The World

Incas, Pizarros, Habsburgs and Medici

LE GRAND NEZ AND THE CARNATION EMPRESS

The emperor faced challenges on all fronts. In the east, Suleiman advanced; in the west, François of France, the personification of macho, lascivious yet cultured Renaissance monarch, known as Le Grand Nez (Big Nose) and Grand Colas (Big Cock), hated Charles as much as he resented Habsburg encirclement. The hatred was mutual. Charles challenged François to personal combat. François tried to seize Milan in Italy, where outside Pavia on 24 February 1525, Charles’s arquebusiers scythed down François’s charging cavalry^* and captured Le Grand Nez, who was transported back to Spain. ‘Nothing remains to me,’ François told his mother, ‘except honour and life.’ After he had tried to escape disguised as an African slave, wearing blackface, he capitulated to Charles, whom he refused to meet, winning his freedom, though he had to leave his sons as hostages. Galloping exuberantly into Paris, he shouted, ‘I’m king again,’ reneged on the deal and signed an alliance with England.

The twenty-six-year-old Charles celebrated victory as he celebrated marriage to a girl he came to adore. After an engagement to Mary, the six-year-old daughter of Henry VIII and his aunt Catherine, designed to undermine the Franco-English entente, he switched to marrying Infanta Isabella, aged twenty-three, the pale, red-haired daughter of Manuel of Portugal who offered a Croesan dowry. Isabella was well educated and, confidently wearing a medallion inscribed Aut Caesar aut nihil, determined to marry only a great monarch. She got her Caesar, while her brother João III married Charles’s sister, Catarina. The first cousins met for the first time at their Seville wedding, but she was extremely pretty. They fell in love, honeymooning happily at the arabesque Alhambra in Granada, where he built a new palace and imported carnations to plant in her honour.

The young empress ‘sleeps every night in her husband’s arms; they stay in bed until 10 or 11’, observed a Portuguese diplomat, ‘always talking and laughing together’. Charles boasted that his hands were shaking from erotic exhaustion – ‘I can’t write with my own hand’ – as he was ‘still a new bridegroom’, and Isabella conceived at once, surviving an agonizing labour with regal grit. She requested a veil, and when a midwife advised her to scream if necessary, she replied, ‘I’d rather die. Don’t talk to me like that: I may die but I will not cry out.’^* The baby was named Philip. Although Charles selfishly treated her as a breeding machine – she endured seven pregnancies – and left her for four years at a time as he defended his empire, he loved her, praising her ‘great beauty’. He trusted her too, appointing her regent; he praised her decisions as ‘very prudent and well conceived’.

In May 1529, it was Isabella who permitted that coarse conquistador Pizarro to set off for somewhere called Piru. ‘We order that Captain Pizarro be entrusted with governing it for the rest of his life,’ she wrote. ‘We give permission for him to take 250 men with him.’

In December 1530, Pizarro sailed from Panama, arriving fortuitously just as the Empire of the Four Parts Together reeled from a war of succession. Conqueror and father of fifty sons, Inca Wayna Capac, who had ruled for thirty years, had expanded Four Parts to its greatest extent, from the Peruvian heartland to the Andean mountains and Amazonian swamps, pushing into today’s Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador – victories celebrated by flaying vanquished lords, impaling their heads on stakes and stretching their skins on to drums. The Sapa Inca knew about the European arrival even before Cortés’s conquests, but in 1524, while fighting in south-western Colombia, he contracted smallpox brought by the Spanish, dying in an epidemic along with his chosen heir. The Four Parts was divided between two sons, Huáscar Inca who was to rule from his new city of Quito, and the favourite Atahualpa as autonomous king of Cuzco in the south – an arrangement that soon proved disastrous. Huáscar seduced the wives of his nobles and seized the fiefdoms of former Incas, leading to tension with his brother whom he arrested. When Atahualpa escaped, the brothers, backed by feuding royal clans, fought one another with armies of 50,000 apiece until Huáscar was captured.

Just as Pizarro was about to arrive, Atahualpa laid on a sadistic show, forcing his half-brother to watch as all his wives and children were tortured then killed. He was leading an army of 40,000 towards the capital Cuzco when he encountered Captain-General Pizarro and his 106 infantrymen and 62 cavalrymen, a family affair that included three Pizarro brothers. The Spaniards agreed to greet Atahualpa, who was resting in a nearby spa in Cajamarca. In the city square there, the Castilian artfully concealed artillery in surrounding buildings. When Atahualpa was borne by his retainers into the square, Pizarro’s friar offered a breviary. The Inca threw it to the ground, and the conquistador ‘gave a signal to the gunner that he should fire shots into the midst of the Incas’.

THE INCA AND THE CONQUISTADOR

Pizarro’s few warhorses charged into the Incas, who did not fight back. Seven thousand were slaughtered. Atahualpa was arrested. Pizarro demanded a vast ransom of gold. Offering a military alliance to the victor, Atahualpa gave his fifteen-year-old half-sister Quispe Sisa to Pizarro. She was first baptized as Inés Yupanqui and then seduced by the grizzled Pizarro, who nicknamed her Pispita after a beautiful Spanish bird. While in custody Atahualpa, still fighting his civil war, ordered his brother’s murder – ‘How shall my brother get so much gold and silver for himself? I would give twice as much as he can, if they would kill him and leave me as lord.’ He ordered gold from Cuzco for Pizarro. Six tons of gold and five of silver were melted down, but as the Inca’s generals raised new armies to attack the Spanish, Pizarro panicked and decided to kill the monarch, accusing him of idolatry and murdering his brother. He then sentenced him to burn, an unbearable fate for an Inca. Pizarro’s friar offered Atahualpa strangulation if he converted, so he took the name Francisco after his killer and was then garrotted.

Now a young Inca, Manco Yupanqui, another son of Huáscar who had survived Atahualpa’s massacre of the family, offered Pizarro an alliance, believing he could re-establish the Four Parts with Spanish help. In Cuzco, the Pizarro brothers installed Manco as Inca, watched by his regal mummified ancestors.

The capital was dazzling. ‘This city is the greatest and the finest ever seen in this country or anywhere in the Indies,’ Pizarro wrote to Charles. ‘We can assure your Majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.’ Pizarro presided over the looting of the Coricancha, Temple of the Sun, its gold and silver walls, its garden of golden plants, sacrificial altar and image of the sun and the many golden statues of early Inca rulers, all of it melted down. Pizarro sent his brother Hernando homewards with the emperor’s first share.

Charles dominated Italy. In Rome, Leo X excommunicated Luther, who fulminated about ‘how openly and shamelessly the pope … practises sodomy’. After Leo’s death and a short-lived successor, Charles backed the election of another Medici, Giulio, who became Clement VII. Genial and cultivated, Clement commissioned Michelangelo, whom he had known since they were young, to finish the family chapel in Florence, telling him, ‘Think only of work’ and ‘Spare no expense.’ Michelangelo celebrated. ‘Medici is pope. Which will cheer the whole world,’ he told his quarryman. ‘With regards to art, many things will be accomplished.’ Instead Rome was to be sacked in an orgy of violence and rapine.

THE BLACK DUKE, MICHELANGELO AND THE SACK OF ROME

Pope Clement betrayed Charles and allied with François. Charles was incensed: ‘You must know the part we played in your election.’ His army, unpaid and roiling, marched on Rome. Clement prepared to fight, but he had grossly miscalculated. In early May, the imperialists stormed Rome, slaughtering Clement’s Swiss Guards on the steps of St Peter’s. Clement fled to the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he melted down jewellery to plan his escape. Outside the Hadrianic fortress, Charles’s Landsknechte – many of them Protestants – went wild, raping nuns, defacing Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican with the graffito ‘luther’ and killing 10,000 Romans – until the plague culled the Landsknechte themselves. The catastrophe that befell Clement led to a revolution against the Medici in Florence. These apocalyptic scenes helped inspire Michelangelo’s vision of hell in the Last Judgment and intensified Catholic–Protestant hatred. ‘Christ reigns in such a way that the emperor who persecutes Luther for the pope,’ gloated Luther, ‘is forced to destroy the pope for Luther.’

On 6 June, Clement, terrified of Charles, surrendered, promising a ransom. He escaped to the countryside, where he received English envoys seeking permission for Henry VIII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Charles’s aunt, and marry a feisty paramour, Anne Boleyn. At any other time, such a request would have been fixable, but politics, like love, is all about timing: Clement could not risk offending Charles. Henry, who started as a slim, genial, gingery charmer and developed into a vicious, narcissistic, semi-impotent bloviator, desperate to produce a son for his parvenu dynasty and in love with Boleyn, was a religious conservative. But his talented Protestant minister Thomas Cromwell was a religious radical who orchestrated divorce from Catherine, marriage to Boleyn, schism with Rome and a step towards a Reformist England. Clement’s decision to refuse justified Henry’s move against European interference that both formed and reflected England’s autonomous instincts.

In 1530, Charles arrived in Bologna to receive his reward from Clement: a papal coronation, which proved to be the last. In return Clement asked for the Medici to be restored in Florence, where Michelangelo, despite his relationship with the family, backed the republic, serving as anti-Medici governor-general of fortifications. But his battlements were of no avail: Charles restored the Medici.

Clement, like Henry, had no legitimate heirs. Only two young bastards were left, but one of them was probably his own son by a black slave. The illegitimate Alessandro Medici had grown up in obscurity, his mother described as a ‘slave’, ‘Moorish’ and ‘half-Negro’. But now family necessity trumped racial prejudice. Alessandro enjoyed an astonishing reversal of fortune, first tutored and trained, then unveiled as duke of Florence and betrothed to Charles’s illegitimate daughter Margarita. Nicknamed Il Moro – the Black – Alessandro, the first and only European ruler of colour, proved adept at murderous Florentine politics, poisoning his cousin Cardinal Ippolito Medici and possibly having his own African mother murdered to avoid social embarrassment. Spending extravagantly on his superb clothes and exquisitely engraved pistols, the Black Duke was now an Italian magnifico. If Charles was impressed, Michelangelo was not: when he refused to design a fortress for Alessandro, the duke ordered his assassination. Fortunately, ‘someone spoke in my ear that I shouldn’t stay there any longer if I wanted to save my life’ and the artist escaped to Rome, where Clement^* forgave him.

Yet Clement was still playing Habsburgs against Valois, marrying the other Medici heiress, the fourteen-year-old Catherine, nicknamed Duchessina, to François’s second son Henri. While it seemed unlikely Henri would ever be king, Catherine would dominate France for forty years.

MICHELANGELO’S LAST JUDGMENT AND THE FALL OF THE BLACK DUKE

As Clement was dying, he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Yet the death of Michelangelo’s generous patron led to the election of an even better one. Paul III, the former Alessandro Farnesse,^* urbane, astute and sometimes murderous, summoned Michelangelo, aged sixty, who insisted he was too tired and overstretched to accept more work. ‘I’ve nursed this ambition for thirty years and now I’m pope I won’t be dissatisfied. I’m determined to have you in my service,’ insisted Paul.

Michelangelo duly painted The Last Judgment, a fresco of the dead awakening at Judgement Day and the second coming of Christ. Then Paul commissioned him to design a piazza on the Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio, where he placed Marcus Aurelius’ statue, then appointed him overseer of St Peter’s. Paul and Michelangelo became friends.

The artist now thrived in Rome, sending money to his feckless family to relaunch them as nobility while presiding over his brood of protégés and enjoying friendships high and low. He sent love letters and drawings to a young nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, but it was to his dear friend Princess Vittoria Colonna that he wrote most intimately about art: ‘For a reliable guide in my vocation, beauty was set before me as a birthright, a mirror and a lamp for art.’ He tempered his curmudgeonliness with laughter and wit, mocking his ageing bladder: ‘Urine! How well I know it – drippy duct, compelling me to awake too early, when dawn plays at peekaboo, then yonder – yuk!’ He was getting older, and at one point he fell off the scaffold in the Sistine.^*

In Florence, Alessandro Medici had only just married Charles V’s daughter, the fourteen-year-old Margarita of Austria, but his cut-throat swagger and enthusiastic seductions attracted bitter envy, particularly in his penniless cousin and companion Lorenzaccio. So often in politics the greatest peril lies within not without, and nothing surpasses the intimate loathings of family.

Lorenzaccio decided to kill the Black Duke. In 1536, he offered the duke every womanizer’s dream: the seduction of a wholesome wife. Luring him to the assignation, he burst in on the sleeping Alessandro with a hitman. As Lorenzaccio stabbed him in the stomach, Alessandro fought back, almost biting off the killer’s finger until the hitman slashed his throat.^*

Charles was the universal emperor of Christendom, his armour engraved ‘Charles the Divine’. But his enemy Suleiman regarded himself not just as sultan, khan and padishah but as the real Caesar. Disdaining Charles as mere ‘king of Spain’, he advanced on Vienna.

SULEIMAN’S FAVOURITES: ROXELANA AND IBRAHIM

‘The king of Spain,’ Suleiman told a French envoy, ‘has proclaimed he wants to act against the Turks and now I am advancing against him. If the man has balls and courage, let him come.’

His favourite, Ibrahim Pasha, commissioned Venetian jewellers to craft a four-crowned imperial tiara. The vizier ruled supreme, based in a new palace on the hippodrome (still standing) where he presided over spectacular shows of imperial power. Grand viziers had the right to display five horsetails on their banners, but Ibrahim was allowed six, just one fewer than the sultan. Only Ukrainian Hürrem, nicknamed Roxelana – mother of five sultanic children – had the power to challenge him.

The sultan’s teenaged son, Mustafa, was jealous of Ibrahim. The system played teams of mother and son against mother and son. Unable to undermine Hürrem, Mustafa’s mother, Mahidevran, attacked her, scratching her face and tearing her hair. Summoned by Suleiman, Hürrem refused to come, saying her looks had been destroyed. Mahidevran was exiled.

Suleiman’s life seemed stable with Ibrahim and Roxelana. While his mother Hafsa ruled his family world, Suleiman did not change Roxelana’s status. But when the valide sultan died, he first manumitted Roxelana, still in her twenties, then married her.^*

After several sons, only one of whom could succeed, Suleiman and Hürrem stopped having children, aware that losers in the power tournament would be strangled. Hürrem probably used intravaginal suppositories, with oil from cabbage leaves, pepper, juice of peppermint, leaves of pennyroyal and dill. She inherited control of the Old Palace and the harem, emerging out of the shadows, corresponding with the queens of Poland and Hungary while endowing her own charitable foundations in Istanbul and Jerusalem. ‘You know I’m never content with the least thing,’ she admitted to Suleiman.

Suleiman and Ibrahim were planning wars, treaties and construction on a vast scale. In the east, Suleiman fought the Shiite Persians; in the west, in 1524, he defeated the Hungarians and killed young King Ludwig of Hungary, triggering one of the Habsburg marriage deals made by Emperor Maximilian: Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, was married to Ludwig’s sister. So Ferdinand now claimed Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia, which would remain Habsburg kingdoms until 1918. Then in 1529 Suleiman and Ibrahim invaded Austria, 120,000 Ottomans besieging Vienna, which was saved only by the heavy rains that forced them to leave behind their heavy guns. Three years later, they attacked again; this time Charles counter-attacked into Ottoman Hungary.

Charles and Suleiman did not just conduct their duel on land. In 1528, facing Ottoman advances on land and slave-hunting Islamic pirates by sea, Charles hired the best Christian admiral, Andrea Doria, ruler of Genoa as Perpetual Censor, heir to a dynasty of seafaring oligarchs. When Suleiman was distracted by war against Iran, Doria raided Ottoman Greece. Suleiman in turn summoned the greatest corsair of his time: Barbarossa.

* Charles fielded an army of Swiss and German Landsknechte and Spanish tercios, experts in the use of pike and arquebus. Their pike squares allowed them to reload and fire in unison. François also employed Landsknechte but fewer of them. Arquebuses were constantly improved, with Italy as the laboratory of technical innovation. Imperial troops started to use heavier arquebuses, supported on a rest, that penetrated armour: they became known as moschetti – muskets – and they quickly made armour obsolete, ending the era of heavily armoured knights that had started with cataphracts in Persia a millennium earlier. The most famous gunmaker was naturally an Italian. Da Vinci experimented with musket designs. In 1526, an Italian artisan, Bartolomeo Beretta, founded a foundry in northern Italy that manufactured muskets. In the 1530s, Beretta was experimenting with a new, smaller firearm: pistols – from the Czech pistole – became an aristocratic fashion item, bespoke and intricately ornamented. As for the Beretta, the factory is still producing guns today.

* Childbirth, conducted at home, was still lethal; women made wills before going into labour. The pain was scarcely eased by doses of myrrh, valerian root and ‘Turkish poppy’ – opium. Statistics are guesswork but over many centuries, child mortality before the age of five varied from 20 per cent to 50; as many as 20 per cent of births ended in death for the mother. Midwives, often operating in families who passed on their knowledge, dilated mothers with unsterile fingers and, if a baby could not be delivered, Caesarian section killed the mothers; doing nothing killed both; and generally midwives used a hook, a crochet, to save the mother and remove the baby. Even in successful births, tearing could lead to fatal puerperal sepsis. Often the infection of the open wound left by the placenta developed into puerperal fever; mothers often died of peritonitis. So far doctors – all men – were uninvolved. When doctors started to get involved and in the next century maternity hospitals were founded, the mortality rates soared. For a long time, home births were considerably safer.

* Clement was an open-minded humanist, who protected the Jews of Rome against the Inquisition and was interested in the theories of a well-connected, Italian-educated Polish priest, Nicolaus Copernicus, who argued that the earth revolved around the sun. Clement saw no threat to the Church from heliocentricity. Ironically the radical Luther rejected Copernicus as ‘that fellow who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down’.

* A throwback to the Borgias, Farnese was known as the Petticoat Cardinal, raised to the scarlet because he was the teenaged brother of Pope Alexander’s mistress. Paul also hired Titian, who painted revealing portraits of the aged pope and his shifty nephews. Titian balanced papal with imperial patronage, playing the Farnese against the Habsburgs. But Paul never paid for the paintings. Finally in 1548, Titian left for Augsburg to become the Habsburgs’ top painter.

* In 1549, Pope Paul III died with Michelangelo at his bedside. Michelangelo was close to those who flirted with Protestantism, but now he had to be very careful. In 1555, the zealous Giampietro Carafa was elected Paul IV and launched a crackdown on dissent, deploying the Inquisition and ordering some of the nudes in The Last Judgment to be painted over. Michelangelo died aged eighty-eight in 1563.

* As Lorenzaccio escaped, the Medici invited a cousin, Cosimo de’ Medici of Urbino, to become duke. Cosimo turned out to have the right stuff. He was as murderous and cultivated as a Medici should be, killing enemies, hunting down Lorenzaccio and personally stabbing to death his own disloyal valet. His descendants ruled Tuscany for two centuries. As for the Black Duke’s widow, Margarita, Charles married her to another papal popinjay, Paul III’s grandson Ottavio Farnese, duke of Parma. Free-spirited and intelligent, she refused to consummate the marriage for several years and then only on the condition that she kept her own court. Later she was a competent and tolerant governor of the Netherlands. Her son would be the duke of Parma who in 1588 failed to rendezvous with the Armada.

* Roxelana now officially became Hürrem Sultan with the title of Royal Consort Haseki Sultan. Valide and haseki sultans were traditionally served by a Jewish lady-in-waiting – known as the kira – mediating with the male and Christian worlds, often acting as a diplomat with foreign monarchs. Hafsa’s kira Strongila was inherited by Hürrem and later converted to Islam.