The World

Valois and Saadis, Habsburgs and Rurikovichi

LA SERPENTE: A MEDICI QUEEN IN FRANCE

On 10 July 1559, celebrating their daughter’s wedding on the Place des Vosges, Catherine watched her husband Henri II, son of Le Grand Nez, seated on his horse Unhappy and wearing the colours of his long-time mistress Diane de Poitiers, snap his vizor shut and lower his lance. Catherine asked him not to continue but he shouted back, ‘It’s precisely for you that I fight.’ The two riders, wearing full armour, galloped towards each other.

Jousting was built into their marriage: the erotomane King François was said to have monitored their wedding night. ‘Both,’ he adjudicated, ‘showed valour in the joust.’ But the death of her uncle, Pope Clement, cancelled the dowry. Worthless to France, regarded as a scheming Italian from a family of traders, Catherine, ‘her mouth too large and eyes too prominent and colourless for beauty but a very distinguished woman with a shapely figure’, watched her husband fall in love with Diane de Poitiers, nineteen years older than her; Medici called her the Old Lady. Henri talked of repudiating Catherine when no pregnancy ensued, though Diane encouraged Henri to visit his wife. Catherine drank mule’s urine to guard against sterility, painted her ‘source of life’ with poultices of ground stags’ antlers and cow dung embellished with crushed periwinkle and mares’ milk – hardly the perfumes to encourage lovemaking.

Finally a sensible doctor examined the couple and discovered slight abnormalities of their sexes that he managed to correct. Catherine became pregnant, surviving nine births. Six children lived to adulthood, four sons and two daughters, including Isabel, high-spirited queen of Spain. Three sons became kings, all sickly and unbalanced, perhaps from inherited Medici syphilis, but their births gave Catherine prestige. When Henri succeeded his father, Catherine had to please his mistress Diane, remembering later, ‘It was the king I was really entertaining, acting sorely against the grain, for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore.’ But she tolerated it because ‘I loved him so much.’

The jousters clashed with the horrendous crack of splintered lance. Catherine screamed; the crowd gasped; Henri tottered; his vizor gaped open, blood gushing from splinters sticking out of his eye and from his temple. Wife, mistress and son all fainted. Philip’s doctor Vesalius^* was summoned; Henri howled as doctors tried to remove the splinters. It was a dangerous moment for a divided France: 10 per cent of the population were Huguenots – as French Protestants were known – led by Queen Jeanne of Navarre and Admiral Coligny of the Montmorency family, and Henri was determined to exterminate the ‘Protestant vermin’.

Catherine rushed to her weakling son, François. ‘My God, how can I live,’ he sobbed, ‘if my father dies?’ Septicaemia set in. The new king, François II, was married to the sixteen-year-old Mary, the diminutive, impulsive, half-French Scottish queen, descended from Henry VIII’s sister, and handed power to her ultra-Catholic uncles, the Guise brothers, who were determined to destroy the Huguenots.

When after sixteen months François himself died of an ear infection, Catherine took power as gouvernante de France for another meagre son, Charles IX, aged ten, nicknamed the Brat. If Catherine’s orphaned youth personified the plight of women in power families, her adulthood demonstrated the opportunities for exercising power.^*

‘I was not loved by the king your father as I wished to be,’ Catherine confided in her daughter Isabel, ‘and God … has left me with three little children and a divided kingdom where there is not one man I trust.’ Catherine believed she must compromise with the Protestants to preserve France for her sons,^* but the Guises traduced her to Philip, claiming that she was compromising with heretics. He called her Madame la Serpente. ‘Therefore, my daughter, my friend, don’t let your husband the king [Philip] believe an untruth,’ Catherine beseeched Isabel. ‘I don’t mean to change my life or my religion.’

In January 1562, Catherine appeased the Huguenots with her tolerant Edict of Saint-Germain, which disgusted Philip. That March, in a clash at Vassy, seventy-four Protestants were killed by François, duc de Guise, leading to full-scale civil war and then to the assassination of Guise. When Catherine proposed a summit with Philip, he refused to see La Serpente, sending Isabel, who defended him against her mother.^* Catherine proposed marrying her daughter Margot to Philip’s bizarre son, Don Carlos. But Philip had a new family member to promote instead of his demented son. He summoned a boy of twelve named Geronimo.

‘I was delighted to learn that he is my brother,’ Philip wrote. He was the emperor’s illegitimate son by a German serving girl, raised in obscurity. Philip asked him if he knew who his father was. ‘No,’ said Geronimo. Philip kissed him, granted him his own court and renamed him Don Juan of Austria. Don Juan was brought up with his cousin Carlos, who was exactly the same age.

But they were very different. Don Juan grew up into a competent and flashy paladin; Carlos was deteriorating into a murderous maniac. But both craved power.

PHILIP’S MURDEROUS FLAGELLATING SON AND SWASHBUCKLING BROTHER: VICTORY AND HEARTBREAK

In 1562, when chasing a serving girl whom he liked to flagellate, Don Carlos fell head first downstairs. His head swelled, he lost his sight and he feverishly asked for the fragrant body of a revered Franciscan (who was later canonized as St Didacus), which was put into his bed. Carlos slept, but his head had become infected. The physician Vesalius trepanned the skull, drained the fluid off Carlos’s brain, removing a piece of skull, and saved his life – though Philip gave the credit to the shrivelled saint’s ‘odour of sanctity’.

Philip promised Carlos the governorship of the Netherlands but gradually realized that ‘Although my son is nineteen and although other children develop late, God wishes that mine lags behind all.’ Don Juan asked permission to fight the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. Philip refused, but the dashing bastard disobeyed the king and served at sea. When he returned, Philip was impressed by his glamorous energy. But Carlos was envious; his behaviour was becoming more alarming: though he studied German and the empire, and was happy that he was now engaged to his double cousin Anne, he stormed out of a meeting of the Castilian Cortes (parliament), threw a page out of a window, set fire to a house, tried to murder several courtiers and avidly flagellated more servants.

Philip was now facing a crisis in his Seventeen Provinces (Netherlands and Belgium) which gave his mad son a chance to meddle in dangerous matters. In 1566, Philip’s aggressive enforcement of Habsburg power in the form of taxation and Catholicism provoked rebellion in the independent-minded, sophisticated and often Protestant cities of his richest territories. While kings swaggered front of stage, in most places their powers were always limited to some extent by assemblies, cities and guilds but nowhere more so than in the pluralistic Seventeen Provinces where their rights and privileges had been confirmed by the dukes of Burgundy. Philip’s governor, his half-sister Margarita of Austria, widow of the Black Medici, was conciliatory. Philip disagreed.

‘In matters of religion, don’t temporize,’ he ordered. ‘Punish with the utmost severity.’ In 1567, he dispatched his drear paladin Fernando de Toledo, duke of Alba, veteran of Tunis and Mühlberg, to crush the rebellion. When Philip used Margarita to lure rebel nobles and arrest them, she resigned and Alba (whom the Dutch called the Iron Duke, the Spanish the Great one) launched a conventional war and campaign of repression to defeat the rebels, beheading two noble leaders. He boasted that he went on to execute 18,600 people and killed many thousands when seizing Dutch towns. He summoned the provinces’ pre-eminent Protestant, William the Silent, prince of Orange, a protégé of Charles V, whom Philip had appointed as stadtholder (lieutenant) of Holland and Zeeland. Discreetly encouraged by Elizabeth of England and, via the Jewish duke Joseph Nasi, by Sultan Selim, William escaped to Germany, where he and his brothers assumed the Protestant leadership, appealing to the French Huguenots, signing letters of marque to Protestant privateers, the Watergeuzen (Sea Beggars), who soon defeated Spanish warships, and led an army into Holland.^* For the rest of Philip’s reign, the Seventeen Provinces, where he had to deploy as many as 80,000 troops, became a quagmire – out of which much of what we think of as the modern world would emerge.

His son, Don Carlos, made secret contact with the Dutch rebels and proposed to Don Juan, his trusted uncle of the same age, that he procure him a galley to escape, to seize power in the Netherlands. In return Carlos offered him the crown of Naples. Don Juan reported this treason to Philip. Worse was to come. When Carlos later received Don Juan, he tried to shoot him with his arquebus, but his servants had uncocked it. He drew a dagger and threw himself at his uncle, who disarmed him, tossed the diminutive, hunchbacked prince aside and drew a sword: ‘Don’t come one step closer, Your Highness!’ Carlos decided to kill his father.

At midnight one night in 1568, Philip donned helmet and breast-plate, gathered a posse, then led them through the corridors of the Madrid Alcázar and burst into the bedroom of Don Carlos, who awoke to find his bed surrounded by his father and several courtiers, swords drawn. ‘My aim,’ wrote Philip, ‘was to find a permanent remedy. Time is unlikely to find a cure.’

Carlos was imprisoned in the Alcázar, where he starved himself and tried to commit suicide by swallowing a diamond. He died six months later. That death was a relief for Philip. But in October 1568, his adored Isabel, aged twenty-three, died of infection after a miscarriage. Heartbroken, Philip did not want to remarry, but his niece Anna, twenty-one-year-old daughter of his cousin Emperor Maximilian II, betrothed to Carlos, was now available. Even the pope warned against inbreeding, but he needed a son more than ever.

To ensure that his Austrian cousins supported his anti-Protestant crusade, Philip invited their son, Rudolf, brother of his new wife and now his own heir apparent, to Spain. ‘May no one deter you from your faith,’ he told Rudolf, ‘which is the only true one!’ Rudolf was trained in Spanish ceremonial, ever after sporting its ‘Spaniolated’ ruff and black hose, but he was horrified by Philip’s dogmatism. It was the art of the Escorial – where Titian was painting The Last Supper – that impressed him. Rudolf the Mad would be the most unbuttoned and eccentric of all the Habsburgs.

As Philip settled into a happy fourth marriage, his half-brother Don Juan won glory.

In January 1567, Philip banned the faith, customs, language and costumes of the 400,000 Moriscos – Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in 1501 – who, encouraged by Joseph Nasi from Constantinople, reacted by launching a rebellion in the mountainous Alpujarras under a mysterious leader, El Habaquí, boosted by jihadis from Africa and Ottoman Janissaries sent by Selim. Philip appointed Don Juan to crush the Muslims, the start of a dirty war in which Morisco villages were exterminated and Muslim rebels tortured Catholics. Don Juan was wounded in the fighting. ‘You must preserve yourself,’ Philip told his brother. ‘I must keep you for great things.’ Philip ordered mass deportations. ‘The saddest sight in the world,’ wrote Juan. ‘There was so much rain, wind and snow the poor people clung together lamenting. One cannot deny the spectacle of depopulation of a kingdom is most pitiful.’ Some 90,000 died; Philip planned to expel the remaining Moriscos – a tragic solution carried out by his son, Philip III.

Soon afterwards the news arrived that Selim had taken Cyprus from Venice. Pius V invited Philip, whose commitments were eased by a truce with the Dutch, to join a Holy League against the Ottomans. Philip nominated the twenty-five-year-old Don Juan as commander of 208 galleys, 6 galliasses, 24 other warships and 60,000 men (including Miguel de Cervantes, future novelist) to fight an Ottoman fleet of 300 ships and around 100,000 men. The Ottoman galleys were more manoeuvrable; the Christians had better artillery. Overlooking Philip’s instructions to avoid military impetuosity as much as sexual incontinence, Juan was determined to fight, asking advice of experienced admirals in the fleet and repeatedly practising manoeuvres.

Dressed in gleaming armour, Juan toured the fleet in a frigate, addressing the sailors in different languages: ‘My children, we’re here to conquer or die!’ He ordered his galley slaves, mostly Muslims, to be double-shackled, while the Ottoman Capitan-Pasha Ali promised his Christian slaves, ‘If I win the battle, I promise you liberty.’

At Lepanto off the Greek coast, the Ottomans tried to wrap their crescent formation around the Holy Leaguers. The fighting was savage as Ottoman galleys were blasted out of the water by Don Juan’s cannonades; Don Juan, commanding at the prow of his El Real, ordered the storming of Sultana, flagship of the capitan-pasha, whose head was taken to Don Juan, then mounted on a pike, destroying Ottoman morale. Seagulls feasted on eviscerated bodies floating in a crimson Mediterranean. Altogether 35,000 Turks were killed, 130 Ottoman ships captured, while 8,000 Christians were killed, 20,000 wounded. Thousands of Christian slaves, chained to their ships, went to the bottom, but 12,000 were liberated. The victory made Don Juan the pre-eminent hero of Christendom and convinced Philip of his own messianic destiny. Don Juan wanted to sail on to Istanbul, but Philip restrained him. Instead Don Juan seized Tunis. Now he wanted a kingdom of his own.

Philip, triumphant over Islam, now encouraged the death knell of heresy in France that was linked to his Dutch problems. In August 1572, Catherine de’ Medici was planning a magnificent Parisian wedding – and the slaughter of half her guests.

RED WEDDING: BRAT KING, CROCODILE QUEEN AND PSYCHOTIC TSAR

Once sceptical about Philip’s repression in Holland, Catherine now planned to destroy her own Protestants, who were recklessly supporting the Dutch against Spain.

She was negotiating the marriage between her daughter Margot and the Protestant prince Henri, eighteen-year-old son of Queen Jeanne of the little Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre and Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, a cousin of the king by a junior branch of the Capet family. The marriage was designed to reunite the family across the religious divide. But when the Huguenots planned to kidnap Catherine herself, she started to consider combining the marriage with an extreme solution.

Margot, a dazzling brunette whose ‘lovely face shone with faultless white skin’, resisted the marriage. As they grew up, Catherine struggled to control her vicious children: Charles was spineless, devious and tubercular; Henri, duc d’Anjou, was artful and depraved, his looks spoiled by a seeping fistula between eye and nose. Anjou favoured wild transvestite orgies. Catherine tried to divert him by giving a party where the serving girls were naked, but, in between bouts of self-flagellation, prayer and fasting, Anjou preferred his male lover sieur de Lignerolles. Catherine had Lignerolles stabbed in an alleyway, and that was just the beginning.

The boys were locked in a sinister dance with their mother. ‘I’m not one of those mothers who love their children only for themselves,’ Catherine told Henri. ‘I love you because I see you foremost in greatness and reputation.’ They were attracted to their sister Margot. Now the brothers seduced or raped her: ‘It was you who first put my foot in the stirrup,’ she later told Anjou, trembling with secret excitement when he embraced her.

Margot was already in love with a non-royal cousin. When her mother and brother Charles discovered her flirtation, they awoke her in the night and punched her viciously, tearing her nightdress to shreds. She agreed to obey her mother: ‘I had no will nor choice but hers.’

As the guests arrived in Paris, Catherine met with her son Anjou. King Charles the Brat had a close, almost filial friendship with the Protestant leader, Gaspar de Coligny, so the mother and Anjou decided that since ‘the admiral [Coligny] had inspired His Majesty [Charles] with a bad and sinister opinion of the queen’, in Anjou’s account, ‘my mother and myself, we resolved to rid ourselves of him’.

In August 1572, broiling and tense, Paris filled with sumptuously dressed guests. The Protestant bridegroom, Henri of Navarre, dark, aquiline, muscular, had arrived with 800 black-clad, heavily armed horsemen. Margot dazzled the courtiers: ‘Besides the beauty of her face and her well-turned body, she was superbly dressed … her hair was dressed with big white pearls and rare diamonds – [like] a brilliant night sky full of stars.’

On 18 August, in Notre-Dame, Margot, wearing an ermine-rimmed crown, a jewel-spangled dress, stood beside Henri, who was accompanied by Admiral Coligny, to take her vows. It was claimed that when twice asked by the cardinal for her assent Margot said nothing, so Charles reached out and pushed her head down in a nod. This might be later Bourbon propaganda, but the ceremony was laden with menace. During the next four days Catherine prepared her strike. Not for nothing did she collect embalmed crocodiles: seven hung from the ceiling of her study.

On the 22nd Catherine and Anjou ordered a hitman to shoot Coligny, but he only wounded the admiral’s hand. The king was furious when Coligny whispered that his power had been usurped by his mother and brother. Catherine and Anjou were made to pay their respects to the bedridden Coligny, surrounded by Huguenots eager for revenge. Within the Louvre, Catherine and Anjou agreed ‘to finish the admiral by whatever means. It was necessary to bring the king round. We decided to go to him in his study after dinner …’

The crocodile queen decided to massacre not just Coligny but the Huguenot nobility. When he was told of Coligny’s plan to attack him and his mother, Charles shouted, ‘Lies! The admiral loves me as though I were his own son.’ Catherine argued that Coligny was tricking him. Suddenly the unbalanced king was convinced. ‘Then kill them all!’ Brat shrieked. ‘Kill them all!’

In the early hours of St Bartholomew’s Day, the hit squad of Anjou’s Swiss Guards stormed Coligny’s house and erupted into the bedchamber. ‘Are you the Admiral?’ they asked.

‘I am. I should at least be killed by a gentleman and not this boor,’ but the boor drove his sword through Coligny’s chest, then threw him out of the window, the signal for the hecatomb to begin. At the Louvre, where her new husband Henri and his retainers were lodging, Margot was suspected by both sides, ‘so that no one told me anything, until that evening’. She finally confronted her mother. ‘God willing, my mother replied, I’d come to no harm but in any case I must go, for fear of awakening their suspicions.’ After praying for her life, Margot joined Henri in his bed, surrounded by forty Huguenot guards. Margot fell asleep. Henri later wandered out of his room, but he was detained and safely locked up as the royal guardsmen went from room to room, killing the guests. When Huguenots escaped into the courtyard, archers shot them.

‘Navarre!’ Margot was awoken by banging on the door. When a servant opened the door, a Huguenot covered in blood staggered in, pursued by five royal hitmen, and clung on to Margot, covering her in blood. Laughing, the captain of guards ‘gave me the life of that man clinging to me’.

‘They’re killing them all,’ the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip, ‘stripping them naked, dragging them through the streets, sparing not even children. Blessed be God!’ Philip ‘experienced one of the greatest pleasures I’ve had in all my life’.

King Charles panicked, crying, ‘What bloodshed! God, forgive me … I’m lost,’ then blamed it all on his mother: ‘God’s blood, you’re the cause of it all!’ Henri of Navarre converted to Catholicism. Bodies were heaped around the Louvre. Coligny was castrated and gibbeted, his head delivered to Catherine, who forwarded it to the pope. Three thousand were killed in Paris, 20,000 nationally.

The French, said a foreign monarch, were barbarians. That monarch, Ivan the Terrible, was himself no humanitarian^* and now his capital was lost thanks to his own atrocities. In May 1571, the Crimean khan Devlet Giray galloped north and stormed Moscow, enslaving tens of thousands and leaving the city a smoking ruin. ‘They burned Moscow, and didn’t dare tell me for ten days,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s treason’ – and traitors had to be killed, some poisoned by Dr Bomelius.

Deciding he needed to marry again, Ivan held a bride-show at which the German doctor helped him select the final twelve girls. His role was to ‘inspect their urine in a glass and define and explain its nature’, after which the tsar chose one for himself, but she died soon after the wedding. He married for a fifth time just before Khan Devlet raided northwards again. On this occasion Ivan’s generals used his artillery, manned by German mercenaries, to hold off the Tatars. Ivan now reunited the kingdom, terminating the division between oprichnina and zemshchina. Dismissing or killing his fifth wife, Ivan wanted a sixth royal wife from England or Poland. Dr Bomelius proposed Elizabeth of England, who had already agreed to grant Ivan asylum if he lost his throne. Ivan criticized Elizabeth for not being ‘sovereign-born’ and for remaining single. Now Poland offered an opportunity.

In July 1572, its king died, leaving his sister Anna, half Italian, well educated and unmarried at forty, as heir. But the Polish nobles – the szlachta – rejected a female queen and their Sejm (parliament) gathered to select a new king who would marry Anna. Ivan, supported by some Lithuanians, proposed, as did a Habsburg, but a surprising outsider proved irresistibly flexible. Henri of Anjou, Catherine de’ Medici’s effete, vicious son who had failed to become king of England or Holland and was keen for his own crown, charmed Anna, whom he promised to marry, and agreed to terms that created the most free and democratic state in Europe.^* Henri won the election, but when he arrived, amazing the Poles with his heavy make-up and flamboyant entourage, he delayed marrying Anna and then suddenly received news that his brother Charles was dead. Henri was king of France and Poland. Abandoning Anna, infanta of Poland, who now sought a husband to fight on against Muscovy, Henri flounced away in the night like a scented, rouged thief, pursued by outraged Polish horsemen, to re-emerge in Paris as Henri III. ‘France and you,’ he told his mother, ‘are worth more than Poland.’

MURDER OF THE SONS: KING OF THE HERMAPHRODITES AND TSAR OF SIBERIA

Dressed in coral bracelets, earrings, doublets pleated and slashed in scarlet, and violet ribbons, his hair scented and curled, King Henri was nicknamed King of the Isle of Hermaphrodites or King of Sodom, but he was unable to stop the religious war, again banning Protestantism. Margot’s marriage to Navarre, sanctified amid the red wedding, was cursed: she had so many love affairs that the king had her arrested for promiscuity. Incensed, Margot remembered how he and his brother Charles had seduced her. Their mother Catherine hinted to her son-in-law Navarre that they should perhaps liquidate Margot.^*

Henri III recognized that Navarre, who had returned to Protestantism, was his heir but he was determined to be master. Forming his own hit squad, the Forty-Five, he had his Catholic rivals, the surviving Guise brothers, assassinated: one was killed in front of him as he sneered ‘King of Paris, eh? Not so big now’ – and the other was diced and cooked in a fireplace like an aristocratic kebab. Furious Parisians drove Henri out of Paris. Catherine was horrified: ‘Wretched man, what’s he done? Pray for him. He’s headed towards ruin.’ In August 1589, just after his mother died at sixty-nine, Henri received a visitor, a friar, while sitting on his commode. The friar drew a dagger and stabbed the defecating king. ‘Ah my God,’ cried Henri, holding his guts in, ‘the wretch!’ Before dying, he gave Navarre some final advice: ‘You’ll experience many calamities until you change your religion.’ With the passing of the last of the Valois branch, Navarre, now Henri IV, first of the Bourbons, fought for his kingdom – ‘I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist’ – until he realized that his predecessor was right. Henri converted for the fifth and last time to Catholicism with the sentiment if not the words: ‘Paris is worth a mass.’^*

Henri’s second marriage did not bring him close to the record of Europe’s most uxorious monarch. In Muscovy, Ivan now married a seventh and eighth time, his last wife producing a son. In autumn 1575, Dr Bomelius cast a horoscope that predicted danger for the tsar. Ivan abdicated as grand prince of Russia and appointed in his place a scion of Genghis and nephew of Tsarina Marina, Simeon Bekbulatovich, who ‘reigned’ for a year before Ivan took back the crown. But in 1579 the war turned decisively: the Poles retook Polotsk and invaded Muscovy. Ivan blamed his disasters on Dr Bomelius, who tried to escape, jewels sewn into his clothes. He was caught and roasted on a spit.

It was not easy to be Ivan the Terrible’s son and heir. Ivan Ivanovich was in his prime, while his father was crippled by arthritis, barely able to move, according to an examination of his skeleton: there is nothing more dangerous than a lame tiger. His father had twice chosen wives for him, then dismissed them. Finally, young Ivan married a third for love. In November 1782, the older Ivan, hobbling on his sharp metal tsar’s staff, saw his pregnant daughter-in-law wearing only one robe instead of the traditional three and slapped her.

‘You thrust my first wife into a nunnery,’ shouted his son, ‘then my second. Now you hit my third.’ The tsar stabbed him in the head with his staff. The tsarevich died soon afterwards. The daughter-in-law miscarried. Ivan grieved madly, scratching the walls. ‘Alas for me a sinner,’ he wrote in a typical lucubration, ‘I, a stinking hound … always wallowing in drunkenness, fornication, adultery, filth, murders, rapine, despoliation, hatred and all sorts of evildoing.’ He listed his victims killed unshriven, ordering prayers for their souls. Ivan had lost a war and a son – just as he gained a new empire.

In September 1582, his conquistadors, the Stroganovs, harassed by Kuchum, khan of Sibir, hired a Cossack captain Yermak to attack the khanate. Yermak and 840 freebooters and slaves, armed with muskets and a couple of cannon, crossed the Urals, allied with some of the indigenous animist Khanty peoples who resented the Tatar Muslims, and defeated Kuchum, seizing Qashliq, the Mongol capital. Accepting the title offered by Yermak, tsar of Siberia, Ivan was exultant, ordering bells rung and sending gifts to Yermak plus a unit of musketeers.

In March 1584, Ivan, fifty-four but ailing, told the English ambassador, ‘I’m poisoned with disease.’ He was playing with turquoise stones. ‘You see? The change of pure colour into pall heralds my death.’ It was said that the colour of turquoises changed in the presence of poison.

THE BATTLE OF THREE DEAD KINGS: SEBASTIAN THE ASLEEP AND MANSUR THE GOLDEN

That afternoon, the Terrible bathed and sang hymns loudly, and then, while playing chess, was felled by a stroke.

As Ivan died, Yermak was in desperate straits in Qashliq, besieged by Tatars and Ostiaks, whom he managed to repel, but he was isolated and almost out of gunpowder. On 5 August 1585, the conquistador was ambushed by Kuchum, his men slaughtered, and he himself, escaping by river, drowned under the weight of the Terrible’s armour.

Yermak’s Cossacks panicked and abandoned Qashliq. But in 1598 they encountered reinforcements and returned, founding the first European city in Siberia, Tobolsk. The conquest and settlement of Siberia, much neglected by historians, was similar to that of north America two centuries later: the colonizers crushed indigenous resistance by Tungus and Buriat peoples, burning villages, raping and enslaving women and bringing catastrophic diseases, particularly smallpox; some indigenous tribes killed themselves en masse.^*

It would take the Russians just forty years to reach the Pacific Ocean, where the Spanish had seized the Philippines, originally named for Philip II who then ordered its conquest.^* Anything now seemed possible to El Prudente, who ordered the conquest of China, a plan diverted by challenges closer to home.

While enjoying this streak of successes, Philip struggled to control his flamboyant half-brother Don Juan, whom he decided to send to Holland as governor-general to negotiate a permanent peace. He dangled an amazing prize: Don Juan was also to command the ‘Enterprise of England’, destroy Elizabeth, marry Mary of Scots and become king. Abetted by two of Philip’s secretaries, Juan disobeyed Philip and bungled the Dutch negotiations. Philip probably had Juan’s secretary assassinated in the back streets of Madrid.

Philip was simultaneously trying to restrain his Portuguese nephew King Sebastian, another strange child of consanguinity, sometimes hyperactive, sometimes becalmed, but always enraptured by a messianic crusading mission.

Sebastian’s very existence was regarded as miraculous: his family had almost died out when in 1554 the king’s only son died of consumption, leaving a pregnant wife Juana, daughter of Charles V. But eighteen days later she gave birth to Sebastian O Desejado – the Desired. Sebastian, relishing the company of young monks and avoiding female company, presided over further imperial expansion: off China, Macau was secured, while in south-east Africa, he founded the fortress of São Sebastião (Mozambique) and, in the west, built a new slaving port, Luanda (Angola), and expanded into the kingdom of Ndongo – making the Portuguese so far the only Europeans to build a territorial, rather than coastal, empire in Africa. Nearer home, Sebastian aspired to become ‘emperor of Morocco’, exploiting a fissure in the ruling Saadi dynasty, backing a pretender against his pro-Ottoman uncle, the sultan.

Philip advised Sebastian against his plan, but in 1577 the Desired landed at Tangier with the cream of Portuguese nobility, 17,000 men and many volunteers,^* who marched in full armour into the interior. The heat was so intense that Sebastian had cold water poured into his armour, but he was unprepared when, on 4 August 1578, at Ksar el-Kebir, he encountered 60,000 Moroccan troops. Sultan Abd al-Malik was dying but his brother Ahmed encircled the Portuguese. Sebastian had three horses shot from under him. Then he charged and was cut off; his Moroccan pretender was drowned (later flayed and stuffed) and the victor Abd al-Malik expired – three kings dead during one battle. Eight thousand Portuguese were killed, 15,000 – many of them female camp followers – were enslaved. Sebastian’s body was never found: he became the Sleeping King, expected to awaken and rule in the End of Days. But two monarchs benefited from his folly.

Abd al-Malik’s brother, Ahmed – now Sultan al-Mansur, the Victor, later known as the Golden – was ferociously capable, making Morocco a pivotal power and allying himself with Elizabeth of England, with whom he hoped to reconquer Spain. Al-Mansur also hoped to colonize America with Moroccan settlers, blessed by a transatlantic advent of the Mahdi, which did not come to pass. To the south, he envied the wealth of the Songhai kingdom that replaced Mali, demanding revenues from their salt and gold. The askia (king) arrogantly sent two metal shoes as an insult. Twelve years after Ksar el-Kebir, Mansur dispatched a small army armed with cannon across the Sahara under a blue-eyed Spanish renegade, Judar Pasha, enslaved and castrated as a boy. The eunuch took Timbuktu and returned with thirty camel-loads of gold. For a decade, al-Mansur ruled a slaving, salt and gold empire in west Africa.^*

Philip was the other beneficiary. The Aviz were almost extinct and he was the heir: he seized Portugal and united the first two world empires. His flashy brother Don Juan died ingloriously of typhoid, but his death undermined negotiations with the Dutch, who went back to war – and this time Philip appointed his talented Italian nephew, the duke of Parma, who captured Antwerp and the southern provinces. The division was decisive: at Utrecht in 1579, the seven northern provinces – Holland, Zeeland and others – formed a military defence union, directed by their States-General, with help from William and the Orange family. Two years later, the United Provinces declared independence, while the south (Belgium) swore allegiance to the Habsburgs. The union had just 1.5 million people and its forces under William and his brother were defeated by Parma. Elizabeth helped with a meagre army that Parma trounced. Yet the United Provinces, forged by religious war, rising patriotism and international voyaging and well served by their many walled cities and watery terrain, proved resilient; the union was also powered by a pluralistic society that welcome talented immigrants, by a sophisticated economy and financial markets, and by an early welfare system for poor relief. As the Sea Beggars harassed Habsburg shipping, Elizabeth unleashed her own privateers – the ‘seadogs’ led by Jack Hawkins and Francis Drake – for a spree of English raiding. The war against the Habsburgs became a fight to the death.

KING BAYANO, DRAKE AND DIEGO

On 26 September 1580, a grizzled Devonian sea captain, Francis Drake, sailed into Plymouth with the most profitable cargo ever for an English raid on Habsburg treasure. But he arrived back with just one of the five ships in his flotilla and only fifty-six of that ship’s original crew of eighty. Elizabeth was delighted: her profit is estimated at 4,700 per cent.

Drake was the scion of a cousinhood of Devon seafaring families – Hawkins, Gilberts, Raleighs – that would form the spearhead of English expansion and of involvement in the slave trade. At its centre were Drake’s kinsmen, the Hawkinses, to whom he owed his rise. The Hawkinses had long traded English wool with the Italian cities, and in 1530 William Hawkins started trading ivory in Guinea. As a boy, his son Jack had met and served Philip of Spain (‘my old master’) when he landed to marry Queen Mary, but he embraced the opportunities of the rising tension with the paramount Catholic power. In 1562, he raised funds from London merchants to raid the African coast and trade slaves, setting off with his twenty-year-old cousin Drake to attack Portuguese traders, taking ‘into his possession, partly by the sword and partly other means, to the number of three hundred Negroes’. He then sailed to Hispaniola, where in exchange for the slaves ‘he received such quantities of hides, gingers, sugars, pearls’ that he filled five ships. He sold 500 slaves on his second voyage; on his third he was contacted by two African kings asking for his help against their rival, for which his payment was to take ‘as many Negroes as by warres might be obtained’.

Blunt, gritty and dour with acute porcine eyes, Hawkins was the pioneer of the English slave trade that was to become a financial juggernaut of profit and cruelty, though at this point the trade was still dominated by the Portuguese. In the first half of the century, 120,000 slaves were traded across the Atlantic; in the second half, the figure had doubled to 210,000. The gold from Colombia and the silver from Peru were even more valuable: two fifty-galleon treasure fleets sailed back and forth between Europe and the Caribbean, while another sailed across the Pacific to China. By 1590, Philip’s fleets delivered eleven million pesos a year. Elizabeth appointed Hawkins controller of the navy, for which he helped design light, fast ships that could circumnavigate the globe and outfight the majestic Spanish galleons, but he also led more raids on Africa and America.

Philip was infuriated by the English ‘pirates’. Yet the Spanish bought their slaves until in 1568, at San Juan (Mexico), they routed a Hawkins flotilla: the Devonian cousins barely escaped with their lives. But Drake had identified the weakest link in the sea transfer of silver from Peru, by land across Panama then by sea to Cadiz, and found allies to assist his heists.

In 1572, he negotiated with King Bayano of the Maroons in Panama. The slaves on Spanish plantations in Jamaica and Panama regularly rebelled and soon founded their own rebel Maroon communities ruled by elected kings, who were often kidnapped African royalty. In the gold mines of Venezuela, a slave from the Bay of Biafra named Miguel killed his cruel foreman and escaped, founding a community that he structured like the Spanish monarchy, with himself as king, his wife Guiomar as queen, crowned by their own bishop, before King Miguel was killed and his queen re-enslaved. Now, raiding Panama, Drake encountered King Bayano. A Panama Maroon named Diego negotiated an alliance and became Drake’s companion on future voyages. In March 1573, Drake succeeded in capturing an entire convoy of Spanish silver.

Elizabeth and her retainers invested in his transcontinental anti-Habsburg raids. ‘We’d gladly be revenged on the king of Spain,’ Elizabeth told Drake, ‘for divers injuries that we’ve received.’ In December 1577, five ships set off from Plymouth. Drake, accompanied by Diego and possibly other ex-slaves, argued with his co-captain during the journey: Drake accused the captain of witchcraft and betrayal and had him beheaded. Sailing into the Pacific, losing his other ships, he captured Spanish treasure ships, sailed up the Californian coast and across the Pacific to the Moluccas (where Diego died of wounds), before limping back to Plymouth in his Golden Hind to deliver such bounty that the queen’s half-share, £160,000, was greater than her annual revenues.

Drake was knighted, but his ascendancy as naval adventurer was challenged by another tough son of the west country. Walter Raleigh was also a member of the Plymouth cousinhood, but younger, smoother and romantically literary, an irresistible combination of killer, lover and poet.

His half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, nephew of Drake through his wife, had fought with the Dutch Sea Beggars and then helped organize a ferocious reconquest of Ireland which had never been fully subjugated by England. The Plantation, a cleansing operation in which Catholic Anglo-Norman-Irish earls who had traditionally run the island were replaced by Protestant, English lords and settlers, was led by the same west country men who were driving the war against Spain. Gilbert, joined by Raleigh and Drake, treated Ireland like a conquistador, decorating his camp with rows of Irish heads. It was almost a rehearsal for later conquests: when they captured Spanish troops, sent by Philip to aid the Catholic Irish, Raleigh personally helped behead over 200 of them. The cousins were granted 50,000 acres in Ireland. When Drake was there he joined the slaughter of 600 retainers of the Irish chieftain Sorley Boy MacDonnell.

Gilbert and Raleigh were friendly with Elizabeth’s magus and astrologer, John Dee, who was so influential that he had cast the stars to choose her coronation date. In 1577, Dee wrote his Perfect Arte of Navigation proposing what he called a British empire in north America, inspiring Gilbert in 1582 to claim Newfoundland (Canada) as the first English colony. When Gilbert died on the way home, Elizabeth authorized Raleigh to colonize ‘remote, heathen and barbarous lands … not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian People’ in return for a fifth of all gold discovered there. In 1587 Raleigh sponsored an English colony, Roanoke (North Carolina), but his settlers vanished, dying as a result of starvation, epidemic or attacks by Native Americans. Yet Raleigh’s abortive colony had, as Dee predicted, founded a new enterprise: the empire.^*

Raleigh himself was appointed captain of Elizabeth’s bodyguard just as Philip ordered her assassination. His threats were not to be taken lightly. He had offered a bounty for anyone who killed his other Protestant enemy, William of Orange.^* Philip hoped to enthrone Mary, the Scottish queen, a calamitous bungler of impulsive stupidity and unwise passion. In 1567, after the death of her French husband François II, she returned to rule an increasingly Protestant Scotland inspired by the firebrand John Knox who, authoring The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, openly attacked Mary in person until she exiled him. Her second marriage to a dashing Catholic cousin, the eighteen-year-old Henry Stuart, earl of Darnley, six foot tall and known as the Long Lad, successfully delivered a son, James, but provoked Protestant rebellion. Long Lad murdered her Italian confidant, at which Mary most likely acquiesced in his own assassination, organized by a ruffian earl who then kidnapped and married her. Their homicidal alliance sparked such outrage that the Protestants enthroned the baby James and Mary fled to England, where Elizabeth granted her asylum, which she repaid by plotting with Philip. ‘Alas the poor fool will never cease until she loses her head,’ commented Charles IX of France. ‘They’ll put her to death. It’s her own fault and folly.’

Now in February 1587, when Mary’s plots were exposed, Elizabeth had her beheaded, provoking Philip to invade England on a scale only a world empire could muster.

TWO ARMADAS: PHILIP AND HIDEYOSHI

Philip’s strategy was correct: it was impossible to defend every port of his world empire; only a focused offensive against the base of his enemy could succeed. This was not the deluded folly of a Catholic fanatic. Plenty of seaborne invasions of England – from Forkbeard to Henry Tudor – had succeeded but God is in the detail: a simple plan and clement weather were essential.

Yet Philip knew better than the experts: his ‘masterplan’ envisaged a fleet sailing from Cadiz, fighting off English attacks, rendezvousing off Flanders with an army under his nephew Parma that had to board the fleet and then invade England – a welter of precise timings afloat on a tide of unpredictable contingencies. While shipyards built his fleet to carry 55,000 infantry and 1,600 cavalry, Philip, now sixty, chose as the Armada’s commander a grandee, Alonso de Guzmán, duke of Medina Sidonia, who had neither combat experience nor imposing personality. As Drake raided Cadiz, destroying many ships, and Philip became sick with stress, both Medina Sidonia and Parma criticized the plan. ‘I’ve dedicated this enterprise to God,’ Philip told Medina Sidonia. ‘Pull yourself together and do your part.’

In July 1588, the duke sailed with 130 ships manned by 8,000 sailors and carrying 18,000 soldiers as Philip prayed in the Escorial chapel. Surviving English attacks in the Channel commanded by vice-admirals Drake and Hawkins, hardly the victories portrayed in English histories, the duke and his intact fleet waited off Calais for Parma’s army of 30,000. When these troops tardily discovered that the fleet had arrived, they marched towards their ships. But the English sent in fireships that drove the Armada out into a storm, scattering it. Some ships were wrecked, others embarked on a 3,000-mile voyage around Scotland and Ireland. Fifteen thousand sailors perished.

At the same time, across the world, another megalomaniacal visionary, this time a self-made peasant’s son, Hideyoshi, the Japanese imperial regent, was launching his own fleet for an invasion that Philip had himself considered: China.

In May 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered 158,800 men on 700 troopships accompanied by 300 warships to land in Korea and invade China, the culmination of an extraordinary career. He planned to go on and conquer India. Japan had been nominally ruled for over a millennium by an emperor or tenno of the divine Sun family, but real power had been wielded by a regent, most gloriously under Fujiwara Michinaga, as described by Lady Murasaki. But recently the regents had lost power to regional daimyo, somewhat akin to feudal lords.

During the 1560s, the daimyo Oda Nobunaga, head of a powerful clan, started to impose himself on the other warlords, spurred by the slogan ‘Rule the Realm by Force’. Oda was so eccentric he was known as the Idiot until he succeeded his father and started winning battles. He celebrated victory at a feast where platters held the lacquered, gilded heads of his enemies.

At the start of this rise, he had recruited a poor boy, Hideyoshi, who began as his sandal-bearer and rose to become his general. In 1581, Oda reviewed his troops in Kyoto with the emperor, but when he was assassinated his avenger and successor was the indefatigable, flamboyant and manic Hideyoshi, who went on to complete the unification of Japan.

In this he was aided by a remarkable rival and ally, Tokugawa Ieyasu, a daimyo who shared his acumen but not his impatience. Once Ieyasu backed someone, he never betrayed them but he regarded patience, not strength, as the essential quality for success. Early in his life, he had been a hostage and almost lost his family’s power, but he rarely lost a battle and showed his mettle when his wife and son were denounced for disloyalty: he had his wife Lady Tsukiyama beheaded and forced his eldest son to commit suicide by seppuku, slicing open the belly. He was already devoted to a twice-married girl whom he chose for her looks and political wisdom: Lady Saigo¯. A contributor to his rise, she died young at thirty-seven, leaving two healthy sons who became his heirs.

Hideyoshi, appointed regent, now regarded himself as the Sun Child, his mother having been impregnated by a ray of the sun, the World Emperor, pivoting towards China. The Ming emperors received nominal tribute from Japan and recognized the regents as kings of Japan. But now the Sun Child called Japan ‘Land of the Gods’: ‘To take by force this virgin of a country Ming will be as easy as for a mountain to crush an egg!’ The plan was to ‘slash his way’ through Korea, but its king refused to allow Japanese passage. While Ieyasu cleverly kept his troops at home, Hideyoshi dispatched his armada, which enjoyed instant success. Three weeks after the first landing, the Japanese defeated the Korean army, took the capital Seoul and invaded Manchuria. But the Japanese soon faced a Korean insurgency. All Korean officials captured were executed along with their wives and children. So many noses and ears were salted, packed in crates and sent back to Hideyoshi that he built the Mimizuka – Mound of Ears. One detachment recorded 18,350 noses and was rewarded accordingly. Another 60,000 Koreans were enslaved by Japanese merchants: ‘Having tied these people together with ropes around the neck, they drive them along. The sight of the fiends and man-devouring demons who torment sinners in hell must be like this.’ Then the invasion went wrong.

In February 1593, the Celestial Army of the Ming, 400,000 strong, burst into Korea, routing Hideyoshi’s army and slaughtering more Koreans. Hideyoshi opened negotiations, demanding Korean territory. Instead Beijing offered the traditional recognition of Hideyoshi as its vassal king. Hideyoshi sent another army of 100,000 while he messily tried to manage his own family: he had dreamed of founding his own dynasty, appointing his arrogant nephew Hidetsugu as regent while he took the title of taiko, retired regent. The arrangement was already strained when Hideyoshi’s concubine Lady Chacha gave birth to another son, Hideyori, whom he named as his successor. Hideyoshi then decided to exterminate his nephew and his entire family. Hidetsugu was made to commit suicide and his thirty-nine concubines and children were all beheaded. Meanwhile the daimyos led by Ieyasu swore allegiance to the baby, signed in blood.

Hideyoshi was weakened by his Korean quagmire, which had killed nearly a million people, 750,000 Koreans and 100,000 Japanese, but it also fractured the Ming of China, opening the gates for a ‘barbarian’, Nurhaci, khan of the northern horsemen the Jurchens,^* who offered to help the Chinese. Within twenty years, Nurhaci united the Jurchen and Mongol tribes. It was just the start: his Manchu dynasty would destroy the Ming and rule China until the twentieth century.

In 1597, the ailing Hideyoshi turned on Japanese Christians, provoked by a Spanish captain who had revealed how Spain used priests as the vanguard of its colonial conquests. Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish Franciscans had converted 300,000 Japanese and secured Nagasaki as a base. Hideyoshi had copied Portuguese designs for his ships and musketry, but now he declared, ‘My states are filled with traitors … serpents I cherished in my bosom.’ In Nagasaki, he crucified twenty-six Catholics.

When this news reached Madrid, Philip was horrified. He had already faced a much greater fiasco in his English war. The failure of the Armada ‘hurts so much’, he wrote. ‘And if God doesn’t send us a miracle (which is what I hope from Him) I hope to die and go to Him.’ But he did not, micromanaging his empire from his relic-infested apartments in the vast Escorial as his Protestant enemies, English and Dutch, were shaped and energized by his enmity and enriched by his treasure. As Philip mustered his second armada, he anxiously watched the libertine antics of his nephew Emperor Rudolf who was shocking Europe.

THE MAD EMPEROR OF PRAGUE

The corridors of Prague Castle were stalked by Rudolf’s bizarre cast of necromancers, magi, scientists, artists and rabbis, along with a gold-nosed Danish astrologer, a swinging English hierophant, an earless Irish devil-worshipper, an Italian mistress, a converted Jewish lover, a psychotic son named Julius Caesar – and uncaged pet lions.

Rudolf was the strangest Habsburg, turning Prague into a laboratory for original thinkers and new ideas while fighting the Ottomans and attempting to manage the religious wars.

Long-jawed, bulbous-eyed and fair-haired, Rudolf was a late starter, barely speaking for several years. While his father Maximilian II was sympathetic to Protestants, his mother, Philip’s sister, was a terrifying fanatic who, on his accession, tried to bully the shy, fragile young emperor into marrying Philip’s daughter. He wanted to get out of it. ‘You fear losing your states and peoples?’ sneered the mother. ‘What figure will you make before God and the world if you repay his kindness with an insult and put your mother in an intolerable situation?’

Refusing to conform, ambiguous about his Catholicism, avoiding any marriage, Rudolf left his mother in the dreary Hofburg Palace in Vienna to create his own secret world at Prague Castle. The city was cosmopolitan and Protestant with a rich community of 10,000 Jews and many artists and astrologers already patronized by his father. Cancelling restrictions on Jews, Rudolf was determined to learn all the secrets of the cosmos. He curated a chamber of curiosities, collecting two-headed babies and unicorn horns. In his laboratories, he investigated the obsessions of the age: alchemy, a widely believed ‘science’ aiming to transmute base metals into gold; and Hermetic occultism, the belief that spirits and mathematical formulae allowed man to access divine power. He dabbled in Kabbalism with Rabbi Loew who was said to be able to create a Golem – mystic monster – from mud. In 1583, he hired the white-bearded English magus John Dee, the imperialist visionary, who arrived with a sinister sidekick, Edward Kelley, an Irish charlatan whose ears had been clipped for forging coins.

In 1588, Rudolf recruited a freethinking Neapolitan, a former priest called Giordano Bruno, who questioned Catholic dogma and expanded on Copernicus, arguing that there were ‘innumerable celestial bodies’, that the stars were other suns, that the universe was infinite and that souls might migrate to other bodies after death. Bruno was excommunicated by Protestants and Catholics but rewarded by Rudolf.^* In 1599, Rudolf attracted a Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a duel with a cousin over a mathematical debate and sported a gold prosthetic. He amassed data on the stars in the Rudolfine Tables, labelling new stars as novas. While he half accepted Copernicus’ heliocentricity, he argued that the earth orbited the moon. His assistant, Johannes Kepler, a Lutheran mathematics teacher, disagreed cordially.

Rudolf, so impressed by his uncle Philip’s Titians at the Escorial, was also an avid collector, buying his own Titians and backing his father’s court painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted faces using natural objects: in his Seasons, Rudolf, appearing as the Roman god of abundance Vertumnus, is constructed out of fruit.

But Rudolph’s world was darkening: the lions ate his courtiers, and his account books record his compensation payments for their maulings. He even singed his beard in conducting his explosive experiments. ‘Imperial girls’ and young men were procured. Falling in love with his artist Strado’s daughter Katarina, he had five children including Don Julius Caesar of Austria, a diabolic freak who would soon do terrible things. The magi fell out; after the two had experimented with wife-swapping, Dee fled for his life, while earless Kelley, arrested for fraud and devil worship, poisoned himself.

Though he was no soldier, living for art and sex, Rudolf was the defender of Christendom. A young padishah, Mehmed III, grandson of Blond Selim,^* was keen to lead his army, defeating the Habsburgs at Keresztes, forcing Emperor Rudolf to strike back. As he fought a long war that stretched his resources and sanity, Rudolf struggled to balance Catholics and Protestants.

His ailing uncle Philip, criticizing Rudolf from the Escorial, made a decision that would affect millions. In 1595, keen to maintain supplies of the enslaved from Africa, he started to award licences – asiento de negros (agreement of black people) – to Portuguese and Genoese traders to deliver 3,000–5,000 Africans each. As he died of cancer, the only balm for his agony was his daughter placing relics against his body. Yet even now he was directing the war against the Dutch and English. Elizabeth intensified her counter-attacks. But the Spanish repelled Drake at Coruña, where he lost 10,000 men and twenty ships, then in 1595 they routed him and Hawkins at San Juan (Puerto Rico). The two Devonians died of dysentery and both were buried at sea, Drake in full armour.

The next year Elizabeth hit back, sending a small fleet under the erratic leadership of two favourites, an overpromoted young popinjay, the earl of Essex, and Raleigh, to seize Cadiz. In June 1596, they sacked the city. But Philip was not finished with God’s work. In October, while Essex was away raiding, the Prudent King sent his second armada – 130 ships and 20,000 tercios – to take England. As Elizabeth and her paladins panicked, a storm scattered the fleet. But, dying as he was, Philip was still not finished: in 1597, he sent the third armada – 140 ships and 10,000 men. Elizabeth was furious that Essex had not returned, but again Philip’s God did not deliver. Two galleons exploded and a storm intervened, although one ship landed 700 tercios in Cornwall. Finding they were alone and surrounded by English militia, they re-embarked two days later and sailed away. Elizabeth – now old, bald, toothless and caked in white lead and vinegar make-up – had survived. But the greater threat was of her own creation: Essex.

On 13 September 1598, Philip died, succeeded by his only surviving son, Philip III, who continued his works, sending a fourth invasion of Britain to land in Ireland and expelling all the Muslims in Spain. Back in Prague, his cousin Rudolf, confronted by madness and treason among his own family, was convinced that the Church must strike back against the Protestants, using all the weapons at its disposal – war, politics and art. As Protestants dominated the Habsburg lands, Rudolf persecuted them in Hungary and Austria but tolerated them in Prague, inconsistent in all matters. Yet though the popes had led a Catholic counter-attack, it still looked as if the Protestants were winning. In alliance with the pope, Rudolf’s brothers, led by Matthias, believing Rudolf was a threat to monarchy and Church, started to encourage opposition and enforce conversion to Catholicism. Rudolf was stuck between the two sides. In 1605, the Hungarians and Transylvanians rebelled; Austrian Protestants recoiled from aggressive Catholic persecution. The strife was watched closely in London by a monarch who shared Rudolf’s ambivalence. They were not only the ones who feared an imminent religious conflict was about to embroil Europe.

On St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1606, in a London where a wave of plague was killing many, leading to a lockdown of theatres and alehouses, and a conspiracy of Catholic terrorism had shaken the kingdom, James I, veteran king of Scotland, new king of England, was joined in the Grand Chamber of Whitehall by 300 of his courtiers to watch a new play by an actor-writer named William Shakespeare.

* Andreas Vesalius practised what to do with Henri by sticking shards into the heads of recently executed criminals, their bodies often snatched still warm from the gallows. In this era, surgery was limited by anatomical knowledge, the inability to stop bleeding, the absence of anaesthetic and antiseptics. Only two internal operations were possible: trepanning the skull and ‘cutting for the stone’. In the latter procedure, known as a lithotomy, a patient was trussed and held down by strong men without anaesthetic while the surgeon inserted a tube through the penis to hold the bladder stones in place, then cut the perineum and used a scoop extractor to drag out the stones; the wound was not sewn up but left to heal itself. Many patients died. Vesalius experimented with both procedures.

He was born into a dynasty of Flemish physicians: his grandfather was Emperor Maximilian’s doctor, his father was Charles V’s apothecary and valet de chambre, while the son became his doctor and the greatest of the pioneering anatomists: dissecting humans and macaques, he discovered some of the essentials of circulation and the skeleton, disproving many of the claims of Galen believed for over a millennium. Fighting off accusations of heresy by the Inquisition, he had become Philip II’s physician.

* Catherine was an innovator, said to have made forks and cutlery fashionable; until this time, even kings ate with their fingers, cutting up meat with a knife and eating with a spoon. Ordinary folk travelled with wooden spoons; grandees used silver. Catherine was also said to have introduced underwear, a fashion that became a French speciality – and she smoked American tobacco that was known as la herbe de reine.

* Catherine started to negotiate the marriage of her sons, Charles, Henri or Hercule-François, to Elizabeth of England. The rival queens were tough politicians who approached family differently. Elizabeth, a Protestant queen regnant, treated as illegitimate, possibly molested by her guardian, harassed by her half-sister, regarded family – and marriage – as perilous. A Catholic mother and wife, Catherine, far from her Italian roots, based everything on her sons, whose marriage to Elizabeth could avoid civil war in France, balance Spain and win England: Catherine’s son François had been married to Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant to the English throne. Now Catherine played the aspiring mother, Elizabeth the prospective daughter. The candidate was first Charles, who was seventeen years younger than Elizabeth; then Henri, eighteen years younger, who disdained Elizabeth as ‘putain publique’; then, much later, in 1559, when the machinations also involved the leadership of a new Dutch state, Elizabeth, now forty-six, hosted and flirted with Hercule-François, duc d’Alençon, twenty-four, and at least pretended to be engaged.

* On the way, Catherine met Nostradamus, Michel de Nostredame, astrologer, necromancer and physician, born of a family of Jewish converts, paying him 200 écus for his horoscopes of her sons. But he noticed instead one of her pages, Henri of Navarre. The hierophant ‘read’ the moles on his torso. He was sixth in line to the throne, unlikely to be relevant. Yet Nostradamus predicted that he would be king.

* The name Sea Beggars originated when a Dutch delegation called on Margarita. ‘Fear not, madam,’ said an adviser, ‘they’re only beggars.’ The Beggars adopted the beggar’s pouch as a rebel symbol. Within four years, there were eighty-five privateers in action, precursors of the armed trading corporations.

* But his moniker – Terrible – only became current in the seventeenth century, when it meant ‘awesome’ rather than the modern meaning of ‘atrocious’, and his atrocities were not so different in cruelty from those of Catherine de Medici or Henry VIII or Cesare Borgia. In many ways, he was a man of his time.

* This colossal state of Poland–Lithuania – forgotten because it has no modern equivalent – became a Serene Republic under the presidency of a king elected by the Sejm of the nobility. The nobility formed around 15 per cent of the population, so there was an electorate of over 500,000, larger than anything in England or France until the 1830s. It most resembled the oligarchy of Venice, dominated by magnates, but religious tolerance, even for Jews and other minorities, was guaranteed. This Złota Wolnos´ć – Golden Liberty – lasted for the next two centuries.

* Amazingly the St Bartholemew’s Massacre did not end Catherine’s marriage negotiations with Elizabeth who in 1579, now over forty, entertained the youngest Valois, the duc d’Alençon whom she flirtatiously called ‘my frog’. But Alençon died soon after this futile trip.

* Henri IV the Great settled the religious wars by granting toleration to the Protestants, laying the foundations of modern France. He divorced Margot and married Marie de’ Medici, the plump, plain but masterful and tumultuous daughter of the grand duke of Tuscany, a marriage that paid off his debts. Henri’s mistress called her ‘the fat banker’. Henri and Marie de’ Medici fathered the future Louis XIII and Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England. As for Margot, irrepressible and sensual, she took ever-younger lovers into her fifties, dying in 1615.

* Ivan was succeeded by his son, Fyodor, known as the Bell-ringer for his simple piety. The Bell-ringer died without children, the throne seized by the Terrible’s last favourite, Boris Godunov, who was married to his sister. Boris was accused of the murder of Dmitri, last son of Ivan the Terrible. Once in power, he promoted the colonization of Siberia and contributed to the tightening of controls over Russian peasants. But Boris failed to win the glory or enjoy the longevity necessary to found a dynasty, his death unleashing a decade of war and invasion by Poles, Swedes and Tatars, exacerbated by three impostors, the False Dmitris – who claimed to be the Terrible’s murdered son – that almost destroyed Muscovy. The Poles captured Moscow, a trauma that engendered a fear of a resurgent Poland that lasts to this day. Out of this mire, a sickly teenager, stammering and lame, Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of the Terrible’s first beloved wife, Anastasia, and first cousin of Tsar Fyodor, reluctantly emerged as the tsar of a new Romanov dynasty. His survival looked unlikely, but his commanders drove the invaders back. But the wars had impoverished the peasantry, who often escaped to the borderlands: Michael’s son Alexei enforced stability by allowing the nobility total control of their peasants, who became serfs, no longer allowed to leave their estates. Serfdom was similar but not the same as chattel slavery: serfs owed service to their masters and could be punished, raped and killed, but they also farmed for themselves, paid taxes and often served in the army. Later they could be sold like slaves and were often transferred with their estates.

* A fleet of five galleons and 500 soldiers, more than half of them Inca and Mexica, had crossed the Pacific, under Miguel López de Legazpi. The Philippines were the outer rim of the Indic world, Polynesian peoples ruled by Hindu rajas as well as Islamic amirs under the loose rule of Brunei, whose sultan Bolkiah had conquered an empire in the 1490s that was now ended by the Spanish. In 1570, Legazpi, now capitán-general, defeated Ache, raja of the Maynila kingdom on Luzon, and built his capital Manila, seat of the Spanish rulers until 1898. Philip’s treasure fleets now sailed across the Pacific to China, usually manned by Spanish officers and often Mexica or Amerindian troops.

* The most pre-eminent was Sir Thomas ‘Lusty’ Stuckley, sixty years old, son of a Devon knight, who commanded the Portuguese centre. Stuckley had fought all over Europe: he served Mary I but as a recusant Catholic he defied Elizabeth, about whom he boasted he ‘didn’t give a fart’ and whom he impertinently told he would found his own kingdom before escaping to serve Philip and Don Juan of Austria in plots to invade England and Ireland. The Mediterranean was a small world: Stuckley had fought for Don Juan at Lepanto while the Moroccan sultanic brothers Abd al-Malik and Ahmed had fought for the Ottomans at the same battle.

* In Marrakesh, he built a fantastical palace, al-Badi – the Marvellous – embellished with marble columns from Italy; some of it still stands. The labourers were white slaves, Portuguese prisoners, treated abysmally.

* The French had been ahead of the English but no more fortunate: in 1534, François I had dispatched his own conquistador Jacques Cartier to north America where he founded various settlements in Quebec, the start of New France. But the settlements were wiped out by disease and Native American attacks.

* In 1584, William was the first national leader to be assassinated using a handgun, but his killing changed nothing: his son Maurice replaced him as stadtholder. His assassin did not collect the prize, being captured and subjected to one of the most gruesome executions: the right hand that had pulled the trigger was burned off, his flesh cut and torn from his bones in six places; he was then burned with bacon fat, dismembered then disembowelled alive, before his heart was cut out of his chest and tossed in his face before his head was cut off. But Philip did ennoble his family and give them estates.

* Born in 1559, Nurhaci started as a soldier in the armies of the Ming, learning Chinese by reading The Water Margin, but by the age of twenty-one both his father and grandfather had been killed by a rival chieftain. His life story has many parallels with that of Genghis. Asserting his supremacy by killing his elder brother and nephews, he organized the Jurchens into an elite corps, divided into Banners, then launched an attack on Ming China, conquering a northern region. He changed the name of the Jurchens to Manchu and called his family the Aisin (Golden) Gioro. In 1626, now in his sixties, he discovered his crown prince in a relationship with his young wife. He imprisoned and murdered the son, with whom he buried his unfaithful wife. On his death, his younger son declared himself emperor of the new Qing dynasty.

* Such views were not new: Copernicus had presented his heliocentricity to Clement VII but what was regarded as fascinating eccentricity in 1533 was dangerous during the Catholic revival of 1600. Bruno foolishly returned to Venice whence he was extradited to Rome, where Pope Clement VIII supervised his trial, accused of contradicting Catholic dogma. He refused to renounce the plurality of worlds. Sentenced to death in 1600, he supposedly replied, ‘Maybe you give this sentence with more fear than I receive it.’ With his tongue ‘imprisoned for his evil words’, he was hung upside down naked and burned alive.

* On his accession, Mehmed ordered the strangling of nineteen of his young brothers – they kissed his hand, were circumcised and then snuffed out with one saying pluckily, ‘Let me eat my chestnuts and strangle me afterwards.’ Crowds wept as they watched the tiny coffins wend their way to Hagia Sophia, where their miniature tombs remain poignant. Mehmed was directed by his Bosnian-born mother Safiye, who relied on her Italian-Jewish kira, Esperanza Malchi. Her Jewishness proved a lightning rod for discontent. In 1600, unpaid troops rioted, demanding her head. Mehmed and Safiye sacrificed her: Esperanza was led on a packhorse to the hippodrome where the mob ‘cut off the accursed one’s hand and cut out her vulva, nailing them to the doors of conceited ones who obtained their posts by bribing that woman’. Her ‘shameful part’ was then paraded through Constantinople. ‘If her execution was necessary, why like this?’ the valide sultan asked the sultan. ‘She could have been thrown into the sea. Such an execution of a woman so closely connected is damaging to imperial authority.’ From now on, Jews no longer held high office and were forced to wear caps and insignia to mark their inferiority.