The World

Tamerlanians and Rurikovichi, Ottomans and the House of Mendes

STRANGLINGS AND SEA BATTLES: THE BARBAROSSA BROTHERS AND THE PIRATE QUEEN

In 1533, Barbarossa sailed into the Bosphoros and past the Topkapı Palace with forty vessels, banners aflutter, before presenting Suleiman with camel-loads of gold, jewels and textiles escorted by lions and a procession of Christian enslaved girls, each bearing a gift of treasure. Suleiman appointed Barbarossa, red-bearded, burly, bushy-browed, as Kapudan-ı Derya – Captain of the Sea – while ordering Ibrahim to create shipyards and build a fleet.

Barbarossa was born on Lesbos, son of an Albanian Christian cavalryman turned potter and a Greek priest’s widow, converts to Islam. Two of his brothers, Oruç and Ilyas, had started as traders until they were captured by the crusading Knights of St John. They killed Ilyas and enslaved Oruç in their galleys until Khidr, the future Barbarossa, freed his brother. When Isabella and Ferdinand started to persecute their Muslim subjects, the brothers launched a rescue mission, ferrying some of the refugees to safety in Morocco.

Many ex-Spanish Muslims became Barbarossa’s associates, led by the noble girl Aisha, whom we saw leaving Granada in 1492 with the last amir. When the noble refugees arrived in Morocco, now beset with factional war, her father married her to the potentate of the port of Tétouan. When the husband died, Aisha took over Tétouan as Lady of Power, Sayyida al-Hurra, fortifying the town and creating a fleet that raided Christian shipping – known to Christians as the Pirate Queen. Basing themselves on the island of Djerba, the brothers raided Italy and Spain, seizing Christian children and girls to sell in the slave markets. Raids often enslaved as many as 6,000. The brothers captured African ports, first Oran then Algiers and Bougie, where Oruç lost his arm. When he replaced it with a silver prosthetic, Turks called him Silver Arm. Offering Algiers to Selim the Grim, who accepted it as a sanjak (province), Silver Arm infuriated Charles, who ordered attacks on Oran and Tlemcen during which Silver Arm was killed. The last brother Khidr, red-bearded Barbarossa, took command. Sending ships to aid the new sultan Suleiman’s attack on Rhodes, Barbarossa again raided Italy and Spain; his captains hit northern France, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight, while he made Algiers into a luxurious slaving boomtown – the start of what Christians called the Barbary Coast.

When Barbarossa, chief admiral and governor of north Africa and Rhodes, left Istanbul, he pursued Doria, landing at Ostia, the port of Rome, and capturing Capri (he built Castello Barbarossa there, whose ruins still stand). Thanks to her intelligence network operated through her Jewish femme d’affaires Strongila, it was Hürrem who informed Suleiman of Barbarossa’s first victories.

Faced with a Habsburg counter-offensive, Ibrahim pulled off a treaty with France against Charles, partly negotiated by Barbarossa, who visited Toulon with his fleet. Charles V dispatched an envoy to offer Barbarossa the lordship of Africa or assassinate him. Barbarossa beheaded the hitman.

In 1535, Charles struck back, seizing Tunis while Suleiman and Ibrahim were leading an offensive against the Safavi shah of Iran, Tahmasp, capturing Baghdad. But Ibrahim, after ten years of viceregal power, had grown too comfortable with Suleiman, and too cosmopolitan, even for the easy-going Ottomans. The longer a minister is in office, the more enemies are made. Ibrahim was not shy of his magnificence. ‘Though I am the sultan’s slave, whatsoever I say is done. I can at a stroke make a pasha out of a stableboy, I can give kingdoms and provinces to whomsoever I choose,’ he told foreign envoys. Outside his palace on the hippodrome, Ibrahim erected the statues of Hercules, Diana and Apollo captured in Hungary, which shocked the iconoclast Muslims. ‘Two Abrahams came into the world,’ joked the poet Figani, ‘one a destroyer of idols, the other an idol worshipper.’ Ibrahim had Figani strangled. Although Ibrahim had a male Italian lover, he had long loved the sultan’s sister Hatice, sending her poems – without Suleiman’s permission. On campaign he let his flunkies call him ‘sultan’. He had executed a rival vizier – and he had clashed with Hürrem. ‘An explanation has been requested for why I am angry with the pasha,’ she had written to Suleiman in 1526. ‘It will be heard. For now, send greetings to the pasha if he’ll accept them.’ Suleiman let Ibrahim marry his sister, with a fiesta in the hippodrome. But the vizier was close to the sultan’s eldest son Mustafa, whose likely succession would be a death threat to Hürrem’s sons.

On the Ides of March, 1536, the padishah and vizier broke the Ramadan fast together. Then Ibrahim went to bed in the inner Topkapı. Some time in the night, Suleiman sent his killers, the Tongueless, into Ibrahim’s apartments where they garrotted his childhood friend. The Makbul (favourite), wits said, had become Maktul (killed), buried in an unmarked grave. Hürrem’s position was enhanced: Suleiman appointed Rüstem, their son-in-law, as grand vizier. His wife, their favourite daughter Mihrimah (Son of Moons), would become an Ottoman potentate in her own right.

As a young slave Rüstem, a Croatian pig farmer’s son, had riskily jumped out of a window to grab a trinket Suleiman had dropped. Hürrem had favoured a more handsome man for Mihrimah, but Rüstem paid the sultan’s Jewish doctor to declare that the man had syphilis. His enemy counterclaimed that Rüstem had leprosy, which was disproved by the presence in his robes of a louse – lice were believed to avoid lepers. In 1539, Rüstem, nicknamed Lucky Louse given his rise to power, and by now in his mid-forties, married the seventeen-year-old Mihrimah, becoming a damad, imperial son-in-law. Amassing great wealth, he would ultimately own 1,700 slaves. But Ottoman princesses had special power: they could divorce their husbands, amass wealth themselves and discreetly deploy power. Like her mother, Mihrimah was beautiful, blonde, forceful and intelligent, later negotiating for her father and brother with the Polish monarchs.

Suleiman was directing a global war, long neglected by European historians. In 1538 he sent eighty vessels and 40,000 men through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean – probably the largest to ply those seas since the Ming treasure fleets. The Admiral of the Indian Ocean was an enslaved Hungarian eunuch and future grand vizier, Hadım Suleiman Pasha, now sixty-nine, who sailed from Jeddah, seized Aden (Yemen) from the Portuguese and then rendezvoused with the sultan’s Gujarati ally in an unsuccessful attack on Portuguese Diu (western India). In the Horn of Africa, Suleiman invaded Habesh (Eritrea) and captured Massawa, which remained Ottoman into the nineteenth century. He also sent troops and cannon to his allies, the sultans of Adal in Ethiopia and Ajura, in Somalia, to help their attack on local Christian enemies. These conquests brought a new intoxicant, derived from beans, long favoured by Yemenite sufis, to Cairo then to Constantinople: coffee. Coffee became a global commodity, with coffee houses contributing to the new sociability in cities. Barbarossa was the one of the first to add a coffee house to his mansion.

In the Mediterranean, Barbarossa seized Otranto as Suleiman threatened northern Italy; the admiral captured many of the last Venetian islands and strongholds, driving the republic to join the Holy League arranged by Pope Paul III against the Ottomans. In September 1538, near Preveza (Greece), Charles’s admiral Doria led 112 galleys and 50,000 troops against Barbarossa’s fleet of 122 as the latter’s Jewish-born admiral Sinan landed troops on the coast, covering the Ottoman rear. Barbarossa destroyed thirteen ships and captured thirty-six along with 3,000 prisoners, winning domination of the Mediterranean.

Charles was distracted by the decline of Isabella. Pregnant for the seventh time and possibly consumptive, she was ‘the greatest pity in the world, so thin as not to resemble a person’. In May 1539, she gave birth to a stillborn son, then died of postnatal fever at thirty-five. Charles collapsed – ‘Nothing can console me,’ he told his sister Maria – sending their son Philip to oversee her burial in Granada and commissioning Titian to paint her from existing portraits, thereafter always travelling with her image. He soon returned to his womanizing ways, secretly fathering a son, Geronimo, by a teenaged German servant girl. The boy was taken away from her and raised by courtiers – to emerge later.

Recovering from these blows, Charles planned a powerful attack on Algiers, but as usual he was impoverished – until the arrival from America of a dazzling fleet of treasure, dispatched by captain Pizarro, whose brother Hernando presented Charles with his first tranche of Peruvian gold and news of its conquest.

THE HABSBURG BROTHERS AND THEIR CONQUISTADORS

The emperor disapproved of Pizarro’s murders – ‘The death of Atahualpa displeased me because he was a sovereign’ – but added, ‘Since it seemed to you necessary, we approve it for now.’ Later he granted him the grandiloquent title marquess of the Conquest while agreeing ‘permanent allocations of indigenous inhabitations’ as effective slave labour.

The conquistadors were fortunate in their timing: Xauxa and Wanka tribes, who resented the Incas, served as Spanish auxiliaries, as did the anti-Atahualpa Incas. Without these allies, Pizarro’s coup would have been impossible.

The Pizarros relished and abused their domination of the Inca princesses but also upgraded their middling family by breeding with Inca royalty, not to speak of getting their hands on their property. Many of these girls were very young. The Spaniards used a sickening Cape Test to see if they were old enough for intercourse: if, struck from behind by a cape, they fell over, they were too young; if they remained standing, they were ready. It was a fiesta of rape for the Spaniards, though some of the Inca women were proud to attract the omnipotent strangers. Pizarro, who never married, came to love Atahualpa’s sister Quispe Sisa (Inés), who gave birth to their daughter, Francesca. She was legitimized by Charles and became the greatest heiress of the New World. But Pizarro could not resist taking another of Atahualpa’s sisters, Azarpay, whom he also installed in his palace, much to Inés’s fury.

Pizarro returned to the coast to found a City of Kings (Lima), but his brothers Gonzalo, Juan and Hernando, back from Spain, humiliated the young Inca, Manco, who had consolidated power by killing any family contenders. Now these brothers raped his princesses and extorted more gold. Gonzalo seized Manco’s coya (queen) and sister, Cura Ocllo. The Incas criticized him. ‘Who told you to talk to the king’s corregidor [judge]? Don’t you know what kind of men we Spaniards are?’ snarled Gonzalo. ‘I swear if you don’t shut up, I’ll slit you open alive and make little pieces of you!’ Gonzalo raped Cura Ocllo and imprisoned Manco, who was chained, tortured, burned and urinated on by the brothers. Manco escaped and gathered an army of 200,000, laying siege to the ninety Spaniards in Cuzco and to Francisco Pizarro in Lima. The governor felt he could no longer trust his harem: his loyal Pispita, Inés, denounced her half-sister Azarpay, ‘so without further consideration, he ordered that she [Azarpay] be garrotted’, along with other mistresses. Inés’s mother sent troops to help Pizarro hold Lima.

Manco made his headquarters in the sacred citadel of Sacsayhuamán, looming over Cuzco, but took time to gather his forces. Besieged in Cuzco, the Pizarro brothers just held out. Francisco’s expeditions were beaten back. Juan Pizarro was killed attacking Sacsayhuamán. The brothers were rescued only by their rival Diego de Almagro, who retook Cuzco but then clashed with and imprisoned the Pizarros. Francisco Pizarro hit back, capturing and garrotting Almagro – an act that would rebound on him. Manco, now deploying the arquebuses and swords that had given the Spanish their advantage, retreated to found a new kingdom in the jungles of Vilcabamba.

Francisco Pizarro took vengeance, burning many of the Incas alive. When he captured Manco’s queen, Cura Ocllo, already raped by his brother, he and his secretary gang-raped her and then had her stripped, tortured, shot full of arrows and floated in a bucket downriver to Manco, who ‘wept and made great mourning for he loved her much’.^*

Now that the Manco revolt was over, Pizarro sent more gold back to Charles to ‘aid His Majesty in the war against the Turks’.

‘Send me the most unusual gold and silver work,’ ordered the emperor. ‘You can coin the rest.’ His conquistadors were on his mind. In 1535, Charles appointed a viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, to manage the bumptious Cortés. Mendoza boasted of the way he continued the conquest, killing the locals ‘by firing at them with artillery until they were cut to pieces, setting the dogs on them or giving them to African slaves to kill – to punish those who are most guilty and make the rest more fearful’. When he had served in the conquest of Granada, he added, ‘we used to beat and stone many Muslims’; the rest ‘were treated as slaves and divided up’. Mendoza’s arrogance made Cortés seethe.

In 1540, the marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca returned to Spain, rich but embittered and keen to be recognized. Charles avoided him until Cortés pushed past the outriders and jumped on to his carriage. ‘Who are you?’ asked the alarmed kaiser.

‘I’m a man,’ answered Cortés, ‘who gave you more provinces than your ancestors left you cities.’ Charles let him and his son Martín, El Mestizo, join his entourage for his crusade to seize Algiers – just as in Lima the other conquistador, marquess of the Conquest Pizarro, finally enjoyed his success. But not for long. The half-Inca son of Almagro known as El Mozo (the Lad) sought revenge on Pizarro. In June 1541, he and a hit squad attacked the Lima palace. Pizarro fought back with a halberd, killing two assassins, before collapsing, stabbed in the neck, and begging for mercy from Christ.

‘Confess in hell,’ cried the Lad, smashing an urn into his face as his hitmen stabbed Pizarro another twenty times and then beheaded him. But this was not quite the end of the Pizarros nor of the Incas.^*

In October 1541, Charles embarked from Palma with a fleet of 500 ships and 30,000 troops – and the Cortés father and son. But a storm destroyed the fleet; the Algerines counter-attacked, nearly capturing the emperor himself. Cortés and Martín almost drowned, losing all their jewels, but they survived.

Cortés’s presence focused the emperor’s mind on Spanish abuses. In 1542, Charles signed the New Laws, setting up the Council of the Indies, limiting the encomiendas and protecting the Indians, outraging the last Pizarro brother left in America. Gonzalo Pizarro galloped into Lima, clad in bejewelled black velvet and feathers, encouraged by his followers to declare himself king of Peru and marry Francisco’s eleven-year-old Inca heiress, Francesca, fusing Inca and Pizarro blood. The rebels defeated and killed the viceroy, but in April 1448 Charles’s new legate rallied imperial forces then captured and beheaded Gonzalo.^*

Yet the protection of the indigenous people, as suggested by El Protector de los Indios, Bartolomeu de las Casas, accelerated the import of African slaves. Juan Garrido, who had accompanied Cortés, was probably the first African to settle in the Americas.^* Three skeletons found in a mass grave at the Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales in Mexico City dating from the 1520s may have been the first slaves – they originated in Africa and show the broken bones and wear of physical labour; one had been shot dead with a copper bullet. Since the kings of Portugal held the rights to Africa, the Spanish slave trade was initially handled by Portuguese and pombeiro merchants.^* It became very profitable. As the Amerindians perished, the price of African slaves rose exponentially from four or five pesos in 1527 to fifty in 1536 to 200 in 1550. During Charles’s reign, 30,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Habsburg America.

America swiftly affected the world: its gold and silver funded the Habsburgs but ultimately flowed eastwards to India and China to pay for their luxuries. The decaying faces of popes and princes revealed that syphilis was ravaging Europe almost as fast as smallpox had decimated America.^* Foods from the New World conquered the old like culinary conquistadors: the Andean potato, easily cultivated, became an instant staple everywhere, particularly in Russia and Ireland. The sweet potato, transplanted by European traders, became popular in Africa and especially in China, where it helped propel Chinese population growth. Corn (maize), imported by European traders, changed farming in Asia, while in west Africa its resistance to drought and ease of storage helped concentrate power for local kings of Oyo and Benin. But it also helped slave traders to feed the enslaved on the crossings of the Sahara and the Atlantic. Chilis, vanilla, turkeys, tomatoes, pineapples and pumpkins followed in their wake. Tobacco became a global addiction, chocolate a popular drink (long before an English chocolatier made solid chocolate in 1847). Intellectually, the revelation of other civilizations with their own values and knowledge challenged European thought and ultimately inspired a new curiosity and openness.

The ‘twin’ monarchs – Habsburg and Ottoman – were now both exhausted by their duties, coarsened by power. Charles was fortunate in having a healthy and able son, Philip, who possessed the steely control and intense focus that he himself often lacked. After Philip had promised to remain a virgin until marriage, Charles arranged the boy’s consanguineous marriage to Maria Manuela, daughter of João II of Portugal and Charles’s sister, niece of the groom’s mother. Charles gave Philip sensible advice on politics: ‘Never do anything in anger’ and, best of all, ‘Trust no one; listen to everyone; decide alone.’ But his advice was less good on sex.

While Charles continued to seduce girls and father children, he tried to control his son: ‘You’ll soon be married; it is important you restrain your desires’ which ‘can be dangerous both for the body’s growth and its strength. It even causes death as it did with Prince Juan which is how I came to inherit these kingdoms … I require and request that once you’ve consummated the marriage, you plead some illness and keep away from your wife.’ On the wedding night, a courtier dashed into the bedchamber after two and half hours and removed the bridegroom. When he heard that Maria was pregnant, Charles congratulated Philip: ‘I thought it would take you longer.’ Philip was not the grim fanatic of legend: he enjoyed dancing and flirting, and was now enjoying an affair with a beautiful lady-in-waiting (even though she had a rabbi among her ancestors). His wife gave birth to a son, but died of infection, at seventeen. The baby Carlos was born with physical and mental handicaps – the result of intermarriage and perhaps oxygen starvation – that ultimately threatened his father and the monarchy itself. Philip, filled with ‘anguish and regret’, retired to a monastery for a month.

In 1543, when Charles left Spain, Philip started to rule in that kingdom. ‘Don’t fail to send me soldiers,’ his father demanded. Philip resisted, reminding his father ‘of the exhaustion of your kingdoms’. Demands for soldiers and cash, and nagging, soured their relationship. At the same time, Charles beat François in a race to win over the ageing and obese Henry VIII, conveniently overlooking his oafish treatment of his aunt Catherine.^* In 1544, Henry landed in Calais and both monarchs attacked France, forcing François to sue for peace.

Charles had promised his brother Ferdinand that he and his son would succeed him as emperor but then suddenly announced he would nominate his own son Philip. The brothers almost fell out. ‘We have to decide who is emperor, you or me,’ Charles told Ferdinand. This could have caused the fracturing of the Habsburgs, but instead Charles backed down. In a Family Compact that would last for the next 150 years, the two branches of the family would help each other. Philip would inherit Spain, which he was already ruling, the Netherlands, Italy and the Americas; Ferdinand would rule Austria and the empire.

In 1547, Charles defeated the Protestant princes at Mühlberg,^* a Catholic triumph – the culmination of his life’s work. Yet in 1552 the Protestant princes, fortified by France, bounced back, routing Charles, whom they almost killed or captured, forcing him to flee, semi-conscious in a litter, tormented by debts, haemorrhoids and gout – the nadir of his reign – while the Ottoman admirals retook Tunis. ‘I can’t be everywhere and do everything,’ he wrote forlornly to Ferdinand. Bankrupt and broken, he complained, ‘I can’t find a penny, or anyone who wants to lend me one or a man in Germany ready to declare support for me.’ He even distrusted his brother: ‘I begin to wonder whether Ferdinand might have some secret understanding with the authors of this conspiracy.’

In 1556, Charles finally allowed Ferdinand to negotiate a German peace that allowed German princes to choose their sect: cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). It is rare for any family to produce two able statesmen simultaneously, but Charles V’s brother, the cautious, wise, conciliatory Archduke Ferdinand, had created a Habsburg realm in Mitteleuropa encompassing Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, had rebuilt the Hofburg Palace of Vienna as his headquarters, had achieved a happy marriage with his heiress wife that produced thirteen surviving children, had trained a moderate heir, Maximilian, whom he married to Charles’s daughter Maria of Spain, and had fought off four invasions by Suleiman. The sultan, now sixty, was now dealing with his own family crisis the Ottoman way – with the bowstring.

THE OTTOMAN EMPRESS, THE LUCKY LOUSE AND DOñA GRACIA

Hürrem, the Ukrainian-born ex-slave who was now his empress, remained Suleiman’s companion, constantly corresponding with him on his campaigns and acting as his eyes in Constantinople. ‘Sometimes you treat me with kindness, sometimes you torment me,’ he wrote. ‘My love, whatever your mood, I will always adapt to it.’ When his first son with Roxelana died, he wept desperately, refusing initially to let the body be buried, then prayed for forty days. But he was ice-cold in politics.

Wizened, watchful, world-weary, Suleiman monitored his sons carefully. He was close to Mustafa, his eldest, who had become dangerously popular with the Janissaries, the elite musketeers feared by the sultan.

On campaign against the Persians in 1548, taking Tabriz and much of the Caucasus, Suleiman, now thin and gouty, was feeling his age.^* ‘You said your noble foot was aching,’ wrote Hürrem. ‘God knows, my sultan, I was so upset I cried.’ In 1553, Shah Tahmasp counter-attacked and Suleiman dispatched the Lucky Louse, married to his daughter Mihrimah and grand vizier for nine years, to repel him. The padishah was informed by the Louse that Mustafa was discussing Suleiman’s ‘retirement’. The prince may have believed that the Louse – backed by his wife Mihrimah and mother-in-law Hürrem – wanted to kill him.

‘God forbid,’ retorted Suleiman, ‘my Mustafa Khan should dare such insolence.’ But wearily he led his own army to join the Louse, travelling with his youngest son, the hunchbacked Cihangir, who suggested to his father that his hunchback would prevent him being killed by his brothers. ‘My son,’ replied Suleiman, ‘Mustafa will become sultan and kill you all.’

At Ereğli, Suleiman summoned Mustafa, whose mother begged him not to go. Leaving his bodyguards, Mustafa entered his father’s tent where, watched by the padishah, the Tongueless jumped on him with their bowstrings. He fought back but when he tried to escape he tripped on his robe and was strangled, his body tossed outside the sultanic tent. The army mourned him and demanded the head of the Louse. Suleiman agreed to dismiss the vizier. From Constantinople, Hürrem warned him to send good news to calm the city and pleaded for the life of the Louse, signing off, ‘And that’s that. Your lowly slave.’

The Lucky Louse was lucky again: although his wife Mihrimah was unhappy in her marriage, she continued to promote her husband. Two years later, Suleiman had his vizier strangled and reappointed the Louse. Hürrem had won: only her two sons were left, Selim and Bayezid. But one would succeed – and one would have to die.

Selim was plump, genial and hedonistic, a bibulous poetaster whose favoured concubine Nurbanu was a Greek noblewoman enslaved by Barbarossa. He was unpopular with the army who called him the Ox; in Constantinople, he was called the Blond. Bayezid was martial and ambitious.

While Hürrem promoted Selim, Bayezid toyed with rebelling. Hürrem brokered his pardon. But in 1558 she died in the Old Palace, buried in the tomb of the Suleimaniye Mosque that the padishah had prepared for them both. After her mother’s death, Mihrimah moved into the Old Palace and became her father’s companion and adviser, building charitable foundations and mosques (including commissioning Sinan – who was said to be in love with her – to design the exquisitely blue Rüstem Pasha Mosque in honour of her late husband). A painting shows her haughty good looks: she had become a Euro-Asian potentate, trying to keep peace between her brothers.

Yet Bayezid still planned to seize power. Here was a power family that talked about death and treason in poetry. Suleiman warned the boy, who wrote back:

Forgive Bayezid’s offence, spare the life of this slave.

I’m innocent, God knows, my fortune-favoured sultan, my father.

Suleiman replied:

My Bayezid, I’ll forgive you your offence if you mend your ways.

But for once don’t say ‘I’m innocent’. Show repentance, my dear son.

It was now that Europe’s wealthiest private family arrived in Constantinople. They were Iberian Jews, the Mendes, led by Doña Gracia and her nephew Joseph Nasi, married to her daughter Reyna. They had already lived an extraordinary life: Doña Gracia, the heiress to the banking house of Mendes/Benveniste, had been expelled from Spain to Portugal whence she had escaped to Antwerp. When Charles V tried to steal her fortune, she and Joseph fled through France to Venice before negotiating their arrival in Istanbul. With a background of fake conversions and secret Jewish observance, they were born survivors who enjoyed a portfolio of different names.^* The Venetians imprisoned Gracia, at which her nephew Joseph wrote to Suleiman’s Jewish doctor. Suleiman ordered the Signoria to release La Signora. She and her daughter arrived in style, sailing in a splendid flotilla into the Bosphoros, followed by Joseph. She did business with emperors, popes and kings, holding her own, a remarkable achievement for a woman and a Jew. When the pope burned Jews at the stake, Doña Gracia organized a boycott of papal ports. Joseph advised and financed Selim during his struggle with his brother.

In 1559, Bayezid mustered troops. Suleiman sent Selim to defeat the rebel, who fled with his four sons to Persia where he was granted asylum by Shah Tahmasp.

The shah was a master at playing family politics with his neighbours. To the west, he won a fortress and 1.2 million florins from Suleiman. In return he allowed Selim and a team of Tongueless to slip into Persia and strangle Bayezid and his four sons.^* To the east, he was playing a different game, helping the fallen emperor of India, Humayoun, son of Babur, scion of House Tamerlane, to get back his Indian realm – in the hope that he would convert to Shiism and make India a grateful client state. Instead he helped restore the greatest ruler of India since Ashoka.

THE PRUDENT KING AND THREE ENGLISH QUEENS

Humayoun’s son Akbar had been brought up in Kabul by Babur’s sister, but when the shah lent Humayoun a regiment of cavalry to help retake India, the boy joined his father as they galloped towards Delhi. The invasion force of 5,000 Persians and Afghans, led by a tough Afghan paladin, Bairam Shah, was a tiny army to take on a sub-continent. In exile, Humayoun had imbibed the Persianate culture that was to be such an intrinsic part of the Mughal style. An opium-sampling bibliophile like many of the family, he fell from his library ladder and met a book lover’s death. Emperor Akbar appointed Bairam as his vakil – premier – until retiring him in 1562. Increasingly, he consulted his former wet nurse, the loyal and capable Maham Anga, to guide him, overpromoting her teenaged son Adham Khan, who had grown up with Akbar. When his foster brother Adham dared to cross him, Akbar unleashed his inner Tamerlane: in front of his court, he smashed him in the face, shouting ‘You sonofabitch,’ then flung him off a balcony. Adham survived, so Akbar ordered him to be carried upstairs and defenestrated him again, breaking his neck. ‘You did well,’ Adham’s mother said, though the ‘colour had left her face’.

Akbar had taken power with Persian horse archers, but he built the empire with Ottoman muskets and cannon, soon manufacturing his own. Akbar and the House of Tamerlane were now conquerors of India. Akbar’s building of towers of Indian heads was a sign of predatory conquest if ever there was one: a Rajput maharana named Pratap typically called him a ‘vile Turk’ invader. Akbar was at war for twenty years, first approaching enemies in massive hunts, accompanied by a thousand cheetahs and escorted by his armies – ‘hunting another kind of wild elephant’ as his minister put it, a ritual that often brought submission. If that did not work, he deployed his Mongol horse archers, war elephants and the latest artillery. He himself was a crack shot with his favourite gun called Sangram (guns and swords were named). Using his cannon, in 1556 Akbar first retook Delhi and Agra, then Lahore and Punjab and, after 1558, Rajputana, one by one breaking the Rajput grandees, led by the maharana of Mewar, Udai Singh, builder of the exquisite lacustrine city Udaipur. In February 1568, when Udai’s fortress Chittorgarh fell, Akbar slaughtered 30,000 people, displaying heads on the battlements. Most Rajputs submitted: he befriended Man Singh, raja of Amber, appointing him a mansabdar of 7,000,^* calling him farzand (son) and marrying his sister. His Rajput marriages led to a fusion of Tamerlanian and Rajput lineages with Sanskritic and Persian cultures. Thanks to his mastery of imperial powerplays, the conquest dynasty became rooted in India.

Then Akbar swung south-west to seize Gujarat – the coastal sultanate which, via its entrepôt Surat, linked India to European trade – and Ottoman military supplies. He granted the Portuguese, who had arrived in India before Babur, rights to Goa. In 1573, when he stormed the capital Ahmedabad, Akbar celebrated by building more towers of heads. Gujarat trade made the dynasty a global mercantile power. Then the padishah swerved eastwards and northwards, taking Bengal and Kashmir.

Clean-shaven, except for side whiskers, lean, tall, athletic with long eyelashes, Akbar looked like a Mongol, and his black radiant eyes were said to ‘hurt you with their brightness’. He was secretive – he ‘guards over his motives and watches over his emotions’ and ‘never wastes time’, using a water clock to ‘cherish time’, convinced that ‘Idleness is the root of evil.’ He loved to test his fate by riding elephants in musth (their season of heightened aggression), ‘intentionally riding murderous elephants so that if I’ve done something displeasing to God, may that elephant finish us’. He lived dangerously, playing nocturnal polo with specially designed luminous balls and hunting riskily: he was gored in the testicles by an antelope. He was also wounded in the groin fighting in Gujarat, giving him a slight Tamerlanian limp. In 1564, an assassin shot him in the shoulder with an arrow. Security was paramount. Akbar was a consummate deployer of poison, either smeared on the cuffs of a robe presented by the emperor or else offered personally by his own hand in a folded betel leaf.

Although he was illiterate, possibly dyslexic, he patronized intellectuals, led by his vakil and ideologist Abul-Fazl and his brother the poet Faizi, luminaries of his Nine Jewels.

Akbar believed he was a sacred emperor, and incorporated not only Islamic and Persianate traditions but also their Turkic and Rajput counterparts. He appeased Hindus, abolishing the jizyah tax and the slaughter of cows, questioned Islam itself and envisioned an eclectic religious hybrid Din-i Ilahi, Divine Faith, that encompassed Islam, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. As the Islamic millennium got closer, he called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read ‘Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu’, which would usually mean ‘God is great’ but could also mean ‘Akbar is God’, as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. He adopted the Hindu tradition of appearing daily at sunrise on the balcony of the Agra Fort: this jharokha darshan, watched by crowds, became an essential rite of Mughal kingship.

As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were ‘a great terror … in the city’. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya.

Amid all this success lurked stress: Akbar suffered ‘melancholy’. ‘My heart is oppressed by this outward pomp,’ he said. ‘I experienced an internal bitterness, my soul was seized with exceeding sorrow.’ In 1573, when he was thirty-one, drunkenly discussing the courage of Rajput heroes who rushed at spears until pierced through, he suddenly fixed his blade to the wall and rushed at it, only stopped when he was tackled by his Rajput brother-in-law Man Singh.

Like Genghis’s khans, the Tamerlanians were prone to alcoholism: two sons died of drink; his heir Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) was addicted to opium, wine and arrak. Understandably the girls in the zenana were avid consumers of these intoxicants and became so addicted that Akbar had visitors searched. Sometimes Akbar fell asleep during discussions with the Jesuits while drinking post, opium water. Later, he enjoyed tobacco, brought by Portuguese visitors. Nicotine was not the only American commodity pouring into India: American gold and silver enriched Akbar’s kingdom. He promoted trade: as Abul-Fazl put it, ‘By wise regulations, revenue is preserved.’ Thanks to growing cities, good harvests, rising wages and the success of home workshops specializing in weaving (powered by female artisans who could combine raising families with their skilled work), India – with a population of 150 million, of whom Akbar ruled 110 million – produced a quarter of the world’s textiles, as well as pepper, coffee, opium, tea, spices, ivory and saltpetre. Akbar encouraged Portuguese and later English traders because they paid in gold and silver, which made Tamerlanian India rival Ming China as the richest kingdom on earth.

Yet all these steppe monarchies had a fatal flaw: family. The tournament of sons designed to select the most able also ensured murderous bouts of family contention that could bring down an empire. As Akbar tried to manage his sons, the exhausted Christian padishah, Charles V, the source of all that gold and silver, delivered a masterclass on how to handle a succession.

Charles was having a breakdown: he ‘occupies himself day and night adjusting and synchronizing his clocks; he often wakes his valets to help him dismantle and reassemble them’. Craving order amid chaos, he wanted them to tick together.

Yet in the midst of his breakdown, Charles fixed Philip’s next marriage. Henry VIII had died, leaving a puny son, Edward VI, who, despite his youth, was a masterful Protestant. Dying at fifteen of TB, it was he personally who diverted the succession from his Catholic half-sister Mary to his first cousin once removed Jane Grey, Protestant daughter of the duke of Suffolk and great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Queen Jane, sixteen years old, became England’s first queen regnant: after thirteen days, she was overwhelmed by support for Mary, daughter of a formidable king and a popular Spanish queen. Mary executed Edward’s minister, swung England back towards Rome and was delighted with the prospect of marrying the dashing Philip, now king of Naples and Sicily.^* The Catholic marriage – designed to echo Ferdinand and Isabella’s in 1469 – was popular in England. But Mary and her ministers used an anti-Catholic plot as a pretext to behead her rival, ex-queen Jane.

Philip sailed for England and married the unprepossessing Mary, by then aged thirty-seven, in Winchester Cathedral, becoming king of England and Ireland. ‘Once you’ve celebrated and consummated your marriage with the queen,’ ordered Charles, ‘leave her after six or eight days.’ Philip was uninspired by Mary’s looks – ‘It will take a great God to drink this cup,’ sighed his best friend – but he manfully consummated the marriage to the extent that a delighted queen required four days in bed recovering. Then, to Mary’s dismay, Philip escaped to Brussels to attend his father’s abdication.

Departure is one of the tests of political acumen; few know when or how to do it. Succession is the great test of a system; few manage it well. Paternal acceptance of filial independence is a test of any family’s solidarity. Charles succeeded in all three. In October 1555, Charles, leaning on the shoulder of his Dutch favourite, William the Silent, prince of Orange, addressed his grandees. ‘I had great hopes – only a few have been fulfilled,’ he said, ‘and only a few remain to me: and at the cost of what effort! It ultimately made me tired and sick …’ Few leaders ever have the courage to confess: ‘I know I made many mistakes, big mistakes, first because of my youth, then because of human error and because of my passions, and finally because of tiredness. But I did no deliberate wrong to anyone, whoever it was.’ He then handed over the Spanish realm to Philip. Accompanied by his beloved sister Eleanor and his Titian paintings, especially the portrait of the long-dead Isabella, and his clocks, Charles retired to a monastery at Yuste in Spain where he prayed and tinkered with timepieces, dying at fifty-eight.

Mary persecuted Protestant heretics, burning 283 at the stake, and placed her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth under house arrest. But she was ailing; Philip enjoyed being king of England and Ireland but dreaded his marital duties. The poor queen so craved a child that in September 1554 her stomach swelled, she was sick every morning and her periods stopped. But Philip doubted her and gradually her courtiers realized it was a false pregnancy.

Philip was pale, fair-haired, slight with ice-cold blue eyes, his slight Habsburg jaw concealed in a fair beard. He was intelligent and meticulous, with the acumen to make decisions across a global empire, an excellent memory, the stamina to put in hours of work and the sangfroid necessary to order wars and killings. The young king could be charming, he liked dancing and women, appreciated art and had a sense of humour, enjoying pushing his pet elephant into the cells of po-faced monks; later he proved a loving husband and indulgent father to his daughters. Yet he shared his father’s messianic mission without his winning humility and, as a courtier recalled, ‘He had a smile cut with a sword.’

Philip desperately needed a family – and a healthy heir. At the heart of his court lurked the problem of his son, who from early on was torturing animals, blinding horses and whipping servant girls. Don Carlos, prince of Asturias, whose Portuguese mother had died four days after his birth, may have been damaged by lack of oxygen; he was hunchbacked, lame and violent. An only child, he was certainly emotionally neglected, his father absent for years at a time; but his major problem was his deficient gene pool.^* Inbreeding had gathered a world empire, but the very policy designed to strengthen it had weakened it fatally.

Philip, ruling fifty million people in four continents, from Asia to America and Europe, was, like his father, perpetually at war – against France, the pope, the Ottomans – and that was before he faced heretical challenges on every side.

This messianic imperialist believed God would perform miracles for him; anything seemed possible. ‘The world is not enough’ was his motto. The flow of paperwork was endless, but he acted as his own secretary – ‘They’re killing me with work by day which means I’m worn out by night.’ One evening he wrote, ‘It’s 10 p.m., I feel shattered and I’m dying of hunger.’ His single-mindedness led to mistakes and delusions. The predicament of prodigious power is that it exceeds a single human’s ability to wield it. ‘His Majesty has been working even more than usual,’ wrote an aide, ‘reading and writing papers until they come out of his backside (may your lordship forgive me) because on Saturday morning at 3 a.m. he had terrible diarrhoea.’ He decided everything. Autocracy grants the consistency that democracy lacks but replaces it with rigidity petrified by delusion and drowned in detail.

Philip was already at war with France for control of Burgundy and Italy, a conflict that had lasted almost a century. He ordered an advance from the Netherlands into France. On 10 August – St Lawrence’s Day – 1557, at Saint-Quentin, his tercios defeated the French, a victory he celebrated by building the colossal palace-monastery-mausoleum of St Lawrence of Victory of El Escorial near Madrid that would reflect his grandiose messianic vision of sacred monarchy.

All victories were attributed to divine favour: ‘God did this.’ Philip collected a saintly reliquary of 12 bodies, 144 heads and 306 limbs, labelled by hand and regularly used to treat his family’s ailments. His mission in life was to fight the heresy of Protestantism while championing the Catholic counter-attack led by the papacy. He often told his ministers that being engaged in his service and in that of God ‘is the same thing’, a conviction that justified anything. All over Europe the clash between the two denominations intensified. Philip insisted, ‘Rather than suffer the least injury to religion and the service of God, I would lose all my states and a hundred lives if I had them for I don’t intend to rule over heretics.’ He attended many autos-da-fé. When one victim shouted at him, he answered, ‘I would carry the wood to burn my own son if he was as wicked as you.’ At a time when there was no division between secular and religious, Philip believed heresy and impurity by Protestants and crypto-Jewish Christians infiltrating God’s kingdom must be prosecuted, but there were no more executions than in most other European kingdoms. The hunt for crypto-Jews was linked to a certificate of racial purity – limpieza de sangre – that was usually easy to procure, and essential to hold any office, but it could be used against dubious conversos. Philip overlooked impurity when it suited him. He asserted royal power in the Americas, crushing the insubordinate Cortés family and encouraging young Spaniards to settle there.^*

A typical recruit was a young Basque, Simón Bolívar, who thrived in Caracas, developing plantations, copper mines and a port, importing enslaved Africans and then founding schools and seminaries. He also served as Philip’s procurator. Around 5,000 Spaniards now ruled 10,000 Africans and 350,000 Amerindians. Bolívar personified the white mantuanos elite who revelled in their racial separation while actually interbreeding with Amerindians and Africans, to create a new world of mixed-raced peoples.^*

In 1557, after Philip, king of England, visited Mary, now forty-one, she again thought herself pregnant, but tragically both her false pregnancies were probably early symptoms of the uterine cancer that killed her in November of the following year. She was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, daughter of the executed Boleyn.

Philip mourned Mary ‘as you might well understand’, and missed his English kingdom. He proposed marriage to Elizabeth. The intellectual, masterful and single-minded queen rejected him and restored Protestantism to her realm. Philip and Elizabeth both saw religion as essential to their mission. His crown was forged by holy war; she had to be more pragmatic to survive – she had ‘no desire to make windows into men’s souls’. She once provocatively said, ‘There’s only one faith; all else is a dispute over trifles,’ but both monarchs were willing to kill for those trifles. Elizabeth executed almost 200 Catholics in her small kingdom. Yet, tempered by her dangerous trajectory from princess to bastard to prisoner and sovereign, she was a master of political theatre, of opacity and trimming. But now she defied Philip so successfully that he decided on more drastic action.

As Philip took the helm, a young Rurikovich was imposing himself on Muscovy. They were opposites: one was a definition of control, the other of frenzy. Philip called himself El Prudente; Ivan became Grozny: the Terrible.

HOYDA! BLOODTHIRSTY WILD BEAST

On 2 October 1552, the twenty-two-year-old Ivan IV knelt in prayer as his army – traditional horse archers and his new streltsy musketeers and 150 cannon – stormed Kazan on the Volga, the capital of a khanate, and slaughtered its Muslim inhabitants, liberating thousands of Christian slaves. On his way back from Kazan, his beloved wife Anastasia gave birth to the first of three sons.

The Christian conqueror celebrated in Moscow, building the garish nine-domed St Basil’s in Red Square. In just a few years this energetic young autocrat had expanded his kingdom, modernized the army, promulgated a new legal code and guaranteed the dynasty. But a sickness and then a death would destabilize him, unleashing his peculiar mix of sacred charisma, keening energy and demented sadism.

Grandson of the fearsome Ivan the Great and his Palaiologos wife Sophia, the boy had been grand prince since he was three when his father Vasili III died, leaving his mother Elena Glinskaia as regent. Her death left Ivan with only his deaf and dumb brother for company. ‘My brother Yuri, of blessed memory, and me, they brought up like vagrants. What have I suffered for want of garments and food.’ His claims are hard to believe, but he was a murderous melodramatist and hysterical fabulist, haunted by biblical purgatory. He grew up to be tall, as lithe ‘as a leopard’ with an aquiline nose, sensual mouth and flashing eyes.^* Already torturing animals which he threw from the Kremlin towers, he spent his adolescence running wild with a gang of ruffians, committing acts of brigandage, and as soon as he got power he executed some of these friends by having them impaled. He had heard of the cruelties of Vlad the Impaler and his remarkable grandfather Ivan, whom he greatly resembled.

In January 1547, Ivan was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral as Autocrat of all the Russias – and for the first time – Tsar. He was crowned with the ‘cap’ of Constantine Monomachos, which was probably a Mongol gift, while his patriarch now merged Mongol-Roman ideology to declare the tsar, the embodiment of God and personification of the state.

Ivan then presided over a bride-show – a beauty contest of part-Byzantine, part-Mongol origins, in which orders were sent out to the kingdom stating, ‘Those of you who have daughters who are maidens proceed without delay to our lieutenants for inspection … Anyone who conceals a maiden daughter will be punished.’ Ivan chose Anastasia Romanovna Iureva-Zakharina – the first of the Romanovs – who gave birth to the required sons and whom he came to love or at least depend upon as an emotional support.

Ivan lived inside the Kremlin, a red-walled fortress of palaces and churches, amid a pious court that was dominated by a web of intermarried boyars (aristocrats) and an influx of Mongol princes known as tsarevichi – sons of the Golden khans. Ivan favoured these tsarevichi, who were no political threat; it is likely he spoke Tatar, and though he was fanatically pious, his court also had a strong Mongol flavour: even his nobles called themselves ‘your slaves’, in Mongol fashion.

Revelling in sprees of partying and fornication interspersed with prayer and fasting, Ivan was influenced by a white-bearded priest called Silvester who regarded even mirrors and music as satanic manifestations. Young Ivan was clean-shaven until Silvester persuaded him that shaving was for sodomites, prompting him to enforce the growing of beards.

Shortly after his coronation, fire destroyed much of Moscow, killing thousands. Ivan was rushed out of the city, and a mob, inspired by public hysteria and court conspiracy, demanded the life of his Glinsky grandmother, accused of being a witch, and lit more fires. Ivan refused to give up his grandmother; then, rallying his forces, seized and impaled the ringleaders. Court life was inherently stressful, but the frequent fires that swept through Moscow and repeated spasms of the plague added to his sense of a world forever on the edge of an apocalyptic inferno.

In March 1553, Ivan fell ill. He was determined that his baby son, Dmitri, should succeed him, but there was no rule of succession; courtiers wished to avoid another regency and to stop Anastasia’s family from gaining power. Many turned to Ivan’s first cousin, the seventeen-year-old Prince Vladimir, a better prospect than a baby. For twelve days, Ivan, passing in and out of consciousness, tried to force the boyars to swear allegiance to his baby. Vladimir was forced to do so. Then Ivan recovered, and began accusing the boyars of wanting ‘to raise Vladimir to the throne and like Herod destroy his God-given son’. He went on pilgrimage to a distant monastery, demanding the presence of Anastasia and the baby Tsarevich Dmitri, but the journey was perilous. When the baby’s nurse was getting off their boat, she dropped the baby into the river. (The fate of the nurse is not recorded.) Ivan had lost his only heir.

Fortunately Anastasia gave birth soon afterwards to a strong new son, Ivan. In twelve years she bore six children, including another son Fyodor, who was probably born with Down’s Syndrome. The strain took its toll. Ivan was needily uxorious, demanding Anastasia’s constant presence even on unsuitably dangerous trips, yet he remained highly sexed and unrestrained.

In 1556, Ivan followed up his capture of Kazan by attacking Xacitarxan – Astrakhan – the chief slave market of the Volga, storming and razing it. The fall of these khanates was the start of Russia’s rise as a Eurasian empire. He backed a family of Russian conquistadors as important to Russia as Cortés to Spain. A tough old merchant, Anikei Stroganov, aged sixty-seven, and his three fissiparous but able sons, were rich from their fur-trapping east of the Volga and from salterns around Solvychegodsk in the north. When an English merchant, Richard Chancellor, sailed northwards to reach China and ended up where Archangel was later built, Ivan controlled it personally, hoping for benefits from England. He commissioned the Stroganovs to probe across the Urals into the khanate of Sibir, controlled by Kuchum Khan, a descendant of Genghis and populated by Mongols and indigenous tribes. Ivan gave the Stroganovs lands in the Urals and Sibir, where they built fortresses, settled peasants, developed mines and salterns, traded timber and furs, purveying saltpetre and sable to Ivan, and ran their own army, a posse – druzhina – of freebooting frontiersmen named Cossacks.^* But Ivan’s next target was the Baltic, where he hoped to secure a port in Livonia (Estonia/Latvia) and gain access to European trade.

In 1558, when the old crusading order of Livonia, officially called Terra Mariana, tried to join Poland–Lithuania, Ivan attacked, initially taking Narva, but then sparking a complex conflict that embroiled Poland, Sweden, Denmark and the Crimean khanate. Ivan played this game ingeniously and won early victories, but ultimately the twenty-year war almost destroyed Muscovy – and drove Ivan mad.

In September 1559, Ivan dragged Anastasia on pilgrimage to Mozhaisk just as the war lurched into crisis, but she fell ill, wearied by her husband, weakened by her grief at losing four children and exhausted by childbirth. Ivan rushed her back to Moscow: ‘How shall I recall the merciless journey to our ruling city with our ailing Tsarina?’ In August 1560, the twenty-nine-year-old Anastasia was dying, just as many courtiers were encouraging Ivan to make peace, as fires burst out in Moscow and as Devlet Giray, the Crimean khan, raided the south, seizing thousands of slaves. Ivan was convinced she had been bewitched and poisoned. Analysis of her remains reveal 0.8 milligrams of arsenic per 100 grams of bone and 0.13 of mercury, but similar amounts were found in other royal bones, symptoms of iatrogenic quackery, not of murder.

Ivan broke down, oscillating between bouts of killing and bouts of sex while his advisers begged him to remarry – one of his sons was too sick to rule; dynasty demanded an heir – but his catalogue of marriages would make Henry VIII look like a wholesome husband. After trying to wed the heiress of Poland, Katarzyna Jagiellonka, and then a Swedish princess, he did something extraordinary: in August 1561 he married into the Genghis family and House of Islam, falling for Princess Kucheny, pretty daughter of Temriuk, khan of Kabarda, an alliance that strengthened Ivan’s position in the Caucasus. She converted to become Tsarina Maria (while her brother Salmuk was baptized as Prince Mikhail Cherkassky, thus founding one of the aristocratic families of imperial Russia). But Ivan had changed: boozing and cavorting, attended by a circus of skomorokhi, clowns and minstrels, he started an affair with a beautiful young courtier, Fyodor Basmanov, who became his ‘catamite’. When a magnate, Prince Dmitri Obolensky Ovchinin, sneered at Basmanov, ‘We serve the tsar in useful ways, you in your filthy sodomitical dealings,’ Ivan scalded him with boiling water, then stabbed him.

As more aristocrats fled to Poland, Ivan with his commander Shahghali, Muslim ex-khan of Kazan, seized Polotsk (Belarus), drowning its entire Jewish population in the Dvina. On his return, critics of his war, Tatar marriage and homosexual affair plotted to make Vladimir tsar. Ferocious vigilance was – and is – the only way to survive in the Kremlin, but Ivan went much further, beating and strangling boyars, having them sewn into bearskins and thrown to the hunting dogs, or cooked alive in burning stoves. Ivan, inspired by the image of hell in the Bible, believed it was his right and mission to scourge his kingdom, his victims bearing the guilt of the tsar just as the tsar bore the guilt of the kingdom. To the peasants, this was the behaviour expected of their ‘Little-Father-Tsar’ – tsar-batiushka.

His courtier Prince Andrei Kurbsky was horrified to see his tsar and his retainers become ‘raging bloodthirsty wild beasts’ who used ‘unheard of tortures and death’. When Kurbsky learned that he was to be arrested for murdering Anastasia, he defected to Poland, leaving his wife and son whom Ivan immediately murdered. Kurbsky denounced Ivan’s ‘intolerable wrath, bitter hatred and burning stoves’.

In December 1564, Ivan denounced the boyars as ‘traitors’ – ‘They want to devour me,’ he said – and offered to ‘give his realm to the traitors, though a time might come when he would demand it back and would take it’. Accompanied by Maria’s and Anastasia’s sons, and by Maria herself, Ivan left Moscow and sledged to a hunting lodge, Alexandrovskaia Sloboda. Muscovites begged Ivan to return, asking, ‘How can we live without a lord?’ and offering to butcher ‘evildoers named by the tsar’.

That same month, Ivan divided his kingdom into two: his oprichnina contained the best and richest lands, while leaving the rest of the land, the zemshchina, to be run by the boyars. To guard his sacred person, he formed a corps of killers, the oprichniki, led by a group of boyars, adventurers, foreigners and Tatar tsareviches including his wife’s brother, who wore black over their sumptuous clothes, rode with the head of a dog on their bridle and a brush on their whip handles and took an oath: ‘I swear to be true to the Lord Grand Prince … and not to maintain silence about any evil I may know that is being contemplated against the Tsar …’ Often accompanying and micromanaging their predatory sprees, shouting ‘Hoyda!’, a Mongol war cry, Ivan killed magnates and their children, who were beheaded, impaled and pushed under ice, an apostate’s death sending them to hell.

At Alexandrovskaia Sloboda, Ivan, coenobite and sybarite, oversaw a diabolical monastery where he and his monkish murderers rose at 4 a.m. for matins and heartily sang hymns of repentance before joining homosexual sex parties and torture sessions until bedtime at 9 p.m. Three blind old men then told stories to the insomniac tsar. Ivan was joined by a German astrologer-physician, Eliseus Bomelius, who had fallen out with Queen Elizabeth of England and now became his magus and poisoner.

In 1567, Ivan uncovered a conspiracy to enthrone his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa. Vladimir, afraid of a trap, himself revealed it to Ivan, who pounced first on a long-trusted boyar, Ivan Fyodorov. The tsar, accompanied by a terrifying new henchman, Malyuta Skuratov, imprisoned Fyodorov’s retainers in a chamber full of gunpowder which he then ignited, whooping as body parts flew into the air. Then ‘He and his children of darkness, verily like a madman surrounded by raving madmen, galloped at full rein to gaze upon the mangled corpses.’ Ivan stabbed Fyodorov, who was then gutted by Skuratov. A total of 150 boyars – and most of their households and families – were killed by the oprichniki, but the war was deteriorating along with Ivan’s mental health, possibly exacerbated by mercury prescribed for back pain. On 6 January 1569, as boyars defected to the Poles, Ivan, accompanied by his son and musketeers and oprichniki, stormed the cities of Tver and Novgorod, a secondary residence of Prince Vladimir, where the people, heirs to a republican and mercantile tradition, were weary of the war that interfered with their trade with Sweden. Thousands were killed by grilling them alive, roping them together and pushing them under the ice. In October, Ivan seized his cousin. Vladimir, his wife and nine-year-old daughter were forced to drink poison.^* Then he turned on his lover Basmanov, who was made to kill his own father before being killed himself; and then on his ministers, led by keeper of his seal Ivan Viskovaty, for whom he devised a gruesome spectacular.

On 25 July 1570, Ivan, black-clad and brandishing axe and crossbow, arrived at a Poganaia Meadow outside Moscow, accompanied by his son Ivan, now sixteen, and 1,500 mounted musketeers, to find twenty stakes hammered into the ground and linked by beams, along with cauldrons of boiling and cold water. As he watched with diplomats and the public, the oprichniki brought forward Viskovaty and 300 noblemen – most of the Muscovite government – who, after atrocious tortures, could barely walk.

‘I intend to destroy you so completely,’ Ivan told them, ‘that no memory of you will survive,’ and riding on horseback he asked the crowd to ‘come closer to witness the spectacle’.

Viskovaty, who had handled negotiations with Poles, Swedes and Ottomans, was accused of treason and strung up on the beams. Ivan ordered him to confess.

‘Go ahead and drink your fill of an innocent’s blood,’ cried Viskovaty. ‘I curse you bloodsuckers and your tsar—’ His words were cut off as Malyuta Skuratov sliced off his nose, ears and genitals, which killed him fast, infuriating Ivan who suspected that this was an act of mercy.

One boyar after another, some with their wives and children, were beheaded, boiled to death, flayed alive or, in a favourite new method, hanged by their ribs – 116 victims in total. But Ivan’s self-inflicted disasters were just starting: now a new Ottoman padishah invaded.

BLOND SULTAN, JEWISH DUKE, SERBIAN VIZIER

That summer, Selim the Blond, aware of the mayhem Ivan was creating, dispatched his tough grand vizier, Mehmed Sokollu (a Serb, born Sokolovic´, a former grand admiral) to invade Muscovy, seize Astrakhan and build a Volga–Don canal to link the Caspian and Black Seas, but Ivan’s garrison held out and the campaign failed. With the Ottomans already fighting from Sumatra to the Mediterranean, it was just one adventure among many at the zenith of their empire. Selim had inherited his father Suleiman’s worldly ambitions, if not his glacial hauteur and the serene acumen, to run wars on three continents.

Four years earlier, the seventy-year-old Suleiman had reluctantly joined Sokollu, Prince Selim and the army in a thrust into Hungary. During a battle, Suleiman died in his tent. Sokollu won the battle, sent the news to Selim, who was now in Serbia, executed any witnesses of the sultan’s death and, propping up the cadaver in his carriage, kept the news secret for forty-eight days – quite a performance.

Selim reappointed Sokollu as grand vizier and granted his Jewish adviser, Joseph Nasi, monopolies on wine and beeswax as well as appointing him duke of Naxos and the Seven Isles (the only Jewish prince since the Khazars).^* The two grandees loathed each other, but Selim regarded both as indispensible.

Selim, guided by Joseph and Sokollu, directed a world war against the Spanish and Portuguese. He had just dispatched a fleet to Sumatra to aid the sultan of Aceh against the Portuguese and another flotilla to back the sultan of Gujarat. Joseph, who after his aunt’s death lived in the sumptuous Istanbul palace of Belvedere, negotiated with the Habsburg emperor, the kings of France and Poland and the Signoria of Venice. Receiving letters from the emperor and a clutch of kings, running his own espionage network, Joseph was a unique figure, known as the Great Jew, negotiating peace with Poland and guiding its royal election, mediating with the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, sustaining the alliance with France and, when the French refused to repay a debt to him, seizing their ships in Constantinople and selling the contents. Finally he encouraged William the Silent and the Dutch to rebel against Philip.

Selim was keen to expand his father’s mastery of the Mediterranean. When Joseph heard that the Venetian arsenal had blown up, he advised Selim to conquer Cyprus, launching an expedition that finally took the island. This was a challenge that the Habsburgs could not ignore but first Philip needed peace in the north – and a new wife.

In 1559, he got both when he negotiated the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with the French, marking the end of the Habsburg–Valois war for Italy, won by the Habsburgs. Philip’s new wife was French, Isabel, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Henri II and his Italian wife, Catherine de’ Medici, who escorted her to the frontier. The marriage was part of the Catholic counter-attack against Protestantism, but when Philip saw her he was delighted: Isabel was chic, extravagant, addicted to gambling and full of Gallic fun.^* Philip fell in love, visiting her in the middle of the night. Isabel was surprised by his passion; her mother advised her to be grateful. Soon, the birth of their two daughters softened Philip, who finally experienced the joys of family life.

But Isabel tried to influence Philip in the French interest, trained by Catherine de’ Medici, the outstanding female politician of her time, and one so hated she was nicknamed the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb.

* Manco’s brother Paullu enthusiastically embraced Spanish rule and the Christian faith, wearing Spanish clothes, receiving lands and palaces from the Crown and fostering a Hispanicized Inca aristocracy that would form the foundation of a new Peruvian society. In 1538, Pizarro granted Inés her own estates and married her to his ex-page in church while he himself took a new Inca mistress, Atahualpa’s queen, Cuxirimay Ocllo, baptized as Angelina Yupanqui. She had been raped as a child by Pizarro’s interpreter but had won his favour by leading him to a priceless gold statue. Together they had two sons. Both women lived long afterwards: Inés had three children with her husband Francisco de Ampuero, whom she hated and tried to poison, only to be caught and forgiven by him. In 1547 she sued him for mismanaging her dowry and won. Her descendants included Bolivian and Dominican presidents. Cuxirimay, granted estates by Pizarro, later married Juan de Betanzos, who wrote a history of the Incas.

* The Lad was later hunted down and killed by assassins who then sought refuge with Manco Inca in his jungle kingdom. Manco trusted them but, hoping to win a pardon from Spain, they then assassinated him. He was succeeded as Inca by his son; their kingdom survived for another thirty years before the Spanish finally stormed it and ended the rule of the Incas.

* That left just one of the Pizarro brothers, Hernando, ‘a tall coarse man’. When he had returned to Spain in 1539, Charles had him imprisoned for killing Almagro, though he lived in luxury, eating off gold plate, gambling with friends, even receiving visits from mistresses. When his niece, Francisca Inca Pizarro, seventeen and beautiful, arrived in Spain in 1550, Hernando, thirty-three years older, cultured, harsh and mean, married her. She moved into his prison, where she gave birth to five children. Finally released, Hernando and Francisca returned to Trujillo where they built the splendid Palace of Conquest which still stands, owned by the family who succeeded as marquesses of the Conquest. After Hernando’s death in 1575, Francisca married a younger man in 1581 and lived until 1598.

* After the conquest, Handsome John settled in Mexico City where he claimed to be the first to plant wheat in the Americas: ‘I, Juan Garrido, black in colour, resident of this city [Mexico],’ he wrote to Charles in 1538, ‘appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of providing evidence to the perpetuity of the king, a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of Indians or anything else … And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow wheat here in New Spain and to see if it took.’

* Slave traders gradually became known as pombeiros after a feira – fortified slave market – at Pumbe, on the border between today’s republics of Congo and Brazzaville Congo.

* It is unknown how many people lived in Mexico when Cortés arrived. It is often claimed there were thirty million people, but this is probably too high. They were certainly hit hard by European diseases. Western history writing often describes these epidemics as if they were episodes of deliberate European biological warfare. This was not the case. But the indigenous peoples were culled by different epidemics at different times, some of which killed over 25 per cent of the population. The smallpox epidemic of 1519–20 killed five to eight million people. But it was the later epidemics in 1545 and 1576 that were most catastrophic, killing around seventeen million people. New research using Spanish accounts of the symptoms suggests that these were cases not of smallpox but of haemorrhagic fever, more like ebola, with bleeding from ears, nose and bowel, spread by rats who flourished massively during wet years after droughts caused by climate change. If so, this may not have been brought by the Spanish; it may have been an indigenous disease.

* This was easier since the Protestant Thomas Cromwell was no longer on the scene. Cromwell was not the first self-made man to rise to power in England, but the Church was the traditional route – his patron Cardinal Wolsey was a butcher’s son from Ipswich. But Cromwell, who resembled an indefatigably efficient but implacable badger, was a new sort of minister. Son of a middle-class brewer, who as a youngster had fought for the French in Italy against the armies of Ferdinand of Spain, he looted the wealth of Catholic monasteries which Henry distributed to loyal courtiers, providing the fortunes of many aristocratic families. Amid the murderous paranoia of Henry’s court, the new queen Anne floundered after delivering a daughter – Elizabeth. As her sultriness turned to desperation, Henry fell out of love and into hate. Cromwell, playing on her mockery of Henry’s virility, framed her for treason and incest. Boleyn was beheaded and Henry married her demure lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour, while Cromwell, secretary, lord privy seal, vicegerent in spirituals and earl of Essex, married his own son to the new queen’s sister. Queen Jane delivered a son but died in childbirth. Cromwell’s arrangement of a fourth, Protestant marriage to a German princess led to Henry’s sexual humiliation and Cromwell’s own beheading. Henry afterwards regretted Cromwell’s killing. Even a further humiliation from his fifth marriage to a saucy, unfaithful teenager did not douse Henry’s uxoriousness: he married one more time. Henry was an inscrutable showman who consolidated his dynasty and eliminated any threats, but his reputation rests on the fact that his capricious break with Rome reflected a deeper English instinct for both political independence and religious reform. The Cromwell family would produce two rulers of England and almost became a royal dynasty of their own: Cromwell’s nephew Richard Williams-Cromwell was the great-grandfather of Oliver Cromwell.

* Charles was joined by Titian, fifteen years after first sitting for him. The artist’s equestrian portrait of the kaiser in triumph after the battle of Mühlberg throbs with martial power, echoing the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius that both had seen in Rome, but it also reveals the gruelling existence of an emperor. ‘My whole life was a journey,’ Charles said, and indeed he looks exhausted, frazzled, haggard.

* Suleiman was increasingly pious: after rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem (demolished by Saladin’s family three centuries earlier) and embellishing Mecca, in 1550 he ordered his court architect Sinan to design his own Suleimaniye Mosque in Constantinople. Sinan, one of the greatest architects in world history, designer also of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne and creator of as many as 300 projects, was born a Christian, probably Armenian or Greek, named Joseph, who was enslaved and converted to Islam, later distinguishing himself as a military engineer on Suleiman’s campaigns from the Tigris to the Danube.

* Joseph was João Miques, Dom João Migas Mendes, Giuseppe Nasi and Yasef Nassi; she was Doña Gracia, Hannah, Beatrice de Luna and La Señora.

* A painting of Blond Selim shows him signalling to one of the Tongueless whose sign language he partly understood.

* Akbar organized his nobles strictly by the numerical mansab (rank) of 1,000, 5,000, 7,000 or 10,000 soldiers.

* Titian helped with the courtship: his gorgeous full-length painting of Philip II, handsome, slim, arrogant and sporting intricately gold-trimmed armour, was sent to Mary Tudor during their marriage negotiations. In London and Winchester, Philip was accompanied by among others Martin ‘El Mestizo’ Cortés.

* Consanguinity is best measured by an inbreeding coefficient. The breeding of parent and child or brother and sister is 0.25. Inbreeding was already high thanks to the repeated intermarriage between the Trastámara and the Aviz even before it became Habsburg policy. Carlos was great-grandson of Juana the Mad whose own grandmother had died as a crazed prisoner; his grandfather Charles and his father Philip had both married double cousins, raising his inbreeding coefficient to 0.211, close to pure incest. The Habsburg jaw was its least damaging symptom.

* In 1562, the three sons of the conquistador returned to Mexico bearing the body of their father. There they became embroiled in a conspiracy of Spanish encomienderos and Mexica nobility to hail Marques Martín Cortés as king of New Spain. The brothers were arrested; El Mestizo was waterboarded. Amid many executions, the Cortés were spared.

Philip encouraged conversos with impure (Jewish) blood to govern the Americas but also exported the Inquisition to Peru and New Spain. In 1579, he appointed a converso, Luis Carvajal, born in Portugal but returning to Spanish service, as captain-general of New Leon, with the mission to ‘discover, pacify and settle’ north-west Mexico and Texas. Carvajal’s rivals denounced him and his family to the Inquisition as relapsed Jews. Luis died in prison. On 8 December 1596, Luis’s sister and her teenaged daughters and son courageously declared their Judaism and were burned alive in the main square of Mexico City. But some of the family escaped to Italy where, settling at the Florentine port of Livorno – Medici territory – a Carvajal boy adopted the name of a Tuscan village, Montefiore – the ancestors of this author.

* The limpieza de sangre was required by the elite in South America but was hard to maintain. Even elite creoles who prided themselves on their whiteness were usually mixed-race, a fact that only encouraged a fixation with racial and racist categories from mestizo (Spanish-Amerindian), mulatto (African-European), sambo (African-Amerindian), pardo (triracial) and cuarterón (quadroon, with one African grandparent).

* This is according to the reconstruction by Gerasimov who, on Stalin’s orders, opened Ivan’s tomb in 1953 and based on the tsar’s skull crafted an artistic version of his face.

* The word Cossack derived from the Turkic kozak, meaning a freebooter. These ferocious frontiersmen thrived in the borderlands between Muscovy and the Mongol khanates and Poland–Lithuania, adopting by land the cavalry tactics of Mongol fighters, by sea the raiding tactics of Viking forefathers. Composed of runaway Ukrainian peasants, Muscovite deserters and Mongol renegades, their twenty or so communities developed an idiosyncratic Orthodox and meritocratic culture, each voysko (warband), translated into English as ‘host’, elected their own headmen – ataman or hetman. They were not yet cavalry but infantry who often used longboats, known as chaiki (seagulls) for their raids – even, in 1614, attacking Constantinople. The Hosts maintained independence, fighting sometimes for the tsars, at other times for the kings of Poland, their leaders trying to win nobility. Only in the eighteenth century did the Russian tsars transform them into cavalry units.

* The bones of the daughter and mother, tested in the 1960s, reveal arsenic levels of 12.9 for the mother, 8.1 for the child: lethal doses.

* Joseph won Selim’s support for Jews to return to Israel, a Jewish dream since AD 70. As Ottomans protected the holy cities including Jerusalem, Joseph restored the mystical town of Safed (Galilee) and when Pope Pius V expelled Jews from his states, Joseph settled them there.

* A lady-in-waiting who accompanied her to Madrid was one of the first signed female painters, Sofonisba Anguissola.