The World

Tamerlanians and Mexica, Ottomans and Safavis

BABUR TAKES DELHI

In January 1505, Babur, twenty-two years old, raided India for the first time. Since he was just a minor prince struggling for his very existence, his raid was tiny compared to the invasion of his great-great-grandfather Tamerlane, who had sacked Delhi. Babur – Tiger – was an irrepressible, exuberant and playful extrovert with an awesome lineage – his mother was descended from Genghis Khan, his father from Tamerlane. But in the half-century since 1447 when Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh had died, the descendants of the conqueror had failed to control his former empire. Like any mirza,^* Babur longed to sit on the conqueror’s throne in Samarkand. But many mirzas were no longer warriors; rather they were playboys, who were ‘fine as companions, in conversations and at parties, but strangers to war’.

Babur, contemporary of Manuel and Michelangelo, was twelve when his father, womanizer, poet, swashbuckling warrior and pigeon fancier, ‘fat, brave, eloquent’, was killed – he was visiting his doves and his dovecote fell down a ravine. ‘Umar Sheikh Mirza,’ wrote Babur, ‘flew with his pigeons and their house and became a falcon.’ Inheriting the Fergana Valley, the mirza depended on his grandmother, Ësan Dawlat Begum, ‘for tactics and strategy, an intelligent and good planner’. Babur was a Chagatai Turk, adept with the crossbow, sword, six-flanged mace and axe of the steppe horseman, and thanks to his flamboyant memoir Baburnama, written in Turkish, he is one of the first statesmen we can know personally.

As a teenager, Babur married for the first time, to Aisha, but his first love was a boy: ‘I discovered in myself a strange inclination for a boy in the camp bazaar, his very name Baburi suited me well.’ Sometimes, ‘Baburi came to me but I was so bashful I couldn’t look him in the face,’ and when Babur bumped into him, ‘I went to pieces … I’m so embarrassed every time I see my beloved.’ Tortured by his infatuation, ‘that frothing up of desire and passion, and the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander bareheaded and barefoot through street, orchard and vineyard. I took no notice of myself or anyone else.’ Afterwards he married his beautiful, intelligent cousin Maham, whom he trusted implicitly, saying, ‘Treat Maham’s words like a law,’ especially after she gave birth his beloved son Humayoun.

In 1496, Babur seized Samarkand, but lost it after 100 days. ‘I cried involuntarily,’ he admitted. ‘Is there any pang, any grief, my wounded heart has missed?’ In 1500 when he was nineteen, ‘I took Samarkand’ again; ‘I had 240 men.’ A year later, humiliated in battle, he fled, so desperate that he and his posse ate their horses. ‘When one has pretensions to rule and a desire for conquest, one can’t sit back and just watch when events don’t go right once or twice.’ But he also knew that power is solitude: ‘Other than my own heart, I never found a confidant.’

Then, just as he planned to flee to China, his fortune turned: he seized Kabul, famed for its gardens and its poverty, with 200 ruffians whom he had to discipline: ‘I had four or five shot, one or two dismembered.’ Starting with this shambolic warband, he would go on to conquer the richest land on earth. ‘My desire for Hindustan [India] was constant,’ wrote Babur, raiding through the Khyber Pass, where he saw the wealth of India: ‘Every year, twenty thousand animals bring slaves, textiles, sugar, spices.’ Even better, the Delhi sultanate, ruled for fifty years by the Lodi dynasty of Afghan descent, was weak.

In between raids into India, Babur enjoyed booze and drugs. ‘There was much disgusting uproar,’ he reminisced. Once, ‘We rode off, we got on a boat and drank spirits, left the boat roaring drunk and mounting our horses let the horse gallop free-reined. I must have been really drunk.’ He was the only psychedelic conqueror: ‘How strange the fields of flowers appeared under its influence,’ he raved about narcotics. ‘Nothing but purple flowers, sometimes yellow and purple together with gold flecks.’

In November 1525, he led 20,000 men including 4,000 arquebusiers and artillery sent by the Ottoman sultan into the Punjab (Pakistan), then swooped on Delhi. At Panipat, on 21 April 1526, just north of Delhi, Sultan Ibrahim’s 100,000 men and 100 elephants challenged Babur’s small force. The invaders’ musketeers and cannon probably won the day. Ibrahim’s head was taken to Babur. At the age of forty-three, he had conquered northern India. ‘I ordered [my eldest son] Humayoun Mirza to occupy the capital, Agra. But after he had given away his spoils, his troops wanted to return to Kabul; he wanted to stay.

It was not that he liked India – ‘A country of few charms, its people have no good looks … no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, no musk melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in bazaars, no hot baths,’ and there was ‘remarkable dislike between its people and mine’. But it had been prize enough for Tamerlane – and glory was what he wanted: ‘Give me but fame and if I die, I am content.’ Babur summoned Mongol and Turkic grandees. ‘God’s given us sovereignty in Hindustan,’ he declared, sounding very like those other predators – the Portuguese and Spanish – granted empire by God.^*

Babur decided to try Indian food, keeping the cooks of the late sultan, which almost proved a fatal mistake. The mother of the late sultan suborned the cooks to poison Babur’s food. ‘I vomited a lot,’ he wrote to his son Humayoun. ‘I never vomit after meals, not even after drinking. A cloud of suspicion came over my mind.’ Four cooks were tortured and confessed. ‘I ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces, the cook to be skinned alive; one of the women I had thrown under elephants’ feet and another I had shot.’ The sultan’s mother was killed quietly, while Babur understood that ‘He who reaches the point of death appreciates life.’

Babur was challenged by Rana Sanga, a Rajput,^* whose 200,000 men marched on Agra, keen to expel House Tamerlane. Babur temporarily renounced booze, pouring out carafes of wine in front of the army. ‘Noblemen and soldiers,’ he said, ‘whosoever sits down to the feast of life must before it’s over drink the cup of death, but how much better to die with honour than live with infamy!’ As they joined battle at Khanua, the soldiers gripped their Qurans. ‘The plan was perfect, it worked admirably,’ noted Babur, whose Ottoman artillery ‘broke the ranks of pagans with matchlock and cannon’ as the soldiers ‘fought with delight’. He celebrated by building towers of skulls like Tamerlane before carving up India with his Turk, Mongol and Afghan henchmen in return for military service. Then he wrote his memoirs, built gardens, smoked opium, quaffed wine (quoting the verse ‘I am drunk, officer. Punish me when I am sober’) and caroused with two Georgian slaves sent by the shah of Persia – ‘dancers with rosy cheeks’. As Babur declined, Humayoun who ruled Kabul fell ill. Babur was heartbroken.

‘You’re a king and have other sons, I sorrow because I have only this one,’ his empress Maham admonished him from the prince’s bedside.

‘Maham,’ he replied, ‘although I have other sons, I love none as I love your Humayoun.’ Babur offered his own life in exchange for his son’s. In December 1530, the twenty-three-year-old Humayoun recovered – as Babur sickened. Babur’s last advice was: ‘Do nothing against your brothers even if they deserve it.’^*

Humayoun was ‘brave in battle, ingenious and lively, full of wit’, but he ‘contracted bad habits, such as the excessive use of opium’, and preferred to spend his time in chatter and pleasure, lacking killer grit: his worst insult was just to say ‘You stupid!’ Immediately, he was challenged in all directions, by his brothers, by the Gujaratis, by the Portuguese and more seriously by one of his father’s Afghan generals, who advanced on Agra. In 1541, Humayoun fled westwards into Sind (Pakistan).

On the way he met a half-Persian teenaged girl called Hamida who resisted his courtship, possibly because his prospects were so disastrous, but finally he married her and then with forty retainers they escaped across the blistering Thar Desert. At Umarkot, Hamida gave birth to Humayoun’s first son, who was born on a camel. Humayoun was forced to leave the baby in Kandahar with his aunt Khanzada. She thought the baby looked just like Babur: he would grow up to be Akbar the Great. Humayoun fled to Persia. It looked as if the rule of this conquest dynasty would be no more than a flash in the pan of his arquebusiers. Indeed their victories had been had won thanks to their artillery, a present from the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, who now changed the entire balance of Eurasia.

SELIM – SUNKEN DEEP IN BLOOD

In March 1517, Selim galloped into Cairo, having destroyed the Mamluk sultanate and conquered the entire Arab world, increasing his empire by 70 per cent and giving it, for the first time, an Islamic majority. Grandson of Mehmed the Conqueror, third son of Sultan Bayezid, Selim was lithe, lean and cadaverous, clear-sighted and paranoid, impatient and implacable. His success was founded on his arquebusiers, who could be trained in two weeks; it took a lifetime to master bow and horse. Arquebuses, fired from the shoulder using a crossbow stock, lit by a matchlock and detonated with a new invention, the trigger, were becoming muskets.

Frustrated by his father’s vacillations and his own isolation as prince-governor of Trebizond, where he complained he was ‘weak and helpless’, Selim marched on Constantinople and overthrew his father, whom he probably poisoned. Then one by one he strangled his three brothers and seven nephews. Once on the throne, most of his own sons vanished, probably strangled too, to make way for his chosen successor, Suleiman. Always accompanied by his executioners, the Tongueless,^* the padishah – emperor – killed three of his six viziers, kicking around one of their heads: ‘the man-eating king of beasts’, one of his officials called him. When one was rash enough to request a warning if he was to be executed, Selim replied he might consider it but at the moment lacked a replacement. He prided himself as a killer: ‘Drowned in a sea of blood’, he described himself in one of his poems, written under the name Selimi, ‘sunken deep in blood’. As soon as he was secure, Selim renewed treaties with Venice and Poland, signalling to Europe his desire for peace as he faced a mounting challenge from the east: the god-king of Persia.

THE ALEXANDER–JESUS OF PERSIA BIDS FOR WORLD CONQUEST

In 1501, Ismail, aged thirteen, declared that he was the Mahdi, the messiah. Poet, hunter, lover of boys and girls and heroic drinker, Ismail – ‘fair, handsome and very pleasing; not very tall, but of a light and well-framed figure with broad shoulders and reddish hair’ – declared his divinity, advertising in his poetry his aspirations to divine and military leadership. In the 1320s, his Kurdish grandfather Safi al-Din (founder of the Safavis) had undergone a Damascene revelation and converted from Sunni to Twelver Shiism.^* After his grandfather, father and his eldest brother had all been killed, Ismail was raised and trained in secret. Then, hailed by an army of Turkmen believers, the Redhats (named after their twelve-folded scarlet bonnets), as the Perfect Guide and occulted imam, he launched a conquest of Persia and Iraq.

Ismail ordered the killing of all Sunnis: he slaughtered 20,000 in Tabriz and destroyed Sunni shrines. This young shah, part Jesus, part Alexander, prepared to destroy the Ottomans. He turned the head of one Sunni khan into his drinking cup, fed the body to the Redhats and sent the skin to Selim.

The Ottoman denounced Ismail’s divine delusions – ‘You have incited your abominable Shiites to unsanctified sexual intercourse and shedding of innocent blood’ – and prepared a pre-emptive strike. The two competed as poets: shah sent sultan a box of opium, joshing that his egregious poetry must be the work of a junkie.

In summer 1514, Selim massacred 40,000 Redhats before invading Iraq, fighting Ismail at Çaldıran, where his 60,000 men, armed with muskets and 200 cannon, routed 75,000 Turkman horse archers who did not possess a single gun.

The shah was wounded, his favourite wife captured, his invincible divinity shattered. He rebuilt his kingdom, swearing never again to lead his armies in battle. Sponsoring beautiful miniaturist painting and working as an apprentice in his own royal workshop, he assisted in the creation of a gorgeous illustrated Shahnameh – before sinking into boozing and depression, dying at just thirty-seven. But he left Iran as the Twelver Shiite nation that endures today.

It was in order to back an eastern rival to Ismail that Selim lent his artillery to Babur and Humayoun which enabled them to seize India, but when Selim demanded support from Egypt, the Mamluks refused to help.

In 1516, Selim marched east again. Ismail feared the worst, but it was a feint. Selim swerved into Mamluk Syria where the Egyptians were defeated, their sultan killed: muskets trounced crossbows. Heading south, visiting Jerusalem on the way, Selim hanged the last Mamluk sultan from the gates of Cairo. Now ruler of Mecca and Jerusalem, and the riches of Egypt, Selim celebrated himself as the messianic Master of the Auspicious Conjunction and Alexandrine World Conqueror.^*

Meanwhile in his tent outside Cairo his sea captain Piri Reis presented a map of the world inscribed in colour on gazelle hide. Its details had been given to the Ottomans by a Spanish nobleman, captured by Piri’s uncle Kemal Reis off Valencia in 1501 and enslaved.^* The Ottomans did not reach the Americas only because they never conquered Morocco, which controlled access to the Atlantic. But to the east Selim built fleets in the Red Sea and supplied artillery to allies in Ethiopia, India and Indonesia.

Christendom was alarmed by Selim. Pope Leo and Emperor Maximilian called for a crusade. The emperors of east and west – Selim and Maximilian – died almost at the same time, succeeded by young sons who inherited territories so vast they seemed beyond the abilities of any individual.

ROXELANA AND SULEIMAN: THE JOYFUL AND THE MAGNIFICENT

Maximilian prepared for death, exhausted by the strain of defending his lands, suffering from an encyclopaedia of diseases from colitis to syphilis. He travelled with a coffin but planned for the future, negotiating one more double-marriage gambit: forging a Habsburg connection to the Jagiełło family that ruled Bohemia and Hungary. He married his grandson Ferdinand to the Hungarian princess Anne and his granddaughter Mary to Ludwig, king of Hungary. This could have led to a Jagiełło takeover of Austria but a tragedy meant that this union paid off too. Maximilian was the winner in the marital gambling stakes. In 1519, outraged that local tradesmen had refused him credit, he suffered a stroke, after which on his own penitent specifications, his body was whipped and teeth hammered out. His nineteen-year-old grandson Charles of Ghent inherited an empire that extended from Panama to Vienna, from Bruges to Palermo.

Soon afterwards, Selim, riding through Bulgaria, died either of skin cancer or of the plague. Having strangled so many members of his family, he was succeeded by the only Ottoman left alive, his son Suleiman, aged twenty-five, inheriting lands from Mecca to Hungary.

Charles and Suleiman believed they were universal monarchs of universal faiths; both faced militant heresies; both fought simultaneously on multiple fronts, land and sea. They looked immensely powerful but both had to navigate between competing interests. Suleiman could execute his viziers at will yet had to watch the Janissaries, the clergy, his local governors, his sons. Limited by the same laws and traditions that had delivered such extensive lands, Charles’s monarchy was woven into a tapestry of rights and institutions – assemblies, guilds, towns and republics with their own constitutions and customs, granted by earlier monarchs. They were frustrating for Charles but they made Europe peculiarly creative and dynamic. These sovereigns, rivals for almost half a century, both craved conquest, the mark of worldly greatness and divine favour.

Just after his accession, Suleiman, ‘tall but wiry, thin-faced, his nose aquiline, with a shadow of a moustache and a small beard’, reticent and inscrutable, stern and vigilant, met a Slavic female slave whom he named Hürrem – Joyful – for her looks and exuberance, though Christian envoys called her Roxelana – the Ruthenian: she would become the most powerful Ukrainian in history. That year, this priest’s daughter aged thirteen had been kidnapped from her village in a slave raid by the Crimean khan. Mongol horsemen seized good-looking children and enslaved them. Coffles of enchained slaves were marched across the steppe to Crimea where the slave market of Kaffa, seized from Genoa, provided the biggest component of Ottoman income – an empire funded by slavery. So important was it that Suleiman’s first assignment was to govern Kaffa, accompanied by his mother Hafsa, who herself had been seized on a slave raid. The first slave raid by the Girays in 1468 captured 18,000, but the raids kept getting bigger – one in 1498 was said to have taken 100,000. The number captured in this way is incalculable: one historian guesses ten million between 1450 and 1650, others suggest six and a half million between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. More obscure than its Atlantic equivalent – and not based on race – this slave trade was also vast, cruel and deadly for its victims.

Its slave markets were desperate places. ‘A man who has not seen this has not seen anything,’ as a Turkish traveller later noted. ‘There a mother is severed from her son and daughter, a son from father and brother, sold among lamentations, cries of help, weeping and sorrow’ – a scene similar to the tragedies of the African slave markets. Yet there were big differences. If they survived the journey across the steppe, there was a route out of slavery. An enslaved boy, converted to Islam and manumitted, could rise to grand vizier, while a girl, as Roxelana would now demonstrate, could end as empress.

Some time in his first weeks, Suleiman, who was ‘very lustful’ and frequently visited ‘the palace of the women’, was given a present of Roxelana. It was said that his intimate friend Ibrahim, a Greek fisherman’s son, was the giver. The enslaved Ibrahim, who spoke Greek, Turkish and Italian, had been fortunate to be presented to the young Suleiman, who promoted him fast to chamberlain and then, at the age of about thirty, to grand vizier. Jealously nicknamed Frenk (the Westerner) and Makbul (the Favourite), he would be architect of Suleiman’s expansion on three continents. His power would be enhanced if Suleiman’s favoured concubine was his protégée – provided he could maintain control of her. But no one could control Roxelana.

In Constantinople, Roxelana was received into the female world of the Old Palace, the first built by Mehmed in the city centre, which was run by the sultan’s mother, the valide sultan, managed by eunuchs and inhabited by unmarried royal daughters, royal children, retired concubines and fresh young captives like Roxelana who were trained in needlework, the Quran, the Turkish language and sexual virtuosity. A girl started often as an odalık or servant and might never meet the sultan, spending her life until retirement serving the valide in this special world, ringing with voices in Russian, Albanian, Turkish, Italian. But Roxelana would have learned instantly that the power rested not in the female realm of the Old Palace but up on the acropolis in the male-dominated New Palace. Sophisticated, cosy, sensual, polyglot and obsessed with politics and its intimate avatar, gossip, the harem was a family sanctuary and power house as well as crèche, maternity ward, university and bordello. The hundreds of Russian-Ukranian, Greek and Italian girls were there to sexually serve the padishah whose duty was to father sons, from among whom the next ruler had to be chosen. Every girl wanted to be gözde – in the eye of the sultan; every odalık wanted to become a sultanic paramour, but their dream was to be umm al-walad – mother of an Ottoman son – with special status and the promise of manumission on the death of her master.

Roxelana had ‘beautiful hair’ – red-gold – which Suleiman praised. He moved her, travelling in a closed carriage guarded by uniformed eunuchs, into his Hall of Maidens, a micro-harem in the New Palace. After Suleiman had left to attack Serbia, Roxelana delivered a son Mehmed. He already had three sons by different odalisques: there was a rule that after the birth of a son the sultan did not return to the same odalisque, so that each prince would be supported by one mother. But when Suleiman returned after capturing Belgrade, Roxelana was recalled to the New Palace, where she was showered with jewels made personally by the sultan, who had learned the craft from Greek artisans in Trebizond. In between his military expeditions, they conceived a daughter, Mihrimah, and then three more boys.

Roxelana’s fertility and physical strength were remarkable, as was the survival of most of her children while epidemics killed two of Suleiman’s sons by other women. As Suleiman’s contemporary Henry VIII would soon learn, child mortality was high, and many women died in childbirth. Within five years, Roxelana was so powerful that when the sultan’s mother gave him ‘two beautiful Russian maidens’ she ‘flung herself to the ground weeping’ and made such a protest that Hafsa took the girls back. The sultan was committed to ‘my one and only love’.

As Suleiman was often at war, the two wrote constantly to each other. ‘My sultan,’ she wrote, ‘there’s no limit to the burning anguish of separation.’

When he teased her for not reading his letters, or ‘you would have written more of your longing to see me’, she replied, reminding him of their children: ‘Now, my sultan, that’s enough, my soul is too touched. When your letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you.’ But she does not conceal her playful impatience: ‘Their weeping has driven me crazy.’ His poems – written as by Muhibi (The Lover, perhaps her nickname for him) – hint at how she appeared to him: ‘My girl of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love with eyes full of mischief.’

‘I am happy,’ said this ruler of Olympian detachment, calling her ‘my most sincere friend, my confidante’. In the midst of interminable stress, he granted her the biggest compliment: she was ‘the only one who does not distress me in this world’. The padishah compared her not only to provinces he owned but to those he hoped to conquer – ‘My Istanbul, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia; / My Badakhshan, my Baghdad and Khorasan’. She may have been enslaved, but he called her ‘my sultan’: she was ungovernable. He signed off: ‘I’m your Lover, You bring me Joy.’

Both young monarchs surely needed such companionship to survive. Charles too would find consolation for the stress of his inheritance in a loving relationship.

CHARLES AND THE MANIKONGO

Charles, who combined German, Spanish, Burgundian and Portuguese blood, grew up in Bruges and, speaking first French, then Flemish and German, and later Spanish, was known as Carlos in Spain, Karl in Germany, Charles in Brussels. His face was like a hereditary cartoon of his complex domains: ‘he is tall and splendidly built, with a long face, beautiful light-blue eyes, his mouth and chin not as beautiful as his other features, a lopsided mouth with a drooping lower lip’. The elongated jaw and prominent lip – pathologic mandibular prognathism – was a feature of his Trastámara as well as his Habsburg ancestry, his mouth gaping open from elongated adenoids, ‘his tongue short and thick which means he speaks with great difficulty’. Yet he was irrepressibly ambitious with a vision of universal Christian monarchy and expansive empire, choosing the motto Plus Ultra – Further Beyond. He was energetic and dutiful, measured and capable of taking decisions on many fronts despite perpetual stress and constant travelling: ‘nine times to Germany, six times to Spain, seven to Italy, to Flanders ten times, four times to France, twice to England, twice to Africa, eight voyages in the Mediterranean, three in the seas of Spain’, he later recalled. Hunting, partying and womanizing – fathering illegitimate children along the way – were his relaxations, his favourite treats iced beer and oysters, but it was not surprising that he, like Suleiman, tended to melancholy. Given that his mother and grandmother were insane and that he himself suffered depression, it took an impressive constitution and personality just to survive. But he did better.

First he rushed to Spain to claim his kingdom. There he was received by his manic mother, whom he had not seen for twelve years. The sixteen-year-old knelt before Juana, who ‘asked the king three times if he was really her son he had grown so tall’ but confirmed his right to rule in her name. While in Castile, Charles had an affair with his step-grandmother, Germaine de Foix, the twenty-nine-year-old widow of King Ferdinand. Yet arrogant Flemish officials sparked a rebellion of Spanish comuneros. It was suppressed, its leader, a bishop, tortured on Charles’s orders, then garrotted.

This political funambulist was also negotiating election as emperor and coping with a seething religious crisis. His rivals François I of France and Henry VIII of England also fancied Charlemagne’s crown. ‘If you aspire to this throne,’ his grandfather Maximilian had advised, ‘you mustn’t hold back any resource.’ Charles borrowed from Fugger the Rich, paid 1.5 million florins to the electors and emerged as Emperor Charles V,^* whose first problem was Martin Luther. Charles summoned the faecal fulminator for trial by the princes. In April 1521, at the diet (imperial assembly) of Worms, Charles confronted Luther with his heretical diatribes.

‘I don’t trust in the pope,’ retorted the incorrigible Luther. ‘I’m bound by the Scriptures and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I can’t and won’t recant anything,’ and he made a knightly salute. Charles – sympathetic to Lutheran sentiments but convinced that papal authority and ritual were essential – ordered Luther’s killing or burning: ‘We want him apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic.’

‘Burn him! Burn him!’ shouted the Spanish, but Luther was secretly protected by his patron, Frederick III, bewhiskered elector of Saxony, whose retainers carried Luther triumphantly out. Charles let him escape and Frederick arranged his ‘kidnap’ by ‘armed robbers’ who hid him in a Saxon castle as Protestantism spread fast. One of the first princes to convert was the grand master of Teutonic Knights, Albert, who converted his Order’s Prussian lands into his own fiefdom. This younger son of the minor German family of Hohenzollern became duke of Prussia.

Charles’s chief rival was François of France, alarmed by having to face the Habsburgs on both borders; but, thanks to Luther, Charles had to fight popular Protestantism in a series of wars and peasant revolts – the start of 150 years of sectarian conflict, equivalent to the schism of Sunni–Shia in Islam. Yet he could not rule all his lands on his own, so he appointed his brother Ferdinand to be Austrian archduke in Vienna. Ferdinand, who was as pragmatic and able as Charles, had been brought up in Spain, speaking Spanish. The brothers were strangers. When they met after ten years, they spoke different languages. Yet, despite many crises, God and dynasty always came first.

‘Anyone who believes the empire of the entire world falls to anyone by virtue of men or riches is wrong,’ Charles told the Castilian assembly in 1520. ‘Empire comes from God alone.’ He added, ‘I’d have been content with the Spanish empire,’ which included ‘the gold-bearing world’ – America.

There, he only ruled over Panama, Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola, inhabited by 5,000 Spaniards, the benighted Taíno peoples and a few enslaved Africans – and encompassing limited gold. Charles supported Bartolemeu de las Casas, the friar horrified by the killings of Taínos, as Protector of the Indians. Yet the friar devised an atrocious solution: save the Taínos by importing African slaves. In August 1518, Charles licensed a Flemish courtier to export 4,000 slaves from Africa to protect the Taínos: many of these first American slaves were Muslim Wolofs from Senegambia.

In 1520, Charles reappointed Diego Columbus as viceroy. Columbus, duke of Veragua (Panama) and marquess of Jamaica, and now married into the aristocracy, arrived in Santo Domingo in style, holding court at a new palace, Alcázar de Colón (still partly standing). Columbus pioneered the sugar industry in Jamaica – which he owned entirely – but treated his Wolof slaves so appallingly that in December 1522 they launched the first slave rebellion, some escaping to form a community of enslaved rebels, known as Maroons from the Spanish for wild cattle, cimarrón.^*

Yet the Portuguese were far ahead of the Spanish, with their distant outposts in Goa, Cochin (both in India), Hormuz (Iran), Malacca (Malaysia), Sri Lanka and Africa, where they found that Kongo was ideal for sourcing slaves. The demand was rising; they had realized they now possessed a vast, scarcely settled coastline with unknown lands to the interior, Brazil, which became the most important market for slaves. These were overwhelmingly taken from Kongo, where the Portuguese now used African mercenaries and allies from the neighbouring kingdom of Ngola to seize the slaves, and their own mixed-race enforcers to deliver them.^* Their ally Manikongo Afonso acquired thousands of slaves during his military campaigns. The manikongo swiftly lost control, unable to restrict the slave trade to his war captives. ‘Each day the traders are kidnapping our people,’ he wrote to João III, the successor of Manuel, in 1521, ‘children of this country, sons of our nobles, even people of our own family,’ adding in another letter that ‘Many of our own subjects eagerly covet Portuguese merchandise,’ for which ‘they seize many of our black free subjects’. Priests were now shameless slave traders too, inflamed with ‘the lusts of the world and lure of wealth just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covetousness’. Ten of his own nephews, dispatched to Portugal to be educated, were enslaved and sold to Brazil: ‘We don’t know so far if they are alive or dead.’ But João III needed the trade. ‘The Portuguese there on the contrary tell me how vast Kongo is,’ he replied, ‘and how it’s so thickly populated it seems as if no slave has ever left.’ The Pious King brought da Gama out of retirement for one last voyage.^*

In 1518, Charles received the thirty-nine-year-old Magellan, veteran of Albuquerque’s wars whose misconceived plans had been turned down by João. In proposing to sail westwards to reach the Spice Islands, on the assumption that America was close to China and the Moluccas, Magellan did not plan to circumnavigate the world. But when he hinted that the Portuguese did not know of this route, Charles backed him.

Soon after Magellan had sailed with five ships and 260 sailors (including Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Africans, an Englishman and his Malay manservant known as Henrique, possibly the first person to circumnavigate the globe), the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, asked permission to send an expedition to Yucatán in central America. Charles agreed. Velázquez fitted out an expedition under his secretary, Hernán Cortés, part of the first wave of adventurous Spaniards who followed Columbus. Founding a new town on the Gulf coast, Cortés learned of a gold-infested kingdom inland and immediately planned to defy Velázquez’s control.

In June 1519, Cortés sent Charles a letter promising ‘as much gold as Solomon accumulated for the Temple’ along with a golden moon six feet wide and six Caribbean slaves, and requesting ‘the offices of conquistador, captain-general and chief justice’ of his town. Simultaneously Velázquez requested the execution of Cortés for insubordination. The glint of gold convinced Charles.

Cortés set off into the interior of the Mexica empire, accompanied by 500 Spaniards, Juan Garrido (Handsome John), born in Kongo, captured by the Portuguese and later manumitted, a woman named María de Estrada (who fought in all the battles and was the sister of one of the conquistadors), several Jewish conversos, and an unknown number of Taíno and African slaves.

CORTéS, MALINCHE AND MOTECUHZOMA

On the way up the coast in his eleven ships, Cortés landed in the Maya kingdom of Putunchan and, using his cannon and eleven horses, subdued any resistance. He was given thirty enslaved women, including a young Nahua noblewoman, Malinche, ‘the prettiest, the most lively’, reduced to slavery by the Maya. She was bilingual in Mayan and Nahuatl and quickly learned Spanish. The girls were distributed among Cortés’s henchmen and converted to Christianity. Cortés gave Malinche to the most aristocratic of his Spaniards.

Motecuhzoma sent envoys with gold and feathers. The Spaniards ‘seized upon the gold like monkeys’, but no one spoke Nahuatl until Malinche offered to interpret. Realizing her talent not just for translation but for diplomacy, Cortés took her back, promising her rewards if she got him to see Motecuhzoma. Later he said that, after God, he owed the conquest to Malinche – known to the Spanish as Doña Marina. Cortés showed off his cannon and arquebuses; the envoys returned to report to the Supreme Speaker. ‘It especially made Motecuhzoma faint when he heard how the guns went off at the Spaniards’ command,’ recalled one of the Mexica, ‘sounding like thunder, fire showering and spitting out. It turned a tree to dust. Their war gear was all iron, their armour, swords, bows, lances, iron.’ America had no horses. ‘Their deer [horses] were as tall as the roofs; their war dogs huge creatures,’ with ‘great dragging jowls and fiery yellow eyes’. Steel, horses and gunpowder gave the Spanish a commanding technical superiority.

Yet Motecuhzoma was also certain the Mexica were destined by the gods to rule the world and, after a lifetime of martial success and political glory, he vacillated. As Cortés negotiated with the local rulers, interpreted by Malinche, he learned that the Totonacs and many other peoples were discontented with the exacting Mexica empire. It was here that Malinche’s gifts were essential. The offer of the chance to join the Spanish overthrow of the evil empire of Motecuhzoma was irresistible. Next, Cortés and Malinche encountered the powerful and unconquered republic of Tlaxcala which, Cortés was amazed to discover, had ‘no supreme ruler’ but was run by councils of chiefs who ‘all gather together and, thus assembled, they decide’ like ‘Venice or Genoa’. After clashing with the Tlaxcalteca, he recruited them as allies, and 10,000 Tlaxcalteca joined his army. Cortés was a gifted leader, but his conquest was made possible by tens of thousands of local allies. He led this Hispano-Tlaxcalteca army to conquer the holy city of Cholula, a theocracy with rotating officials, dominated by its Temple of Quetzalcoatl, taller even than the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan.

Cortés was welcomed into the city, but remained vigilant in its crowded streets. His Tlaxcalteca allies hated the Choluteca and influenced his next move, but it was Malinche who warned him of a plot to kill the Spaniards. Cortés slaughtered thousands of Choluteca and looted their gold, predations in which the Tlaxcalteca joined enthusiastically before sacrificing many of the survivors.

Boosted by thousands of local troops, in November 1519 Cortés approached the resplendent imperial city of Tenochtitlan, where Motecuhzoma debated how to react. His brother Cuitláhuac argued for war; Motecuhzoma decided on temporary peace. Borne in his litter among 200 courtiers, a confident monarch in his forties, his hair long, his manner cheerful, wearing the turquoise diadem and golden sandals under a canopy of quetzal feathers, he met Cortés on his warhorse: two men convinced of the righteous destiny of their sacred empires. But Motecuhzoma had everything to lose, Cortés everything to gain. They each saw the other in the terms of their own worlds. Both dismounted, Cortés tying a necklace around the Speaker’s neck, but when he tried to embrace him the courtiers stopped him. They then led the Spaniards into the unforgettable city of gleaming temples, multicoloured houses, canals and squares, watched by crowds from rooftops and canoes. Some Spaniards thought they were dreaming, others that it resembled Venice.

Cortés was settled in a royal palace, where Motecuhzoma visited him. The Spaniards in turn visited the Supreme Speaker’s palace, where they were dazzled by its facilities including baths (the Mexica, unlike the grubby Spaniards, washed daily and changed clothes regularly), sated by the dishes – roast turkey and quail, tortillas – and impressed by a cocoa drink and a new intoxicant, tobacco, which Motecuhzoma smoked. All of these novelties would later catch on in Europe. But the Spaniards were horrified by the temples, where the priests, hair clotted with fresh human blood and earlobes bleeding from ritualistic piercings, showed them the staircase where sacrificed people were tossed, dripping with blood, and the top of the pyramid where a humanoid statue gripped a stone receptacle for human hearts. They also saw the techcatl, the spattered green execution stone, and braziers holding warm human hearts from the sacrifices that day. Their righteous horror should have been qualified by the knowledge that European cities were decorated with the heads of the executed, while they had regularly seen heretics burned alive.

Then Cortés discovered that Motecuhzoma’s troops on the coast had clashed with Spanish forces. He punished the Mexica commanders by having them mauled by his war dogs – mastiffs and wolfhounds trained to kill – and then burned alive, which shocked the Mexica.

As fear spread across the city, Cortés agonized over what to do and decided to arrest the monarch, afraid that he was about to be double-crossed. When he heard that Velázquez had sent a force to arrest him, he rushed back to the coast and succeeded in winning over the Spaniards. Meanwhile his henchmen in Tenochtitlan tried to stop a sacrifice, thus sparking a massacre followed by an uprising. Motecuhzoma was hit by stones thrown by outraged Mexica and then arrested. His brother Cuitláhuac, married to Motecuhzoma’s eleven-year-old daughter Tecuichpoch Ixcaxochitzin, was chosen as Supreme Speaker just as Motecuhzoma died, either of his wounds or on Cortés’s orders. Cortés hurried back to save his comrades.

In June 1520, besieged in the palace and lacking the forces to defeat the raging Mexica, Cortés broke out under ferocious attack, losing much gold and 600 men, a Night of Sorrows, escaping across the causeway. Facing defeat, he now proved his acumen, telling his men, ‘Onwards, for we lack nothing!’ Regathering his strength, he reported to Charles, ‘It seems to me the best name for this country is New Spain,’ of which he could call himself emperor ‘with no less title than of Germany’. But most significantly he sent gold regalia. ‘The gold-bearing world’ impressed the emperor.

Cortés rebuilt his army. The Mexica mystique had been shattered and the subjugated peoples were now keen to join the Spaniards in attacking the empire, now being devoured by an even more voracious hunter – a case of jaguar–crocodile predation. The second city of the Triple Alliance, Texcoco, now joined Cortés, who had left a worse weapon in Tenochtitlan: pathogens of smallpox. ‘A great plague broke out, lasting for seventy days, killing a vast number of our people,’ a victim later told Spanish priests. ‘Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies, we were covered in agonizing sores from head to foot. The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. A great many died from this plague, and many others … starved to death in their beds.’ Cuitláhuac perished, succeeded by a young nephew Cuauhtémoc, a respected warrior who also married Motecuhzoma’s daughter Tecuichpoch Ixcaxochitzin. As soon as he was chosen, Cuauhtémoc killed Motecuhzoma’s sons. Cortés struck back with terror, now deploying 700 Spaniards and 70,000 local troops, a hybrid army of warriors, Spaniards, Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca, the former in armour with arquebuses and Toledo swords shouting ‘Castile!’, Mesoamericans in feather headdresses and carrying machuahitl maces edged with obsidian shouting ‘Tlaxcala!’ First they attacked one of Tenochtitlan’s allies, Tepeaca, killing 20,000, tearing some to pieces with war dogs, eating others in cannibalistic feasts, then enslaving women and children, branded G for guerra – war. Cortés was guided by his Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca allies, eager for vengeance against their own enemies. ‘Clearly Cortés had to mould his plans to the objects of his indigenous allies,’ writes Fernando Cervantes. They believed they were using the Spanish – and vice versa.

On 22 May 1521, Cortés surrounded Tenochtitlan, cutting off food supplies.

ISABEL MONTEZUMA: THE LAST EMPRESS AND THE FALL OF THE MEXICA

In late July, with 900 Spaniards and as many as 150,000 Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca, supported by brigantines on the lake, Cortés assaulted the city. Trained since childhood, hardened by cutting themselves with thorns and hallucinating on peyote, the Mexica fought wildly, sinking a brigantine and almost capturing Cortés himself, sacrificing prisoners and stringing up fifty-three heads. But in the end, wrote Cortés, they ‘could no longer find any arrows, javelins or stones’ and ‘our allies were armed with swords and breastplates and slaughtered so many of them on land and in the water that more than 40,000 were killed’. He freely admitted that his Tlaxcalteca auxiliaries ‘dined well’ on prisoners, ‘for they carried off all those killed, sliced them into pieces and ate them’. He did not give his allies credit for their help in battle, but conceded that ‘We had more trouble in preventing our allies from killing with such cruelty than we had in fighting the enemy. For no race, however savage, has ever practised such fierce and unnatural cruelty as the natives of these parts.’ Far from being a victory over four million people by 900 Spaniards, it was the triumph of overwhelming numerical and technical superiority, aided by the most punishing epidemic ever seen in the Americas. On 13 August, Cuauhtémoc was finally captured.

‘Strike me dead immediately,’ he told Cortés, asking him to spare his young wife Tecuichpoch. ‘So loud was the wailing of women and children,’ wrote Cortés, ‘that there was not one man among us whose heart did not bleed.’ It took a lot to make his heart bleed: ‘We could not prevent more than fifteen thousand being killed and sacrificed that day.’ The triumphant Spaniards and Tlaxcalteca soldiers looted and raped. The Mexica lamented their downfall in this threnody:

Broken spears lie in the roads

We’ve torn our hair with grief

The houses are roofless now

And their walls red with blood.

Cortés dismantled Tenochtitlan and built instead Mexico City, the Great Temple replaced by a great church. When the gold discovered proved inadequate, he had Cuauhtémoc tortured with fire to make him reveal more, while he rewarded his henchmen with encomiendas and sent treasures and a jaguar back to Charles. But at first no one paid much attention in Europe. His first treasure trove was captured by a French pirate, and the jaguar escaped, killing two sailors and then jumping into the Atlantic.

Shortly before Cortés laid siege to Tenochtitlan, Magellan was killed fighting locals in the Philippines who refused to convert to Christianity. Just as Cortés’s treasures reached Spain, one ship of desperate, cadaverous survivors arrived there from Magellan’s voyage. On a catastrophically bungled odyssey around the tip of south America into a ‘peaceful’ ocean that he named the Pacific, Magellan had lost men and ships to storms, mutinous fighting and fatal scurvy, before reaching Guam and then Brunei, the Moluccas and the Philippines,^* where the explorer himself was smote. But one captain, Juan Sebastián Elcano, filled his ship with spices and with eighteen survivors sailed back around Africa to Spain. Charles, boasting that they had gone ‘where neither Portugal nor any other nation has been’, granted Elcano a coat of arms featuring a globe and the words Primus circumdedisti me – You encircled me first. The emperor along with the Fugger bankers backed a return voyage, during which Elcano starved to death, lost in the Pacific.

These Iberian adventurers had scarcely touched the vastness of the Pacific and its island realms. Some of these islands had been settled by Polynesians only recently: the last wave of Polynesian settlers had occupied the two islands of Aotearoa (New Zealand) only around 1300. The Maori remained in Aotearoa and for reasons unknown lost the will and technology to sail long distances. On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), settled since the third century, the islanders had built massive statues and temple platforms to honour ancestors and observe the stars.

In the middle of the Pacific, the four main islands of Hawaii were ruled by dynasties of intermarried chiefs descended from a founding goddess, Papa. The exact sequence is still unknown but around 700 Hawaii may have been settled by Polynesians from Tahiti, while it was a few centuries since new conquerors from Nuku Hiva (named the Marquesas by the Spanish) had arrived on the islands.

While starry-eyed European travellers later idealized Hawaii as a free-loving, easy-going paradise, this was a hierarchical, polyamorous society of warriors dominated by kapu, the Polynesian religion, with rituals, foods and lands specified for each class. The chieftains earned mana, divine charisma, by inheritance and war, which granted them the right to sacrifice humans to the gods. Subjects bowed to the floor before chiefs. The struggles for power were as ferocious as those in Europe; noble babies were killed if they cried when they were laid on the sacred Naha Stone; victories were celebrated by human sacrifices. The losing chieftain was personally sacrificed – usually strangled – by the victor.

Their entire concept of family was more flexible than that prevailing in Europe: women, high and low, enjoyed a degree of independence unthinkable in China or Europe and were allowed lovers; children often treated two men as fathers and were usually raised by cousins rather than parents. Older men took teenage boys as aikane – lovers. But genealogy was chronicled and treasured. Around this time, the main island was governed by a semi-mythical alii nui or queen called Kaikilani, the ancestress of the kings who would encounter the Europeans.

Cortés knew little of the Pacific, but he understood there were lands there to conquer. At forty-nine, he had lost none of his ambition or energy. Before permitting more expeditions, Emperor Charles ordered that indigenous peoples ‘must be allowed to live in liberty’, but Cortés was already forcing them to work to death in encomiendas, while spasms of epidemic – measles, smallpox, mumps, haemorrhagic fevers, – were killing large numbers of them: by 1580, some 88 per cent of the people of the Valley of Mexico had died.

As other conquistadors competed with Cortés to ‘explore’ (seize) the lands around the Valley, he felt forced to pre-empt them, orchestrating expeditions up the Pacific coast, starting with his own to the Sea of Cortés followed by that of a henchman who sailed up the coast as far as San Francisco, mapping the coast of a new territory named California.^*

Cortés’s allies remained independent, with many kingdoms untouched by Spanish control for over a century. In 1523, Cortés sent his sidekick Pedro de Alvarado to conquer the Maya kingdoms of Kiche and Kaqchikel in Guatemala and Salvador, but failed. Ultimately it took massive assistance from Nahua peoples to crush the Kaqchikel; to the north, Zapotecs helped Cortés take the lush Oaxaca Valley. The second largest kingdom, that of the Purépecha, was conquered in 1530, but the last independent Maya kingdom did not fall until 1697.

North America was even more challenging. In 1528, an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez tried to found a colony in La Florida, the vast lands between Alabama and modern Florida, but it was a disaster. Trudging 2,000 miles, starving and eating each other, the Spaniards were enslaved by Coahuiltecan Indians: four survivors made it to Mexico City.^*

On his own expedition to Honduras, Cortés took with him Cuauhtémoc, the Supreme Speaker, afraid to leave the last ruler in Mexico City. But when he discovered a plot to rebel, he had him beheaded and impaled.

Back in Mexico City, Cortés was joined by his long-time wife, Catalina Suárez, but she died mysteriously, probably murdered by her husband. Malinche, his Maya interpreter and in some ways the architect of the decisive alliance with the Mesoamerican allies, became his mistress – whether by force or choice we cannot know – giving birth to his first son Martín known as El Mestizo (the Mixed Race). Cortés took the boy away, had him legitimized by the pope and raised in Spain. As for Malinche herself, Cortés gave her an encomienda and married her to another Spaniard, with whom she had a daughter. Still only around twenty-three, this remarkable woman had endured fourteen years a slave; now she was a landowner and the wife of a Spanish gentleman. But she died soon afterwards, perhaps in one of the epidemics.

Amid the killing of Mexica, Cortés presided over a strange melding of Spanish conquistador and Mexica royalty, Motecuhzoma’s bloodline being especially revered. Cortés regarded Motecuhzoma’s daughter Tecuichpoch, now twenty-five, this widow of three Supreme Speakers, as an important symbol of the new order. He converted her to Christianity with the name Isabel Montezuma, marrying her to a henchman (who soon died) and granting her an encomienda, worked by local and African slaves. Described as ‘very beautiful’, she became a devout Christian, but she too was unable to avoid becoming Cortés’s mistress.^*

Cortés was now super-rich, but denunciations by his enemies, led by Diego Columbus, flooded in to Charles V, though he gladly received the first 60,000 gold pesos from his ‘gold-bearing lands’. The emperor took control, chairing a Council of the Indies in the Alhambra Palace, Granada, and confiscating some of Cortés’s sultanic holdings. In 1528, Cortés, fulminating against ‘powerful rivals and enemies’ who have ‘obscured the eyes of Your Majesty’, sailed home to face the emperor.

Although Charles disliked the coarse conquistador who had so enriched his empire, he created him captain-general of the South Sea and marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, granted him 23,000 vassals and pardoned his insubordination. Cortés celebrated by marrying a noblewoman with whom he had a legitimate son, Don Martín. Cortés returned to New Spain, living in splendour at his palace (the first Spanish building on the mainland that still stands at Cuernavaca).

As Charles took control of New Spain, he received Cortés’s cousin Francisco Pizarro, who asked the emperor’s support for an expedition to conquer another fabulous auric kingdom – Piru. As long-serving mayor of Panama City, Pizarro had been exploring down the Pacific coast, gathering intelligence. Charles agreed. When his men grumbled about the hardships, Pizarro shouted, ‘There lies Piru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.’

As ever Charles was desperate for cash, personally exhausted, mentally stressed and politically overextended – and he needed a companion if not a wife.

* The descendants of Tamerlane were entitled amir-mirza; the descendants of Genghis were entitled khan.

* Once in power, he promoted himself from mirza to padishah – emperor in Persian – styling his first wife Maham and his sister Khanzada as begum-padishahs or lady empresses. Babur and his successors called his dynasty the Gurkanis, after Tamerlane’s title gürkan meaning imperial son-in-law, or House of Timur. Their enemies denigrated them as Mongols. The British, attracted to the dynasty in which they saw parallels to their own empire, called them the Mughals.

* The Rajputs were Hindu princely dynasties descended from kshatriya warlords.

* Babur was buried in his beloved gardens in Kabul where his tomb still stands, originally inscribed: ‘If there’s paradise on earth, it is this, it is this!’

* The special executioners were the Tongueless or Dilsiz (known as deaf-mutes by European visitors) who served as pages, couriers and executioners. The Tongueless were part of a secretive unit, the Enduran – interior service – within the harem who, wearing blue robes and trousers, and red boots, ensured privacy and were regarded as special, sometimes mentally challenged outsiders devoted to the ruler. First hired by Mehmed the Conqueror, they became the padishah’s special killers for strangling princes and viziers with the bowstring. Executions were also conducted by the Bostandji Bachi, once Chief Gardener, who became the pasha of 3,000 red-hatted, yellow-robed bodyguards who protected the sultanic palaces.

* Safi al-Din’s fanatical followers – Twelver Shiites – believed that, after the first ten imams, the eleventh had been murdered by the Sunni caliph in 874 and his son the twelfth imam vanished, occulted or hidden, poised to re-emerge as the Mahdi at the day of judgement. Ismail went even further. ‘My name is Shah Ismail,’ the boy told his followers. ‘I am God’s mystery. I am the leader of all the ghazis [warriors]. My mother is Fatima, my father is Ali; I am the sacred master of the Twelve Imams … I am the living Khidr [heroic saint of Islamic theology] and Jesus, son of Mary. I am the Alexander of my contemporaries.’ Ismail’s blondness reflected his descent from the Komnenoi dynasty of Constantinople: in 1439, Emperor John IV of Trebizond married his daughter Theodora to Ismail’s other grandfather Uzun Hasa, khan of the Ak Koyunlu.

* Arab potentates rushed to pay court: Selim received Abu Numeiri, the young amir of Mecca, who offered the keys of Mecca and Medina on behalf of his father Barakat, the Hashemite sharif descended from Qatada. Selim reappointed them amirs of Mecca. Selim himself commandeered the titles Shadow of God, Messiah of the Last Age and Renewer of the Religion.

* Still in the Ottoman archives, the map’s eastern half including China is missing; the western half shows not just the Mediterranean but the discoveries of ‘Colon-bo’ – Colombus. America was labelled ‘Vilayet Antilia’: Antilia was the legendary island of the Atlantic; vilayet was an Ottoman province, so its name suggested it could be next for Ottoman conquest. Selim supposedly rejected the idea of an Atlantic conquest by tearing the map in two, keeping the eastern half and returning the American section. Actually no one knows what happened to the map.

* When Fugger’s own interests were at stake, he was not shy in reminding Charles V: ‘It’s known that your imperial majesty could not have claimed the Roman crown without my help.’

* Columbus’ other son Fernando followed the opposite path: he retired to a Seville mansion, wrote his father’s biography and collected 15,000 manuscripts and printed books. When Diego Columbus died in 1526, his son Luis Columbus de Toledo inherited the titles admiral of the Indies, duke of Veragua and marquess of Jamaica. Jamaica, its Taínos almost extinct, now populated by African slaves, remained a vast personal estate – the last one – of the Columbus family, until 1655, when it was captured by the English. Today’s duke of Veragua is named Cristóbal Colón.

* The Portuguese had seized, raped or married African women, creating a new caste of mixed-raced Luso-Africans, who, until 1976, essentially ran their empire as enforcers and slave traders. African kings and traders brought them ivory, ebony and slaves, who were then marched back to the coast, often cruelly supervised by higher-status enslaved guards.

* Da Gama died in India. Like the Columbuses, the da Gamas became a colonial dynasty: his three sons governed Gold Coast in Africa, Malacca and the State of India in Asia while in 1540, one of them, Estauvo, fought Ottoman fleets and aided the Christian emperor of Ethiopia, raiding up the Red Sea to Sinai, at the height of Portuguese empire. Vasco’s grandson Joao da Gama was captain of Macau and then, in 1588, sailed across the entire Pacific exploring the north American coast before arriving at Acapulco to be arrested by the Spanish.

* In the Philippines they were intrigued by the tattoo-covered indigenous men who pierced their penises with studs which, they explained, initially discomfited their female partners but ultimately delivered a remarkable intensity of ‘lustful pleasure’.

* This was said to resemble the island kingdom of Calafia, queen of the black Amazons of California in the popular chivalrous novel Las sergas de Esplandián (Adventures of Esplandián) by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. California is the only territory named after a fictional character. The Sea of Cortés is now the Gulf of California.

* Among them was Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote a chronicle of his adventures, and Mustafa, known as Estevanico, an enslaved African Muslim with a gift for languages – ‘the negro who talked to them’, in Vaca’s words. Mustafa, African explorer of the American west, was later killed in New Mexico acting as a guide for a return expedition.

* Pregnant, Isabel was quickly married to another Spaniard (she married six times in all), and then gave birth to a daughter, Leonor Cortés Montezuma. Altogether she had seven children by her two Spanish husbands and Cortés. Part pawn, part symbol, she became strong-minded, liberating her slaves during her lifetime and in her will: ‘I want, and I order, that all my slaves, Indian men and women, born from this land, shall be free of all servitude and captivity, and as free people they shall do as they will; so if they are [slaves] I will and command for them to be free.’ One son, Juan de Montezuma Cano, married the Castilian aristocrat Elvira de Toledo, building the Toledo-Montezuma Palace, still standing in Cáceres with its murals of Mexica Speakers and Spanish grandees; another son was progenitor of the counts of Miravalle, while the descendants of her brother Pedro (de) Montezuma Tlacahuepan, who accompanied Cortés back to Spain, became dukes of Montezuma.