to leverage his silver mines: Fugger paid a sum to market the silver. Focusing on the Habsburgs, he gave loans to Arch-Sleepyhead during his dark days and then helped Maximilian pay off more loans using his copper mines. Fugger’s handling of Maximilian made him probably the richest commoner in Europe, the first millionaire. Yet Hercules’ greatest success was a double splicing of his children Philip and Margaret to Isabella’s Juana and Juan. Such marriages sacrificed royal children – this was especially true for daughters, who were sent abroad to marry foreign strangers, never to see their parents again and most likely to perish in childbirth – for the sake of power that was also a biological gamble.

If Philip had failed to produce children and Juan had succeeded, the Spaniards could claim Austria. Instead the Infante Juan, Isabella’s ‘Angel’, was said to be so attracted to Margaret that he exhausted himself sexually, dying after six months, supposedly of excessive fornication but more likely of smallpox.^* Isabella was poleaxed by the loss of Angel.

His sister’s marriage was almost too successful, but in a different way. Juana, well-educated, red-haired like her mother, was obsessional and free-thinking. As a girl, she challenged Catholicism. Her mother ‘treated’ her refusal to take confession with torture, prescribing la cuerda, being suspended with weights hanging off her legs and arms. It did not work. Now living in Bruges, Juana watched Philip strut from ‘from banquet to banquet, lady to lady’, and was outraged by his promiscuity. He in turn was infuriated by her criticism. Juana clung pathetically to her four female African slaves, who shared her bed.^* When she gave birth to a girl, Philip snapped, ‘As this one is a girl, put her in the archduchess’s accounts; when God gives us a son, put him in mine.’ More pregnancies followed. For the birth of the heir, Charles, Juana was at a ball when her waters broke and the baby was born in a Ghent latrine, though brought up in Burgundy; a second son, Ferdinand, was raised in Spain.

Juana and Philip were now heirs to Spain as well as to Austria and Burgundy. A trip to Spain was overdue, but when the young couple arrived Isabella’s attempts to force Philip to follow her anti-French policy angered him. Fearing that her mother wanted to break up her marriage, Juana collapsed under the stress. ‘She sleeps poorly, eats little, she is sad and very thin,’ warned the doctors, as the infanta camped outside on the ramparts, refusing to come in. The destructive clash of state and family was being driven, not by cold-hearted statesmen, but by a woman: Isabella. Philip returned to Burgundy, but when Juana joined him she was so jealous she scratched one of his girlfriends with scissors. Now she only trusted her slaves.

‘I’m not happy with the slaves,’ he ordered. ‘Expel them.’

Juana exploded, threatening to kill his messenger and refusing to eat. Philip locked himself in his rooms. She banged on the doors.

‘If you don’t do what I say,’ warned Philip, ‘I’ll leave you.’‘I’ll let myself die’, she cried, ‘rather than do anything you ask.’

‘Then do whatever you want!’ he shouted, convinced she was insane.

Hearing of this, Isabella and Ferdinand both fell ill with fever; he recovered but she died at fifty-three. Juana now became queen of Castile. She and Philip sailed to claim the kingdom. They were shipwrecked in England, staying with the old king Henry VII and Juana’s sister Catherine, widow of Prince Arthur. Henry watched Juana carefully. ‘She seemed fine, restrained and gracious,’ he noted, ‘although her husband [Philip] and those with him made her out to be mad.’

When they reached Spain, her father and husband decided Juana was indeed insane, agreeing that if ‘the said most serene Queen, either from her own choice or from being persuaded by other persons, should attempt to meddle in the government, both would prevent it’. It is now impossible to gauge how much her confinement was a male conspiracy, how much manic depression. She was ill-treated: when she refused to eat, Ferdinand ordered her whipped, then, entrusting Spain to Philip, he sailed for Naples.

Despite her ‘insanity’, the couple were still sleeping together. In September 1506, after hard partying, Philip died either of typhoid, sunstroke or alcohol: Ferdinand returned to rule Castile. While Philip was being embalmed, Juana, who was pregnant with a sixth child, seized the body and took it with her to Tordesillas Palace, refusing to bury him and travelling with the body. But, however mad Queen Juana was, the biological gamble of Maximilian’s marriage alliances paid off for both families in ways they could not yet imagine.

Ferdinand ruled the expanding empire alone. America now attracted shiploads of aspiring conquistadors, often energetic and talented, if voracious and ruthless, who went to the Indies to ‘serve God and the King and get rich’, objectives in which, like the Crusaders, they saw no contradiction. In 1504, trained as a notary, Cortés settled in Santo Domingo, earning an encomienda of forced native labourers, then attaching himself to Diego Velázquez, henchman of the Columbuses. Appealing to Ferdinand, Diego Columbus won back the hereditary viceroyalty. In 1511, Velázquez, governor of Cuba, embarked on that island’s conquest, assisted by Cortés. Taíno resistance was led by a Haitian kasike named Hatuey who had fled with his men by canoe to Cuba. Brandishing gold, Hatuey warned the Cuban Taínos, ‘Here’s the God the Spaniards worship. For these they kill … they speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, rape our daughters.’ In the course of a three-year war, Velázquez crushed Hatuey, eventually burning him alive, and, in one atrocity among many, slaughtered 2,000 Taínos who had merely gathered to gawp at the Spanish and their horses.

The chaplain on these killing sprees was the angular, bald, intense Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who had received his own estate on Hispaniola, but now he declared, ‘I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.’ He went on to denounce the cruelty to King Ferdinand, who recalled Diego Columbus. It was not enough: de las Casas himself sailed for home to see the king. Yet the conquest had now reached the mainland.

Pizarro joined one of these expeditions led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who founded the future Cartagena (Colombia), then crossed the Isthmus of Panama where, falling to his knees in wonder, he was the first European to see the ocean he called the South Sea. Balboa, adelantado of the South Sea, fought the natives, converting some to Christianity, but clashed with his ferocious superior, Pedrarias Dávila, known at court as the Jouster, who, arriving in America, had fallen ill and been buried alive in a coffin, only rescued by a servant who heard shuffling within. Now Dávila, who always travelled with the coffin, suborned Pizarro and ordered him to arrest Balboa, whom he then had beheaded. Pizarro now had a patron. When Dávila founded Panama City, Pizarro was its first mayor – and he started to hear of a vastly rich kingdom to the south.

In Italy too, Ferdinand was triumphant, recovering Naples and Sicily. He no longer needed the duplicitous Borgias. It was they who needed him.

‘I had foreseen my father’s death and made every preparation for it,’ Cesare Borgia confided to Machiavelli, ‘but I hadn’t anticipated that I’d myself be wrestling with death.’ In August 1503, Alexander VI and Cesare both fell ill. When Alexander died, his corpse – ‘its face changed to the colour of mulberry, covered with blue-black spots, nose swollen, mouth stretched by a double-sized tongue’ – was, according to the gleeful Burchard, ‘rolled up in a carpet and pummelled’ into a narrow coffin. Lucrezia had adored her father: the poet Pietro Bembo saw her after her father’s death ‘in that dark room, in your black gown, lying weeping’. And Cesare was too ill to prevent the enthronement of his deadliest enemy.

THE BIGGEST BALLS: TWO TERRIBILES – JULIUS AND MICHELANGELO

Pugnacious and vindictive, Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of Sextus, chose the name Julius II after Caesar, determined to reconquer papal power, play what he called ‘the World Game’^* and beautify Rome for the glory of God and the della Roveres. Autocratic and short-tempered, nicknamed Il Terribile, he regularly beat his courtiers with his cane. As a cardinal he had fathered a daughter – the shrewd Felice, to whom he entrusted diplomatic negotiations – though his enemies claimed he was ‘a great sodomite’, and later he was so riddled with syphilis that courtiers had to stop visitors kissing his decaying feet.

First, he outplayed Cesare Borgia, who fled to Spain. ‘I won’t live in the same rooms that the Borgias lived in,’ said Julius, relishing his triumph, ‘and I forbid under the pain of excommunication anyone to speak or think of Borgia again – their name must be erased.’ But really there was little difference between the Borgias and the della Roveres.

Julius was eager to go to war. ‘Expel the barbarians,’ he roared. The chief barbarians were the French, who controlled northern Italy, but he also hated the Venetians and coveted Bologna. Creating a crack army of Swiss Guards, funded by Fugger the Rich, he donned papal armour, forcing the hedonist Giovanni de’ Medici to march north in his entourage. Julius threatened captured enemies, ‘Do it again and I’ll hang you.’ When he attacked the French in Mirandola, he said, ‘Let’s see who has the bigger balls, the king of France or I!’ before scaling a ladder. In 1506, he took Bologna, returning to Rome as both Caesarian triumphator and Christian pontiff. He ordered the destruction of the old St Peter’s and its total reconstruction, funded by Fugger. It was designed by Donato Bramante, who devised a five-domed Constantinopolitan scheme very different from the one that was finally built. But Bramante also advised Julius to summon a young artist from Urbino, Raffaello Sanzio.

Urbane and sociable, Raphael, in his late twenties, was the son of the duke of Urbino’s artist. Orphaned at eleven, he studied in Florence, where he was inspired by the much older Leonardo da Vinci. In 1508, Julius commissioned him to decorate his Borgia-free apartments on the third floor of the Vatican, starting with the papal library, the Stanza della Segnatura, where his School of Athens features Julius as well as Giovanni de’ Medici. At the same time, he hired Michelangelo, who had made his name with his statue of David for the republican regime in Florence.

Julius supervised his artists fiercely, managing ‘the humours of men of genius’, driving them hard, often withholding promised funds. Raphael was genial, Michelangelo irascible. Julius and Michelangelo, both nicknamed Il Terribile, sparked off each other. ‘It kills you trying to negotiate with this man, who refuses to listen,’ grumbled Michelangelo, ‘and loads you with the worst insults ever.’ Michelangelo demanded total freedom ‘to do as I liked’. When Julius was high-handed, Michelangelo, who had received an offer from Sultan Bayezid, threatened to accept and stormed off to Florence, chased by papal guards on horseback. Julius demanded that Florence surrender the artist.

Not risking a war, the Florentines sent him to Bologna. ‘You were supposed to come to us,’ said Julius. ‘You’ve waited for us to come to you.’ The artist knelt for forgiveness. Artists had hitherto been regarded as artisans-cum-engineers. The disadvantage was they were treated like brilliant servants; the advantage was that they were totally uninhibited by the limitations of professional specialization. But Michelangelo demanded that the pontiff treat him with respect – the first artist to win such treatment. Keeping him in Bologna, Julius visited his studios, commissioning a sculpture of himself. Michelangelo asked how to present him.

‘Give me a sword,’ growled Papa Terribile, ‘not a pen.’

Julius first commissioned him to build his tomb – a grandiose project that took decades and was never finished – but then he ordered Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, built by his uncle Sixtus. ‘Painting is not my art,’ replied Michelangelo, still most at home as sculptor, but Julius bullied and coaxed him into becoming a painter. Michelangelo regarded all his work as an expression of divinity. ‘If my rough hammer shapes human aspects,’ he wrote, ‘out of hard rock, now this one, now that, it is held and guided by Divine Fiat, lending it motion, moving as He chooses.’

In the chapel, Michelangelo built himself wooden scaffolding and lay upside down 140 feet above the floor, painting on to wet plaster nine scenes starting with the beginning of time, dominated by his portrait of God and his divine energy. It took four years, hanging upside down. ‘I lead a miserable existence,’ he told his father. ‘My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven, my chest twists like a harpy. My brush above me all the time dribbles …’ For all his gifts, he had moments of doubt: ‘My painting is dead … I’m not a painter.’ Julius inspected the work, clambering up the ladders.

Julius’ artists watched each other jealously: Michelangelo, now thirty, rough and brawny, tormented, infuriated, homosexual; Raphael debonair, courtly, slim, handsome, lover of his model Margherita Luti known as La Fornarina, ‘the baker’s daughter’. While Raphael lived and dressed in style, Michelangelo looked like a peasant, despite earning huge sums that he spent to build up his family’s aristocratic holdings. Leonardo’s fame and Raphael’s rise exasperated the obstreperous and paranoid Michelangelo, who disdained both, particularly the smooth Raphael nine years his junior: ‘All the discords between Pope Julius and me were owing to the envy of Bramante and Raphael.’ When Bramante showed Raphael the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo sneered, ‘Raphael had good reason to be envious since what he knew of art, he learned from me.’

They tried to avoid each other but met once, Michelangelo brooding alone, Raphael with an entourage. Michelangelo cattily asked if this was the chief of police with his posse, at which Raphael wondered if he had encountered an executioner, cast out from society. Yet Michelangelo’s image as a loner is misleading: he lived amid his brigata – the brood – a household of assistants and artists whom he helped train and loved as family. He had a gift for friendship with women, his letters to them witty and loving; and when he fell in love with men, his love letters were vulnerable and passionate.

Julius’ wars started to go wrong. He lost Bologna and grew a beard to grieve – the one depicted by Raphael. In April 1512, he was defeated by Louis XII of France at Ravenna, where his friend Cardinal de’ Medici was captured and almost killed before escaping. Julius sent his daughter Felice – also painted by Raphael – to negotiate with the French, while Medici asked him to use their Spanish allies to retake Florence. Julius agreed. The Spanish stormed the city; Soderini and Machiavelli were overthrown. Cardinal de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano returned as the crowds shouted, ‘Balls! Balls! Palle! Palle!’, referring to the family’s heraldic emblem. The Medici were back.

The balls were spinning. When Julius died of syphilis, Giovanni de Medici was elected pope as Leo X and the cardinals burst out of the Sistine Chapel shouting ‘Balls! Balls!’

LUTHER AND LEO: THE DEVIL’S FAECES AND THE POPE’S ELEPHANT

‘God’s given us the papacy,’ said Leo. ‘Let’s enjoy it.’ And he did, presiding over feasts of ape meat, monkey brains and parrot tongues with sixty starters, naked boys jumping out of pies and a jester who gulped down forty eggs or twenty chickens. He was obese, short-sighted, red-faced and, though often tormented by an anal fistula, cheerful and playful. Yet he was careless with others: when huntsmen were killed on his hunting expeditions, he scarcely noticed: ‘What a day!’

He had known Michelangelo since they were boys in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s palazzo – ‘brothers, nurtured together’, he said – and commissioned him to design the Medici Chapel of Florence’s San Lorenzo. ‘He’s terrible,’ he complained of the artist. ‘One can’t deal with him.’ He preferred Raphael, now painting the Stanze di Raffaello and, after the death of Bramante, in charge of St Peter’s.

Leo, gleaming with jewels, wafting the scents of expensive spices and anal putrefaction, emulated the Borgias and della Roveres in promoting family, choosing his good-natured nephew, Lorenzo, son of Piero, to be ruler of Florence. For Lorenzo, Leo arranged a semi-royal marriage to a cousin of the French king, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, with whom he had a daughter, Catherine – future queen of France. Days after she was born, Lorenzo died, at which Leo appointed his cousin, Giulio, bastard son of the Giuliano killed by the Pazzi, as cardinal and lord of Florence. While living in Rome, Giulio had fathered a son, Alessandro, with a girl of colour, Simonetta, probably the daughter of African slaves. Medicis owned both white and black slaves.

Leo’s intrigues destabilized the Curia, the papal court. One of his first appointments as cardinal was his young lover, Alfonso Petrucci, who came to resent his patron bitterly, putting together a conspiracy in which Leo’s doctor would treat his anal fistula by injecting poison into his fundament. When the plot was revealed, Petrucci, under torture, implicated other cardinals, who were pardoned in return for their fortunes. But Leo had his ex-lover strangled with a scarlet ligature by a Moorish executioner. His new lover was the half-Ottoman singer Solimando.

To pay for St Peter’s, Leo needed more cash, raised from loans from Fugger the Rich, from payments for cardinals’ hats and from the sales of indulgences (whereby a sinner could be delivered from purgatory in return for payments to the Church). Indulgences were just the latest outrageous papal abuse of sanctity that particularly disgusted a German monk from Wittenberg in Saxony. His real name was Martin Luder but he changed it to Eleutherius – Freed – which he Germanized into Luther.

When he was almost struck by lightning, he experienced a Damascene revelation, gave up his legal studies and became a monk. But a visit to Rome horrified him. ‘That filthy stinking puddle full of the wickedest wretches in the world’ was, he wrote with typical ferocity, awash with ‘filthy nonsense. If there is a hell, Rome is built on it.’ Rome was indeed a modern Babylon in which, as Leo’s obscene poet Pietro Aretino put it, visitors ‘usually wanted to visit not only the antiquities but also the modernities, that is the ladies’.

Luther, that pungent firebrand, theatrical and righteous, was even more disgusted by Leo’s hucksterism: ‘Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?’ In October 1517, Luther wrote an attack on the pope, his Ninety-Five Theses, which he nailed alongside other notices on the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche. But he didn’t depend on the church doors: he deployed the new medium of printing. Ultimately, 3.1 million copies were published. He had himself repeatedly painted by his friend Lucas Cranach, making his pugnacious mug one of the most famous in Germany.

A vicious and visceral polemicist, he was fixated on faeces and sex, later denouncing the pope as a transsexual sodomite, his orders ‘sealed with the Devil’s own faeces, written with the anus-pope farts’. He unleashed savage diatribes against the Jews: ‘We’re wrong if we don’t kill them’, those ‘devil’s people’, ‘poisonous worms’ full of the ‘devil’s faeces … which they wallow in like swine’, their synagogue ‘an incorrigible whore, an evil slut’.

Luther’s fury gave a voice not just to resentment of papal corruption but also to a dawning scepticism. Sanctity, he argued, was based not on the titles, payments and magical rituals of the Catholic Church but on the direct relationship between man and God (without priestly intermediaries), guided by the scriptures – sola scriptura – which would soon be translated from Latin into German and so could be read by anyone. All people needed to enter the kingdom of heaven was literacy, which Luther now promoted.

As his teachings spread, twenty-seven nuns in a nearby Cistercian monastery wanted to join his movement. Luther, now forty-one, arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels and, presumably once they had been cleaned of fishiness, found himself attracted to one of them, the twenty-six-year-old Katharina. He had never considered marriage – ‘not that I’m insensible to my flesh or sex (for I’m neither wood nor stone) but because I daily expect the death of a heretic’. Now ‘suddenly I was occupied with far different thoughts. The Lord has plunged me into marriage.’ He argued that ‘A woman has no control of herself. God has made her body to be with man, to bear children,’ so she was welcome to enjoy sex – and they were blessed with six children. But Luther must have been exhausting. ‘Dear husband, you’re too rude,’ Katharina said once. Yet the nun in the fish barrel was decisive: Luther decreed that Protestant priests could marry.

This Protestant spirit spread quickly through northern and central Europe from princes to peasants, based on the fundamentals – the Word of the Bible. The more personal religiosity of Protestantism encouraged a new independent spirit in business, art and daily life. Protestant nations – much of Germany, then the Low Countries, Britain and Scandinavia – became more literate than Catholic ones. Literacy changed the psychology (even the formation of the brain), but also surely increased self-confidence and knowledge, just as it increased self-discipline, self-motivation, analytical thinking and sociability, contributing to what later made northern Europe so successful. Protestantism was not the only factor in this European spirit of ‘hard work, patience and diligence’, but it was, as Joseph Henrich writes, ‘a booster shot … both a consequence and a cause of people’s changing psychology’.

Hoping to ignore Luther, Leo scoffed at this ‘monkish squabble’. He now received an amazing gift from India: a white elephant named Hanno who in his size and joviality almost seemed a metaphor for Leo himself. ‘In my brutish breast,’ Leo wrote in elephantine voice, ‘they perceived human feelings.’ Kept in a bespoke elephant house between St Peter’s and the Lateran, Hanno was sketched by Raphael, and when the Pope wished to mock a pretentious poet he arranged for him to ride Hanno to the Capitol with blaring trumpets until the pachyderm, alarmed by the noise, refused to go further. But Hanno’s foolish keepers mistakenly poisoned him with a gold-laced laxative. On his death, Raphael designed the memorial (‘That which Nature has stolen away, Raphael of Urbino with his art has restored’), Leo penned the epitaph to his ‘mighty beast’, while Aretino wrote a pornographic Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno in which the pachyderm’s penis was left to the priapic Cardinal di Grassi ‘so that he can become more active in the incarnation of bastards with the help of Madama Adriana’.^* Leo forgave Aretino’s impertinence; but he understood his own link with Hanno, writing on his grave: ‘But I wish, oh gods, that the time which Nature would have assigned to me, and Destiny stole away, / You will add to the life of the great Leo.’ The elephantine Leo did not long outlive Hanno, but in his epitaph the frivolous pontiff touched on something much more important:

Mighty elephant which the King Manuel

Having conquered the Orient

Sent as captive to Pope Leo X.

This ‘conqueror’ was Manuel I, the Portuguese king who masterminded a messianic world conquest from Brazil and Kongo to India and Indonesia by the aggressive crusading sailors of his tiny kingdom.

MANUEL’S EASTERN MARAUDERS: DA GAMA AND ALBUQUERQUE

As a young prince in 1493, when summoned by his cousin João II, Manuel feared the king would gut him like his brother. Instead he was appointed heir. His luck in surviving João’s purge added to his belief in his destiny as a Latin King David who would retake Jerusalem, raze Mecca and destroy Islam. Aged twenty-six when he succeeded, with a round face and long, apish arms, he was influenced by his cousins Ferdinand and Isabella, and married their eldest daughter; when she died in childbirth, he wed her sister.^* But the eldest Spanish infanta had refused to marry him unless he expelled all Portuguese Jews.

Manuel had protected Portuguese Jews, who owned a fifth of the country’s movable wealth, their numbers boosted by refugees from Isabella’s Expulsion, but Spain and God were more important. In October 1497, he forced a mass conversion of Jews.

The wealthiest Jewish family in Portugal had pretended to convert: the malagueta-pepper merchant Francisco Mendes married the heiress Beatriz de Luna, who became known as Gracia Mendes, in a Catholic ceremony in Lisbon cathedral. But when expelled they returned to their Judaism and escaped to the Netherlands – the start of a journey that culminated in them becoming Ottoman potentates and Jewish royalty. But for now even being a New Christian was dangerous. In 1506, Dominican friars led a pogrom that burned several thousand Jews and New Christians alive in a bonfire in Lisbon’s main square.

Manuel spent the money from the Jews on four ships, packed with cannon and led by a fidalgo in his retinue, Vasco da Gama, member of the crusading Order of Santiago whose late father had originally been appointed to lead the voyage. Their mission was to follow the route of Bartolomeu Dias and then seize control of the Indian Ocean spice trade, aiming to scourge the Muslims and compensating for their small numbers with cannonades and ferocity.

Sailing round southern Africa, da Gama raided up the Swahili coast, attacking Arab shipping off Malindi, where he found allies, recruited an Arab pilot in Mombasa and then sailed across to Calicut (Kozhikode) on India’s Malabar coast, the pre-eminent among a constellation of city states trading pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, jewels, ebony, amber and tamarind. India was fragmented, the north ruled by a weakened Muslim Delhi sultanate, the south divided between a Hindu raj of Vijayanagara and the Islamic sultanate of Bijapur.

In cosmopolitan Calicut, da Gama met Arab and Indian traders as well as an Italian-speaking Polish Jew, born in Alexandria and an envoy of the sultan of Bijapur. Da Gama first tortured, then baptized him as Gaspar da Gama and used him as interpreter and negotiator. The Portuguese mistook the Hindu temples with their statues for Christian churches, but the samoothiri (zamorin), Lord of the Sea, Hindu ruler of a partly Islamic city, was unimpressed by Vasco’s meagre gifts. These Indian merchant-princes were accustomed to dealing with foreigners – Chinese, Malays and Arabs in contact with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt. But Portuguese methods were an unpleasant surprise.

After barely surviving the return journey on which two-thirds of his men perished, da Gama was raised to the nobility, granted the title Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia, India and All the Orient and sent back by Manuel, who boasted of his exploits and now called himself Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India.

Inspired by his divine destiny, Manuel dispatched a series of fleets eastwards, eighty-one ships in five years, many of them funded by Fugger the Rich. In March 1500, the king saw off Pedro Álvares Cabral, a favourite courtier, and thirteen ships with Bartolomeu Dias and the converted Polish Jew Gaspar da Gama on board. Looping out into the Atlantic, Cabral landed on a new ‘island’ that he claimed for Manuel as Ilha de Vera Cruz (later known as Brazil), before heading round Africa (where Dias was lost in a storm) via Sofala and Malindi and onwards to India. When the samoothiri turned hostile, killing fifty of his men, Cabral bombarded Calicut, killing 600, then joined forces with the raja of Cochin, who resented his subordinate position to Calicut. Seven of the thirteen ships returned filled with spices that were sold profitably.

Manuel, sensing the opportunity of the ‘island’ (Brazil), sent more ships to investigate, including one under Amerigo Vespucci, who realized that it was not an island but a continent. Gathering information in his office of colonial affairs, the India House, Manuel resolved to challenge not just the Egyptian and Arab traders of the Indian Ocean but also his European rivals, Venice and Genoa. His vision was extraordinary – to dominate a vast territory controlled by Swahili, Arab and Indian traders – with tiny flotillas of Portuguese sailors, commanded by his top courtiers, using carracks, overwhelming artillery force and spectacular acts of murderous terror. His monopolistic rapacity made him the first truly entrepreneurial monarch: the French king, envious of his wealth, nicknamed him Le Roi Épicier, the Spice King.

Manuel created a Revenge Fleet to make the Indians pay for their impertinence to Cabral, who was appointed to command it. But the contest between allies of Cabral and those of da Gama was won by the latter. Now the killing started. Admiral da Gama, fitted out in satin crimson and blessed by the king, raided Kilwa (Tanzania), then, crossing the Indian Ocean, burned alive an entire ship of pilgrims on their way home from Mecca, then bombarded Calicut while hanging Indians from his masts and fighting off an Arab fleet of privateers. His cruelty was spectacular: victims were dismembered and decapitated, heaps of body parts sent to the rulers; he cut off the lips and ears of the samoothiri’s ambassador, then sent him back to Calicut with a dog’s ears sewn on to his head.

Manuel kept up the pressure, challenging the overlord of the Indian Ocean: al-Ghaury, sultan of Egypt. Manuel sent two further fleets, now packed with cannon, under Dom Francisco de Almeida, veteran of the Spanish conquest of Granada, as first governor and viceroy of the Portuguese State of India, whose crew included a young nobleman, Fernão de Magalhães – Magellan. But then he sent after him an irrepressible courtier-soldier, Afonso da Albuquerque, a white-bearded veteran who had helped take Tangier and defeat Mehmed II’s Otranto incursion.

Almeida bombarded Kilwa, aided by his rival, the sultan of Mombasa, then crossed to India and built Fort Manuel at Cochin and other forts that now formed the State of India. Albuquerque’s first mission was to take the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen and the port of Muscat. He planned to land at Jeddah, raid inland and steal the Prophet’s body. The amir of Mecca, Sharif Barakat II, appealed to Sultan al-Ghaury as did the sultan of Gujarat. Al-Ghaury ordered Venetian shipwrights to build a fleet which under his Kurdish admiral, Hussein al-Kurdi, who rendezvoused with a Calicut–Gujarati flotilla commanded by a Georgian ex-slave, Malik Ayyaz, and confronted Almeida. An Egyptian–Indian fleet built by Venetians, manned by Russian galley slaves and Ethiopian bowmen and commanded by a Kurd and a Georgian, fought a Portuguese force at Chaul, where Almeida’s son was killed. It was a draw that was avenged a few months later at Diu where the Portuguese slaughtered the Mamluks and killed their prisoners by dissection, by firing from cannon and by hanging.

Once Manuel realized Albuquerque’s commanding acumen, he promoted him. Albuquerque read the Indian Ocean world quickly and understood that, to establish a permanent presence, the Portuguese needed a few strategically placed fortresses. He planned to attack Egypt in the Red Sea, but his new Indian ally Timoji, a corsair who had served the Vijayanagarans, prompted him to seize Goa from the sultan of Bijapur as Manuel’s Indian capital, and together they stormed the city, killing 6,000 defenders.

In 1511, Albuquerque, newly minted duke of Goa, sailed for the centre of the spice trade, the sultanate of Malacca (Malaysia), which he took on the second attempt, killing every Muslim, though sparing Malays and Indians; he then sent three ships to seize the Molucca (Spice) Islands, source of cloves, mace and nutmegs, but they were shipwrecked. Albuquerque filled ships with nutmegs and cloves, then sailed for Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, building a fortress to master the Straits.

Celebrating his global project, Manuel held parades in which elephants and rhinoceroses, adorned with gold, processed through the city followed by Arabian horses and a jaguar. In 1514, Albuquerque received a gift from the sultan of Cambay, Hanno the elephant, that he sent with a rhinoceros back to Manuel in Lisbon. The king arranged for the two beautiful animals to fight, but the elephant sensibly refused to take on the rhinoceros and Manuel sent him to Pope Leo.

In Lisbon, Manuel built his massive Ribeira (Riverside) Palace, containing his Houses of India, Slaves and Guinea and his Arsenal. The city was one of Europe’s principal markets for spices, sugar and increasingly slaves: by 1500, around 15 per cent of the population were African slaves. The trade intensified: 10,000 were traded between 1500 and 1535. Gold and sugar required cheap labour. The sweet tooth of Europe was gratified by the vampiric fangs of the slave traders. The sugar plantations on São Tomé, Madeira and Cape Verde were profitable but labour intensive. Akan rulers bought 10,000 slaves from Portuguese middlemen between 1510 and 1540. But now slave traders expanded from the Bight of Benin – the Slavery Coast – 600 miles south to Kongo. The slave trade would become a gargantuan atrocity and a murderous business, the greatest forced migration in history, but only 3 per cent of it took place between 1450 and 1600: the hellish trade was just starting.

Both race and faith mattered to the Portuguese. In India and Africa, the empire builders displayed the same racism and appetite for coercion of other nations, but they quickly settled with Indian and African women. In Goa, Albuquerque consciously built a new Portuguese city, but he encouraged Portuguese settlers to marry Indian women. It is easy to exaggerate the scale of the Portuguese empire: it was shallow and thinly spread; only a few towns were conquered.^*

As Albuquerque was arriving in south-western India, another foreign warlord – whose family would conquer much of the subcontinent – was invading the north.

* The queen’s eldest daughter, also Isabella, was married to Manuel of Portugal, while her youngest Catalina would marry Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of that cadaverous miser Henry VII. Arthur died within five months and she married his younger brother, Henry VIII. She was known to the English as Catherine of Aragon.

* When Frederick was seventy-seven, arteriosclerosis led to gangrene in his leg; his doctor performed a successful amputation, regarded as a medical triumph – though he died two months later. The leg was buried with him in his magnificent tomb in St Stephen’s, Vienna.

* The suit was crafted by the famous dynasty of armourers, the Helmschmieds of Augsburg. Maximilian eccentrically gave Henry VIII of England a helmet with a face, modelled on himself, with his long nose and spectacles, and topped off with a pair of ram’s horns. Yet armour was already an obsolete fashion: in battle, bullets could penetrate it.

* The monarchs in Europe used this story as a warning against excessive sex. In this macho environment, ejaculatory bombast was part of royal promotion: when Louis XII married Mary Tudor, eighteen-year-old sister of Henry VIII, he ‘boasted of having ejaculated five times in their first encounter’, at which a contemporary noted, ‘One must assume he has just dug five graves with his hoe.’ He did die after three months. Most of these sex deaths were actually of smallpox.

* There were now many enslaved Africans serving in the Portuguese and Spanish courts: each of Isabella’s children had Africans in their entourages. Juana’s sister Catherine arrived in London with John Blancke, who served Henry VIII as a trumpeter at the Tudor court.

* One of Julius’ first decisions was to allow the English prince, Henry, to marry his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. The eighteen-year-old Catherine, princess of Wales, had been in limbo since the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. Ferdinand did not want to pay any more dowry; Henry VII, now in his late forties, did not want to repay it, so he decided to marry her himself, but finally both sides agreed another solution. This had its own problems. The Church banned marriage of sister-in-law and brother-in-law as part of its anti-incest, anti-kinship policy. Catherine could marry Henry only if the marriage with Arthur was unconsummated. Once this was agreed, the marriage could go ahead. In 1509, when Henry VII died, Henry VIII married her.

* Aretino was a cobbler’s son whose scathing verses made him a ‘scourge of princes’. During the reign of the next Medici pope Clement, Aretino intervened to rescue his friend Marcantonio Raimondi, who had produced the first printed book of erotica, engravings based on drawings by Giulio Romano entitled I Modi (The Ways, also known as the Sixteen Positions), which celebrated not only the Church-blessed missionary position but also the woman on top, each dedicated to a specific Medici courtesan and her sexual speciality. The pope banned Sixteen Positions until Aretino appealed to him, and once the ban was lifted ‘I tossed off the verses seen beneath the figures. With all due respect to hypocrites, I dedicate these lustful pieces to you, heedless of fake prudishness and asinine prejudices that forbid the eyes to gaze at the things they most delight to see.’ These are his Sonetti lussuriosi (Lust Sonnets). The Church reformer Bishop Gian Giberti who had denounced the book was a victim of his verses and tried to have Aretino assassinated. The poet escaped to Milan. Self-described as a ‘sodomite’, a friend of Titian who painted him, he was said to have been hired by both Charles V and François I to write verse about the other.

* Manuel’s first wife, Isabella, princess of Asturias, had formerly been married to the Portuguese heir who was killed in a riding accident. She went home to her parents until Manuel requested her hand, her second Portuguese marriage. For a while she was heir to the Castilian throne. Manuel’s second wife Maria had ten children, inevitably dying in childbirth, after which he married Leonor, the eldest child of Juana and Philip and favourite sister of Charles V, who afterwards married François I of France. If this sounds tangled, it is: all three were highly consanguineous.

* European histories traditionally now claim that Portuguese imperialists dominated the Indian–Malay spice trade. Though they certainly heralded European power in the east, that is to exaggerate their power and neglect the local powers. Portuguese numbers were small, their strongholds few, the trade complex, and southern India was dominated by the all-conquering warrior king Krishnadevaraya, maharaja-dhiraja of the Hindu empire Vijayanagara, who himself defeated many of the Islamic sultanates; eastern India was ruled by the Gajapati kingdom; and the Ottomans were about to replace the Egyptians as masters of Arabia and Yemen. Malacca, which had only been Muslim for thirty years, had been a Chinese vassal ever since Zheng’s treasure fleets: the Ming emperor was furious.