The World

Afsharis and Manchus, Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs

HOGMOUTH LEOPOLD, GUNPOWDER SOBIESKI AND QUEEN CLEOPATRA: THE LAST GREAT CHARGE

On 14 July 1683, around 170,000 Ottoman troops, led by the grand vizier, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa, surrounded the city they called the Red Apple. After the murder of the great Kösem, her female nemesis Turhan, now valide sultan, ruled for her young son Mehmed IV, solving a crisis of confidence by appointing as vizier a septuagenarian of murderous vigour: Köprülü Mehmed Pasha. Born an Albanian Christian, enslaved and enrolled as a scullion, Köprülü killed anyone who resisted, writing to a childhood friend, ‘It’s true we were both raised in the harem and both protégés of Murad IV; nevertheless be informed if the accursed Cossacks pillage any of your villages and towns, I swear I will ignore your righteous character and cut you into pieces as a warning to the world.’ It worked. Köprülü and his son added Transylvania and Crete to the empire, while Mehmed was diverted by his obsession with hunting: ‘The father [Ibrahim] was mad for cunt; the son’s mad for the hunt.’

After Mustafa, Köprülü’s son-in-law, won a limited victory against the Poles, he convinced Mehmed to Hunter that the overstretched, interbred Habsburgs were ripe for conquest.

The jaw of Emperor Leopold was so elongated he was nicknamed Hogmouth. ‘God made his skull in the shape of a gourd or a water bottle,’ noticed the Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi, ‘eyes round as an owl’s; face long as that of mister fox, ears as large as a child’s slippers, nose as shrivelled as a grape, three fingers could fit inside each nostril from which black hairs like a bravo’s beard mix in confusion with his moustache; lips like a camel, and whenever he speaks, saliva pours from his camel lips.’ Hogmouth was married to his niece, Margarita, the blue-dressed, blonde infanta in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, daughter of Philip IV of Spain. He called her Gretl, she called him Uncle, and their marriage was happy, though unsurprisingly three of their four children died. Her fun-loving spirit inspired their baroque court. Hogmouth was a talented flautist and composer, and impresario of astonishing shows in which fireworks lit up the sky and carriages and horses seemed to fly through the air. Yet his empress also brought her Spanish antisemitism. Horrified to find Jews thriving within Vienna, she encouraged him to expel and plunder them.^*

Hogmouth had bigger problems. In the west, his cousin Louis had invaded the Habsburg Netherlands, and now in the east the Ottomans were coming. Hogmouth turned to the most gallant paladin of the east: the king of a Poland–Lithuania weakened by Cossack revolt and Muscovite expansion. Jan III Sobieski was a sophisticated Polish bravo, fluent in French, Turkish and Tatar, who had toured the west, married a French aristocrat Marysien´ka, (with whom he fathered twelve children) and fought with and against the Turks, Tatars and Swedes, personifying the Serene Republic at its best. His daily letters to Marysien´ka were filled with gossip and politics, but suffused with their love: he called her Cleopatra; she called him Gunpowder. Realizing that Poland would be next if Vienna fell, Sobieski, now fifty-four and fat, agreed to help Hogmouth, who abandoned the city along with 60,000 Viennese. He left a veteran, Count Ernst von Starhemberg, to hold the capital with just 15,000 men. But he had 370 cannon, while the overconfident Mustafa, accompanied by 1,500 concubines supervised by 700 black eunuchs, and with his own private zoo, had neglected his artillery, fielding just 130 cannon. The fighting was desperate, with mining and countermining of the walls. When the vizier started his bombardment, it looked as if Vienna would fall, but Sobieski took command of a papal Holy Alliance. Leading 70,000 men, starring his Ukrainian Cossacks of the Dnieper and Polish winged Hussars – who sported ostrich feathers on the back of their armour – Sobieski galloped to the rescue.

Mustafa had not covered his back, instead depending on the 40,000 horsemen of the Crimean khan who were more interested in plundering Austria. Vienna was close to catastrophe when on 9/11 1683^* Sobieski appeared behind Mustafa.

‘This man is badly encamped,’ Sobieski noted, ‘he knows nothing of war.’ At 6 p.m. on 9/11, he and 18,000 Polish winged Hussars flew (almost) down Kahlenberg Mountain through Ottoman lines and into Mustafa’s encampment. Mustafa ordered his favourite ostrich to be beheaded as he fled with his harem. ‘God and our blessed Lord forever granted us victory,’ Gunpowder told Cleopatra. ‘The tents and wagons have fallen into my hands, et mille autres galanteries fort jolies et fort riches.’^*

The Polish king rode into Vienna, not waiting for Kaiser Hogmouth to return. ‘All the common people kissed my hands, my feet, my clothes,’ he boasted, sending Marysien´ka one of Mustafa’s golden stirrups. ‘Others only touched me, saying: “Ah, let us kiss so valiant a hand!”’ Hogmouth rushed back, resentful of Sobieski, and their meeting was frosty – there was nothing as cold as Habsburg ingratitude. Hogmouth presented himself as victor; the Ottoman cannon was melted down to cast new bells for St Stephen’s. Poland had saved Christendom, but Sobieski was its last great king.

In Belgrade, Mehmed sent the Tongueless to the vizier with their bowstrings. ‘Am I to die?’ Mustafa asked the Tongueless, then bowed his neck. ‘If God wishes.’ But the sultan was himself deposed and the Ottomans never regained the initiative. Hogmouth ordered his best general, Prince Eugen of Savoy, a young French officer who had fallen out with Louis XIV, to counter-attack, seizing Buda and Belgrade and so almost doubling Habsburg territory. But in the west Louis was close to dominating Europe, an achievement he celebrated by cancelling toleration of Protestants, granted by Henri IV, his grandfather.

Only William of Orange could stop ‘my mortal enemy’ Louis from seizing Universal Kingship, and to accomplish this he pulled off an extraordinary coup: on 5 November 1688, the thirty-six-year-old stadtholder of Holland and husband of Princess Mary of England invaded England.

THE CHANGELING, THE KING’S UNDERWEAR AND THE ORANGES

It was in one sense a bitter family feud, whirling around the two brothers, Charles II and James, and their first cousin William. Charles, who had fourteen illegitimate children and was nicknamed Old Rowley after a famous stallion, had no legitimate heir except his unpopular Catholic brother, James. The Protestant Parliament objected to his succession, thereby launching a deadly crisis – part of fifty years of religious and political strife.

It started in 1673, when James married a ‘tall and admirably shaped’ Italian princess, Maria of Modena, who was only a little older than his daughters Mary and Anne. ‘I’ve brought you a new play-fellow’ was how he tactlessly introduced his wife to his daughters. His ‘Popish bride’ and the possibility of a Catholic heir inspired a malicious conspiracy-theorist, Titus Oates, who had already falsely denounced a schoolmaster for abusing his pupils and now claimed that there was a Popish Plot by Maria’s doctor to kill the king (via poison or a golden bullet) and enthrone James. His allegations became the sparkwheel of hysteria and terror.^* Charles interrogated Oates – this ‘wicked man’ – but was forced to approve the execution of twenty-two innocents. Pepys, now an MP and recently promoted to Admiralty secretary, decried ‘such a state of distraction and fear’ but was denounced because he was a protégé of James. But he was cleared of being a Catholic agent and reappointed.

Parliament tried to exclude James and make Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, Monmouth, the heir. Charles, whose sex life always reflected his politics, tacked towards two Protestant actresses, Moll Davis and Nell Gwynne. He had Nell painted naked, keeping the painting behind another painting and unveiling it to ogling friends. Pepys did not think much of Nell’s acting – ‘a serious part, which she do most basely’ – but she had the gift of the gab, telling a crowd that stopped her carriage and accused her of being one of Charles’s Catholic paramours: ‘Good people, you’re mistaken; I’m the Protestant whore.’

Yet Charles believed exclusion would lead to the end of his vision of monarchy. ‘I’ll never yield and won’t let myself be intimidated,’ he said. ‘Men become ordinarily more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be bolder.’ In any witch-hunt, it takes time, but ‘good men will be with me’. He was right. Emerging near absolute, he ruled through young ministers – nicknamed the Chits – who included Godolphin, a favourite courtier. Charles and the Chits decided to dismantle Tangier, part of the queen’s dowry, which was under pressure from a new Moroccan sultan. Pepys was sent out to supervise. Soon afterwards, it was captured by Ismail ibn Sharif, the Warrior, Moroccan empire builder, whose Alawi family, descended from the Prophet, started in Sijilmassa before uniting the country and conquering southwards to Timbuktu and the Senegal River. Ismail, son of an enslaved African mother, had seized the throne in 1672. The greatest slave trader of his time, Ismail enslaved 220,000 Africans – some of them forming crack regiments – who were joined by thousands of Europeans, enslaved by his corsairs based in Salé. All of them were treated abysmally: he used the Africans to police the whites.^*

On his deathbed, Charles converted to Catholicism and did not forget his girlfriends, telling James not to ‘let poor Nelly starve’. James became king. ‘He would have been a very good king,’ said Sarah Churchill, a courtier of the queen, ‘if it hadn’t been for Popery.’ James signed a Declaration of Indulgence for non-Protestants, using it to liberate Catholics while he built up his army and arrested dissidents. Opposition seethed around the dashing but callow Monmouth, who fled to Holland. When Monmouth invaded England with just eighty-five followers, William warned James, whose general, John Churchill, easily crushed the invasion. James then beheaded his nephew; yet his heir remained his Protestant daughter Mary, married to William of Orange.

Charming the Dutch but unable to warm up William, the genial, pretty Mary suffered miscarriages and the death of a baby, the result of their consanguineous marriage. James tried to divide husband and wife by warning his daughter about William’s affair with her courtier Elizabeth Villiers. Mary ambushed William coming out of his mistress’s bedroom, but he promised to give her up – hardly a concession since the stadtholder preferred the companionship of a handsome officer, Hans Bentinck, who had nursed him when he was ill with smallpox.

Seven dissident English grandees approached William just as Queen Maria took the waters at Bath and fell pregnant. In June 1688, to Catholic jubilation and Protestant disbelief, the queen, attended by Hugh Chamberlen with his secret forceps,^* gave birth to a son, a Catholic heir. James had not allowed his daughter Anne or his Protestant courtiers to attend, sparking a birther conspiracy theory that a changeling had been smuggled into St James’s Palace. Mary turned decisively against her father to ‘save Church and State’, and the seven noblemen signed a coded letter to William inviting him to invade. William mustered his fleet.

James, foolish as ever, turned down Louis’s offer of military support. As Mary waited in The Hague, William sailed with 250 ships and 35,000 men, including ‘200 Blacks brought from the Plantations of the Netherlands in America’, and landed at Torbay, Devon.

William advanced slowly. Lord Churchill, James’s commander, defected (later rewarded by William with the earldom of Marlborough), followed by Princess Anne, who was intimate friends with Churchill’s wife Sarah. James, heartbroken that both his daughters had betrayed him, panicked, throwing the Great Seal into the sea so that his enemies could not call Parliament. But he was captured by fishermen who roughly searched his underwear. William warned his uncle James that he could not guarantee the king’s safety. Pepys, navy secretary, arranged the ship that conveyed Queen Maria and her son to Europe.^* As William entered London, he let James escape to France where he set up a rival court, his followers known as Jacobites. While the mobile vulgus – Latin for fickle crowd, henceforth shortened to the mob – rioted and celebrated the Orange invasion by waving oranges, the dour Dutchman summoned Mary from Holland. Filled with ‘secret joy’ that was ‘soon checked with the consideration of my father’s misfortunes’, she agreed that William was in charge: ‘she would be no more but his wife; that she would do all that lay in her power to make him King for life’. When the assembled convention – not Parliament since only a sovereign could call one – challenged this, William threatened to return to Holland unless he was made king. The convention agreed. The royal couple’s heir, Mary’s sister Anne, had betrayed her father for the sake of Protestantism and regarded Mary as first in line, but then resented yielding the succession to William, whom she called ‘the Dutch Abortive’.

In return, William III approved a Bill of Rights that solved the lethal conundrum that had paralysed England during fifty years of state failure. It agreed a balance of power between a powerful Parliament, the noble oligarchs and the monarch, who kept control of the executive.^*

No one knew how this new arrangement would work. Kings remained the chief rulers of England for another century, able to appoint governments and wage war – and might have remained so if more of them had been masterful warlords like William.

The Dutchman delivered the stability, the rule of law and the creative energy needed to forge a world power. He oversaw the creation of the Bank of England and, realizing that the English coinage was dangerously debased, launched the Great Recoinage, which was managed by an English luminary, Isaac Newton. Now fifty-three, Newton had been given a sinecure wardenship of the Royal Mint, but its management was so incompetent that he agreed to run the vital recoinage himself as master, a highly lucrative position, earning a percentage of every coin produced.

One of the first members of Charles II’s Royal Society for scientists, he was a touchy loner, awkward friend and vindictive feuder, who never married and was probably asexual. His passionate friendship with a Swiss scientist Nicolas Fatio could have been a typical male affinity of the time – or his only love affair; its end sparked an emotional breakdown. He fell out badly with his friend John Locke, who ‘endeavoured to embroil me with women’. His new job was just his latest service to a new spirit of rational scientific inquiry. ‘I do not feign hypotheses,’ he wrote in his Principia Mathematica:^* knowledge must be based on the need for evidence, not on superstition – a conviction shared by a constellation of thinkers across Europe at this time who were increasingly in contact with each other – the start of an intellectual candescence that would illuminate the next century.

Leaving Cambridge, Newton moved to London to mastermind the modern currency and prosecute counterfeiters, a capital crime. He hunted down counterfeiters with all the relish and ingenuity of a detective and prosecuted twenty-eight coiners, many of them hanged, drawn and quartered – though there is no evidence that Newton penetrated the underworld in disguise. Now rich from the Mint, he increased his wealth by shrewd investments.

William commandeered England in his tireless campaign against the Sun King. James, backed by Louis, tried to have William assassinated, incited a Scottish revolt which was defeated at Dunkeld, sparking a massacre of Jacobite clans at Glencoe, then invaded Ireland. William routed his father-in-law at the Boyne and Aughrim, then fought Louis to a standstill – the start of England’s 127-year war to prevent French dominion in Europe. But both were focused on the imminent death of the Habsburg king of Spain, El Hechizado – Carlos the Hexed.^*

Everyone had been amazed that the ensorcelled Carlos, brother-in-law of Louis, was still alive. Son of the long-dead Planet King and his niece Mariana, he had been implacably visited by the curse of Habsburg intermarriage – born with a brain swelling, one kidney, one testicle and a jaw so deformed he could barely chew yet a throat so wide he could swallow chunks of meat. He was never fully literate, he limped and he suffered a multimorbidity of diseases, including measles, smallpox, rubella. Carlos had, writes Martyn Rady, ‘an intersexual state with ambiguous genitalia’: his urethra drained from the underside of an undeveloped penis, a detail on which peace in Europe was founded: could he father a child? If not, who would inherit his empire?

His mother had married him to a pretty French princess with whom he fell in love, but understandably their sex life, which must have caused them unbearable stress, failed. After years of cosy marriage, the confused girl mused that she ‘was really not a virgin any longer, but that as far as she could work things out, she believed she would never have children’, confiding to Louis’s ambassador that ‘despite too much vivacity’ on his part, ‘the coction, as the doctors call it, was not perfect’. Those doctors prescribed an unhelpful aphrodisiac: sleeping with the embalmed body of his father would help Carlos achieve an erection. When Carlos’s first wife died, he married a German princess who pilfered from his palaces and forced him to undergo exorcisms against witchcraft. His mother had El Hechizado borne on a chair to save his energy; he was sane enough to reject making her all-powerful regent, pious enough to sit through an auto-da-fé for fourteen hours, strong enough to hunt and clever enough to invite his court painter Giordano to view Velázquez’s Las Meninas. ‘What do you think of it?’ asked Carlos.

‘Sire,’ replied Giordano, ‘this is the theology of painting.’

As Carlos declined, he visited the pantheon at Escorial to gaze upon the bodies of his family. Meanwhile the Habsburgs of Austria and the Bourbons of France bid for the succession.

Four deathbeds – those universal setpieces of family life, those lethal transfers of power that could destroy an empire – now destabilized Europe and Asia. ‘In a twinkle, in a minute, in a breath,’ said the greatest monarch of his time, Alamgir, ‘the condition of the world changes.’

TITANIC DEATHBEDS: CARLOS, ALAMGIR, LOUIS, KANGXI

In late October 1700, in Madrid, Carlos suffered explosive dysentery with ‘250 motions in nineteen days’, enduring Spanish fly painted on his feet as a blistering agent, dead pigeons on his head and draughts of milk of pearls. At last, on 1 November, he murmured, ‘Now I am nothing,’ and left the monarchy to Louis’s grandson, Philippe.^*

Louis could not resist accepting, but his Spanish gambit, vigorously resisted by the Austrian Habsburgs and England, launched a fifteen-year war that would bring his dreams to the edge of catastrophe. Far to the east, the crabbed old emperor Alamgir continued his twenty-year war to destroy the Shivaji kingdom.

Like Louis’s, Alamgir’s conquests in his own continent were unprecedented: he ruled more of India than anyone else in Indian history except the British in later centuries – but pride and empire have no end. Neither of them could stop. When Alamgir’s vizier suggested they return to Delhi, World Seizer snarled, ‘I wonder how an omniscient hereditary servant like you could request this.’ All the while, the family of Shivaji still held out in Deccan, now led by Rajaram’s remarkable widow Taibai, just twenty-five years old, warrior queen daughter of Shivaji’s commander-in-chief. ‘So long as a breath of this mortal life remains, there’s no release from toil,’ said Alamgir. One of his weary officers complained, ‘Such was his longing for taking all the forts, he personally runs about, panting for any heap of stones.’ Yet his war was a gigantic enterprise: in 1695, his camp was thirty miles in circumference, with 60,000 cavalry, 100,000 infantry, 50,000 camels, 3,000 elephants and 250 bazaars ranged around his imperial red tent, where he held court with his sons and his Georgian dancer-paramour, Udaipuri.

Only the biggest economy in the world could fund war on such a scale: 24 per cent of global GDP was Indian and Alamgir’s annual revenue was ten times that of Louis. While Europeans had traditionally clothed themselves in wool or linen, now their access to Indian cotton launched such a ‘calico craze’ for Indian textiles – chintz, pyjamas, khaki, taffeta and bandanna entering the language – that by 1684 the EIC alone was importing 1.76 million pieces a year or 83 per cent of its trade. In Africa, slaves were now being bought with Indian cotton.

Alamgir treated the Europeans in India as lucrative and useful intermediaries, buying ships and cannon from the Portuguese, but there was no doubt who was in charge. In 1686, the EIC, alarmed by French growth in India, demanded more trading rights. In 1688, Alamgir conquered Golconda, focusing his attention on the English Fort St George, Madras (Chennai). The EIC and Alamgir were expanding into the new areas at the same time, but when the clash came, Alamgir won easily.

Alamgir demanded higher taxes; the English resisted, at which Alamgir attacked Bombay and Surat: the English submitted humiliatingly, prostrating themselves before the emperor and paying a huge indemnity to get back their factories. Then in September 1695 a slave-trading English pirate, Long Ben (aka Henry Every), pulled off a remarkable heist, attacking Alamgir’s annual twenty-five-ship flotilla to Mecca and capturing the gold-packed dhow the Ganj-i-Sawai (Excessive Treasure). The pirates tortured the Indian officers to make them hand over the gold and gang-raped the girls on board – many committed suicide – but Long Ben bagged the unprecedented swag of £600,000, supposedly the largest prize in history but certainly an incalculable sum, indeed so vast that it almost derailed the English presence in India.^* Demanding Long Ben’s head, Alamgir’s navy stormed Bombay and seized all EIC factories.

London sent out a veteran India merchant as the new president of Madras to negotiate. Thomas Pitt was the classic poacher turned gamekeeper. Thirty years earlier, this vicar’s son from Dorset had started trading as a non-EIC trader (an ‘interloper’), earning a fine and a fortune that enabled him to return home and buy a country estate and a seat in Parliament. Now hired by the EIC, Pitt was sent out to appease Alamgir, who was besieging Fort St George. Pitt folded and went on to negotiate a gigantic fine of 150,000 rupees before Bombay was restored and a new factory founded at Calcutta (Kolkata), while in Madras, he fortified the growing town. Taking advantage of the many Indian soldiers fighting in the Deccan, he started to hire Indian mercenaries, known as sepoys.

Pitt hated the English humiliation, complained that the ‘native governors have the knack of tramping upon us and extorting what they please’ – something they would never stop doing ‘until we have made them sensible of our power’. That was impossible while Alamgir ruled.

Pitt had depleted his first fortune, but now, about to retire, he acquired a 426-carat diamond, mined at Kollur and smuggled out by a slave who concealed it within a wound in his body. It was then stolen by a Englishman who murdered the slave and sold it to an Indian merchant. In 1701, for around £20,000, the merchant sold it to Pitt, who sent it home to England in the heel of his son Robert’s shoe and later sold it in Paris for the gargantuan sum of £135,000.^* England’s rise in India and elsewhere would be directed by the Pitts.

Now aged eighty-nine, Alamgir, wizened, morose and ailing, finally collapsed at Ahmadnagar – ‘my journey’s end’ – tended by his daughter Zinatunnisa. ‘I don’t know who I am and what I’ve been doing,’ he confessed to his son Azzam. ‘I entirely lacked statesmanship.’ In his will he advised his successors, ‘never trust your sons, nor treat them intimately …’ Signing off to Azzam – ‘goodbye, goodbye, goodbye’ – on 3 March 1707, he died as ‘a whirlwind arose so fierce that it blew down all the tents standing in the encampment. Many persons and animals were killed … Villages were destroyed.’ This time, the war between his sons, won by Muazzam (Bahadurshah), who killed Azzam, broke the empire. ‘After me,’ he had warned, ‘chaos!’

‘Après moi, le déluge,’ agreed his contemporary Louis XIV, who would similarly realize the futility of his intermediate war against England – and William of Orange.

In March 1702, William III was riding close to his home, Kensington Palace, when his horse tripped on a molehill and threw him. He died as Jacobites toasted ‘the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat’ – but the war against Louis went on and the new Queen Anne promoted John Churchill, earl of Marlborough, to captain-general and co-leader of a ministry with his dearest friend Sidney Godolphin, lord treasurer. Sarah Churchill tried to direct the insecure and ailing queen, tormented by twelve failed pregnancies. The two women were intimate friends, using the codenames Mrs Freeman (Sarah) and Mrs Morley (Anne), but there were two others in the partnership: Mr Freeman (Marlborough) and Mr Montgomery (Godolphin). ‘Every day,’ wrote Anne to Sarah, ‘makes me more and more sensible of the great blessing God Almighty has given me in three such friends as your dear self, Mr Freeman and Mr Montgomery.’

Small, dark, reticent and incorruptible, Godolphin, who had served in the treasury under Charles, James and William, became the first real prime minister, a magisterial administrator of Parliament and finance, whose protégé Robert Walpole praised his ‘good management, prudence and dexterity’.^* No minister before had ever had to raise such vast sums as Godolphin did to fund a European war, but he also negotiated a union between England and Scotland, persuading the Scottish parliamentarians to merge with the London Parliament^* and so becoming in 1707 the first lord treasurer of Great Britain. His fellow duumvir Marlborough was now fifty and untried, yet he proved the greatest of British generals. ‘I long to be with you,’ Marlborough wrote to Godolphin, whose letters were ‘one of the greatest pleasures I have’. While the general was away, Sarah closely advised Godolphin. The duumvirs arranged marriages between their children.

Sailing for Europe, Marlborough directed the coalition of the Dutch and the Habsburgs, but he also won the battles, his finest hour being a forced march 250 miles southwards in summer 1704 to save Vienna from a French army. He rendezvoused with the Habsburg commander, Prince Eugen of Savoy, and together they routed the French–Bavarian army at Blenheim. ‘Give my duty to the Queen,’ wrote Marlborough to Sarah, ‘and let her know her army has had a glorious victory.’ Eugen – angular, ugly, slovenly, peppered with snuff but brilliant – was no less remarkable^* and they formed a rare double act. ‘Prince Eugen and I never differ about our share of the laurels,’ said Marlborough. ‘I not only esteem but I really love the prince.’ Leading charges in battles, sometimes unhorsed as equerries were beheaded beside him, Marlborough won a spree of victories and as ambassador-general held the coalition together. In April 1707, he set off on an important mission, to visit the ascetic warrior king of Sweden, Charles XII, in Saxony.

The Muscovite tsar Peter I and his ally Augustus the Strong, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, had attacked Sweden, hoping to carve up its Baltic lands. But Charles stormed across the Baltic, defeated Peter and deposed Augustus, before occupying Poland. Still only twenty-five, he was debating whether to join France against the Habsburgs or attack Muscovy. Marlborough, keen to ensure that he attacked Peter,^* flattered Charles, who anyway saw Muscovy as the bigger threat. On 1 January 1708 the Swedish king invaded Muscovy, the first of three modern invaders to underestimate the span of Russia. Charles swerved south into Ukraine.

Peter, a twitching giant of six foot seven, was a soldier-reformer, obsessed with technical novelties in ships and cannon, determined to transform and rearm his kingdom. He was gifted with the three essentials that every politician requires to achieve anything: VAR – vision, acumen and resources – as well an invincible constitution and a taste for wild wassailing that involved lethal alcoholic consumption, dwarves jumping out of cakes and naked girls, and fistfights. Yet he had visited the Netherlands and London to procure military technology. After enforcing his power, massacring and personally torturing rivals, this terrifying and capable autocrat reformed his nobility, making them wear German clothes and shave their beards. He founded a new capital, St Petersburg, on captured Swedish territory, but also modernized his army, funded with peasant taxes, and created a Baltic navy. His conscription of peasants to serve for life in his army alongside the enforced service of nobles militarized society to create a huge standing army of 300,000. Its scale allowed the tsars to use its men as cannon fodder to compensate for Russian backwardness.

On 8 July 1709, at Poltava (Ukraine), Peter routed Charles, making Poland a Russian satellite and mopping up the Swedish lands of the southern Baltic.^* The Romanov tsar became Peter the Great, first imperator (emperor) of Russia (Rossiiya, a Hellenization of Rus), a new European power and Eurasian empire, forged with European technology, embellished with European art, manners and luxuries. But the very state itself was an empire inspired by an exceptional national and religious mission of rapacious expansion and ruled by an autocrat who personified the state without the restraint of representative assemblies, noble rights or civil institutions found in other European kingdoms.

Mission accomplished in the east, Marlborough faced a challenge at home. He had earned himself a dukedom, a principality of the Holy Roman Empire, a palace, Blenheim near Oxford, and a fortune, but, less steady than Godolphin, he was highly strung and mercurial, swinging between elated energy and cyclothymic collapses at times of crisis. ‘I really am so weary of the business of the world,’ he told Godolphin. ‘I’ve no pleasure but the expectation I have of being with you and Lady Marlborough.’

Yet Anne and Sarah’s relationship soured. Anne, overweight, blotchy and sickly, worshipped the beautiful Sarah, but her royal grandeur and emotional neediness were matched by Sarah’s termagant unkindness. ‘I am very sorry to find Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman can’t yet bring things quite right,’ wrote Mr Montgomery to Mr Freeman. ‘I’m sure they will at last.’ But they did not. The jealousy and suspicion of Marlborough’s opponents engendered the fear that the paladin could become a Cromwell: they used Anne’s Stuart pride and Sarah’s malice to promote a more affectionate royal friend, Abigail Masham, who, prompted by their rival Robert Harley, turned the queen against her three friends.

In 1708, Harley persuaded Anne to dismiss Godolphin, but Marlborough’s threat to resign forced his reinstatement, now backed by a young protégé, a coarse, ruddy-cheeked Norfolk MP, Robert Walpole, secretary at war. By now, Anne and Sarah were having altercations of blistering malice. Sensing Anne’s dislike, Marlborough requested the captain-generalship for life, alarming the Stuart monarch who feared a Cromwellian dictatorship. ‘I have reason to be convinced’, Marlborough told Sarah in one of their coded letters, that ‘42 [Anne] has been jealous of the power of 39 [himself]’.

Anne unsurprisingly had come to hate Sarah: ‘I don’t love complaining but it’s impossible to help saying nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been by her ever since my coming to the Crown,’ she told Marlborough. ‘I desire nothing but that she should leave off teasing and tormenting me.’ Few monarchs have ever written such a letter, but Sarah was now ‘saying many shocking things’ – even accusing Anne of lesbianism. Marlborough and Godolphin must have despaired, while Walpole called Sarah the ‘Damned Bitch’. Marlborough’s peace negotiations with Louis XIV collapsed and Anne finally dismissed Godolphin, his character now blackened as the insinuating Volpone (in Ben Jonson’s play), and appointed Harley, who went on to win a parliamentary majority. Marlborough was dismissed, and Godolphin died the following year. Harley, now earl of Oxford and prime minister, orchestrated the impeachment of Marlborough, who was devotedly defended by Walpole but nonetheless forced into exile. The queen, realizing she had been manipulated and regretting her treatment of the duumvirs, sacked Oxford just before she died in 1714.

The oligarchs of 1688 ensured a Protestant succession, ushering in the new king, George I, the fifty-four-year-old elector of Hanover,^* who, since many Tories favoured a Stuart restoration, sensibly promoted the Whigs and reappointed Marlborough as captain-general. Backed by Louis, James Stuart, James II’s heir, landed in Scotland, holding court in Edinburgh, but Marlborough’s last service was to coordinate the defeat of the rebellion.

Marlborough’s victories had marked the rise of Britain, increasingly a global force, as a European power for the first time since the loss of its French territories in 1453. The peace of Utrecht was a stroke of luck for the ageing Louis XIV, whose grandson Philippe remained king of Spain while the Habsburgs were compensated by Naples, Milan and Belgium; Britain only got Gibraltar – and the asiento de negros, the Spanish licence to supply slaves which was vested in the specially founded South Sea Company. Investors – from the king and his mistresses to Walpole and Newton – traded the shares, which went up and up.

The peace was some consolation to Louis, but ‘France had expanded too far and perhaps unjustly,’ wrote Louis’s wife, Maintenon. ‘Our court is still very sad. We talk only of wheat, oats, barley and straw. He’s very occupied with the relief of the people.’ In April 1711, smallpox killed Louis’s eldest son – and then his eldest son too, followed by his eldest son.^* Louis was heartbroken. ‘I’ve never,’ noted Maintenon, ‘seen such sorrow … at court.’

On 1 September 1715, after the longest reign in European history, seventy-two years, Louis, riddled with gangrene, his left leg completely blackened, managed his deathbed with faultless style. ‘My dear child,’ he told his five-year-old great-grandson, soon to be Louis XV, ‘you’re going to be the greatest king in the world,’ but ‘Don’t imitate me in my wars.’ Then he addressed his ministers: ‘Adieu, messieurs … I’m leaving but the state will always remain.’ Lastly he turned to Maintenon: ‘What will become of you, madame?’

‘I’m nothing,’ she replied. ‘Think only of God.’ The servants wept loudly.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Louis. ‘Did you think I was immortal?’ Reciting a prayer, he passed ‘like a candle going out’.

In China, the other titan of the age, Kangxi, faced his own agony of succession.

‘If I can die without there being an outbreak of trouble,’ he wrote in his late sixties, ‘my desires will be fulfilled.’ His son Yinreng, whose mother had died in 1674 giving birth to him, grew into a vicious paedophile who bought children for sexual abuse and tried to overthrow his father – he may have been insane. As his own decline encouraged conspiracy among his twenty-four sons, Kangxi ordered Yinreng’s perpetual imprisonment for ‘inhumanity and devilry’. The emperor started to show favour to his eleventh son, Yinzhen, who introduced him to his own son, the eleven-year-old Hongli, whom Kiangxi soon doted on. When the old emperor met the boy’s mother he called her a ‘lucky woman’ for bearing a child who would bring her ‘great honour’ – an unmissable hint.

Dying on 20 December 1722, he left the throne to Yinzhen, who became the Yongzheng Emperor. France was in recovery; Mughal India was dissolving into chaos; but Kiangxi left China as the greatest power on earth: his grandson Hongli became the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled into another age.

The resurgent Habsburgs on the other hand were haunted by an issue of gender. In Vienna, Karl VI, son of Hogmouth, had failed to take Spain but had been consoled by his succession as emperor-archduke. Yet his young daughter was his heir – and a predator stalked the empire.

COCK ROBIN, PRUSSIAN MONSTER, POLISH HERCULES

Karl had married a German princess, Elizabeth, blonde, delicate and spirited: he called her White Liezl. In 1716, Liezl gave birth to a daughter Maria Theresa, but to help her conceive a son doctors had prescribed a calorific diet lubricated with liquor that so bloated her she ultimately had to be conveyed in a mechanical chair.

Maria Theresa, blonde, blue-eyed, devout and intelligent, was educated by Jesuits, sang in family operas and enjoyed riding. At nineteen she married a genial prince, Franz Stefan, duke of Lorraine, whom she adored, giving birth to sixteen children in twenty years. She showed no special talents, but they were not looked for in her either. Only extreme jeopardy would reveal them. Karl frittered away his resources, just as a second-rank power, Prussia, was saving every pfennig and collecting giants.

Its Hohenzollern sovereign, Frederick William, whose father had negotiated an upgrade to king, was a half-demented martinet but also a frugal, shrewd visionary who turned Prussia into the Sparta of Europe. Inheriting the throne at twenty-five, he purged the kingdom of his father’s Frenchified frippery and instead focused on attracting industrious settlers to his territories, advancing trade and creating a disproportionately large army, featuring infantry that fired ‘like a walking battery whose speed in reloading tripled its firepower’ (in the words of his son) – and a regiment of ‘Potsdam giants’. He hired colossi from all over Europe, dispatching giant-nappers to capture them. ‘The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me,’ he said, ‘but tall soldiers – they are my weakness.’

He loved his queen Sophia Dorothea of Hanover but she loathed his violent abuse, ‘horrible avarice’ and oafish philistinism. He considered divorcing her, but he could not risk offending the family: her father had become George I of Britain.

London was in the grip of a speculative frenzy, ignited by shares of the slave-trading South Sea Company, which was structured to pay off government debt. Fortunes were made trading in and out of the shares. The elderly Isaac Newton made so much selling shares that he could not resist rebuying them. But few realized that the company was badly run. When it crashed, it wiped out many investors. Newton, who in old age lived with his niece (her husband had succeeded him at the Mint), was abashed to lose half his fortune – though he remained very rich. A furious backlash blamed corrupt politicians, Elephant and Castle, and the German king. George turned to Robert Walpole, Godolphin’s protégé, who first acted as ‘the Skreen’, protecting those at fault, then turned to solving the crisis. Known as Cock Robin, unflappable, cynical and earthy, jovially munching apples in the House of Commons, Walpole boasted he always opened his gamekeeper’s letters first, and described himself as ‘no saint, no spartan, no reformer’, but he had remained so loyal to Godolphin and Marlborough that he had been imprisoned by Harley. He had traded in South Sea stocks and had made losses (not the 1,000 per cent profit of legend), but he was compensated by massive profits in another slave-trading stock, Royal African. Now he turned the crash into a success by dividing the South Sea Company into two, a slave-trading company that profitably sold human beings for decades more and a bank that issued government bonds. Walpole converted decades of random debt into a single easily traded bond, creating the first modern bond market which gave Britain unique access to the capital that was crucial in making a world power.

Walpole mocked public virtue, which he called ‘schoolboy flights’, teasing youngsters, ‘Well, are you to be an old Roman, a patriot? You’ll soon come off of that and grow wiser.’ He was, recalled a friend, ‘good-natured, cheerful, social, inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals’ with ‘a coarse wit’ but ‘the ablest manager of a parliament I believe ever lived’. Accumulating a fortune and art collection for his palatial Houghton Hall in Norfolk, Walpole was married to Catherine, a merchant’s daughter, both of them sensual enthusiasts who when their marriage cooled took a bevy of lovers. After her death, Robin married his witty, glamorous mistress, Maria Skerritt, twenty-five years younger, but three months later she died in childbirth, leaving him bereft.

Robin was a master at managing his royal masters, first the sausagey George I then his son George II.^* ‘All men,’ he often said, ‘have their price.’ When a rival tried to cultivate George II’s mistress, Walpole countered by befriending his vivacious wife Queen Caroline; he earthily joked that his rival ‘took the wrong sow by the ear, I the right’. Gossips claimed that he had pimped his wife to George II (when prince of Wales) and slept with the queen. His twenty-year rule confirmed the supremacy of the House of Commons, and his Whig oligarchy – the ‘Robinocracy’ – ruled Britain for the next forty years.

The Hanoverians feuded with their sons – but this was nothing compared to family atrocities of Hohenzollerns and Romanovs.^* Frederick William and Sophia, George II’s sister, had fifteen children; she was devoted to the eldest, Frederick, whom she hoped to marry into the British dynasty. The king ruined the negotiations and then when she got pregnant unexpectedly tried to kill her for adultery. He bullied and beat Frederick, punishing him for small infractions such as wearing gloves or being thrown by a horse. Sophia supported the children. ‘Whatever my father ordered my brother to do,’ remembered Frederick, ‘my mother commanded him to do the very reverse.’

Just five foot three, the king terrorized his soldiers and courtiers, his furies aggravated by the agonies of porphyria – mania, gout, pus-filled sores, fevers and cramps. ‘I wish to suffer everything patiently,’ he said, taking up painting to ease his ‘torments’. The queen encouraged Frederick, now sixteen, to follow his artistic inclinations, practising the flute in between military drills, secretly amassing a French library. His monstrous father now suspected him of lacking ‘truly manly inclinations’.

In 1728, father and son set off to visit the ruler of Prussia’s traditional rival, Saxony. A strapping athlete, Augustus the Strong, who supposedly fathered 365 children, was also king of Poland and he was everything Frederick William loathed: depraved, extravagant, godless – he had become Catholic to clinch the Polish throne – and powerless. His ally Peter the Great had reduced Poland to a Russian client state. Augustus, a champion fox-tosser (once presiding over a gruesome festival at which 647 foxes, 533 hares and 34 badgers were tossed), promoted himself with pageants, operas and Meissen china (kidnapping its creator to develop the technology) to make Dresden the ‘most dazzling court in Europe’.

Augustus’ legion of mistresses was led by the talented, spirited Aurora von Königsmarck^* and his Turkish slave Fatima, but it was also said to include his own beautiful, hard-smoking, cross-dressing daughter Anna, Countess Orzelska, aged twenty, who immediately dazzled the visiting Frederick, still only sixteen. Frederick remembered her as ‘this little miracle of nature who possessed every possible charm, together with good taste and delicacy’, and according to his elder sister Wilhelmine he ‘promised everything to gain possession of this beauty, his first lover’.

Hoping to divert him from his daughter-mistress, Augustus shocked the Prussians by opening a curtain to reveal a naked opera singer in a niche. Frederick William hurried his son out of the room, but by then Frederick was in love with Orzelska and suffered depression when he got back to grim Berlin. Shocked by what he had seen on the visit, his father boasted, ‘I am pure as when I left home.’ But on their return king and prince were on collision course thanks to what the father called Frederick’s ‘effeminate, lascivious occupations’.

The king beat Frederick with his cane, punched him in the face and threw him to the ground, forcing him to kiss his feet. When his daughter Wilhelmine supported her brother, he smashed her in the face, knocking her unconscious. But now Frederick fell in love with a boy.

THE PHILOSOPHER PRINCE, THE PHILOSOPHE AND THE MARQUISE

After an intimate relationship with a Scottish officer,^* Frederick was sent away to repent. Instead the eighteen-year-old prince of Prussia established an affinity with Hans von Katte, an aesthetic officer who was eight years older; together they planned the prince’s escape to England, an act of treason.

In August 1730, when Frederick was caught, his father interrogated him, asking, ‘Did you seduce Katte or Katte seduce you?’ He then ordered that Katte be beheaded – ‘better that Katte came to death than the justice out of the world’ – in front of the boy, who was brought out and forced to watch, clearly to purge him of unnatural desires.

‘Please forgive me, my dear Katte, in God’s name, forgive me,’ cried Frederick.

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ replied Katte. ‘I die for you with joy in my heart!’ Frederick fainted. Frederick William decided to execute Frederick, telling his queen he was already dead. ‘What!’ she screamed. ‘Have you murdered your son?’

‘He wasn’t my son. Just a miserable deserter!’

‘Mon Dieu, mon fils!’ The queen and her daughter Wilhelmine shrieked. The king beat the girl and had to be pulled off before he killed her. The Habsburgs’ Kaiser Karl was present and interceded to save Frederick’s life – a mercy that must later have been regretted by his daughter Maria Theresa.

Frederick never forgave his father – ‘what a terrible man’ – but over the next ten years he grew to appreciate that Frederick William ‘knew the best interests of his country better than any minister or general. It was through his efforts, through his tireless labour, that I have been able to accomplish everything that I’ve done since.’

Frederick planned a delicious revenge on his father, hungrily consuming the literature of a new movement that was sweeping Europe – the Enlightenment – represented by his hero Voltaire, with whom the prince now started to correspond.

On 28 March 1727, Voltaire, already at thirty-three a notorious playwright, sometime royal favourite, sometime dissident, now exiled in London, attended the funeral of Isaac Newton. It was a seminal moment. Already convinced that Britain’s mixed constitution was superior to French absolutism and an admirer of Newtonian science, Voltaire interviewed Newton’s doctors, fascinated to discover that the scientist had died a virgin but also to hear from his niece that his theory of gravity originated in a falling apple. It was a passing of the baton: Voltaire saw himself as Newton’s heir.

Born François-Marie Arouet, the son of a lawyer, nicknamed Zozo in the family, Voltaire refused to study law and wrote poetry instead. When his father sent him to work for the French ambassador to Holland, his affair with a teenage girl known as Pimpette got him sacked just as his poem on the French regent’s incest with his daughter got him imprisoned in the Bastille. Later his cheek to an aristocrat got him beaten up and imprisoned again. Returning from England, he joined a consortium that bought up the state lottery, making a fortune. Next he fell in love with a talented, beautiful, younger writer, Émilie, marquise du Châtelet, and settled (with her husband’s permission) at her chateau where they wrote philosophy, history, fiction and science^* – she translated Newton, he popularized Newton; and she was the first woman to have a paper published by the French Academy. Later they each took other lovers – he fell in lust with his niece – but remained partners until she died in childbirth.

In 1734, his Lettres philosophiques, arguing for religious and political tolerance, won European fame, but it was just the start of his campaign against superstition that he later expressed in a slogan: ‘Écrasez l’infâme’. It was the unjust torture and execution of a wrongly convicted Protestant, Jean Calas, much later in 1762 that inspired his most famous campaign. He believed in human progress, but not too much: Voltaire mocked foolish optimism with his character Pangloss in Candide. He criticized all religions – Christians, Jews and Muslims – mocking priests who ‘rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God’. But he joked, ‘There’s no God, but don’t tell that to my servant lest he murder me at night.’

Voltaire was the first of the philosophes, who advocated a new, sceptical, rational, scientific, tolerant state of mind that sought the greatest happiness for mankind and challenged blind faith and sacred monarchy. If we choose to worship God, argued Immanuel Kant, the German philosophe of Königsberg later in the century, ‘we finite creatures can never understand the infinite nature of reality’. Kant summed up the Enlightened spirit in two words: Sapere aude! – Dare to use your own intellect!

Voltaire, who was richer and more famous than his cohorts, being an adept financier in addition to all his other talents, played the role of protector: when a young, poor writer got into trouble, Voltaire intervened. Denis Diderot, son of a provincial cutler who cut him off when he refused to enter the priesthood, was a messy, mischievous, manic force, curious about everything from hermaphroditism to acoustics, pouring out works that challenged royal and Catholic rule, love letters to his many paramours, novels and pornography: his Indiscreet Jewels, an erotic fantasia recounted by the vaginas of odalisques talking about a voyeuristic sultan, written to show how women enjoyed sex as much as men, got him arrested. Voltaire ensured Diderot’s release, after which he launched the work that came to define the new thinking, the Encyclopédie, featuring articles on every subject illuminated by this new Enlightenment.

Yet it was not the end of the old thought: there were still plenty of religious fanatics; some philosophes opposed slavery; some did not; few were even democrats. ‘Democracy,’ wrote Kant, ‘is a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which “all” decide for or against the “one” who does not.’ Most believed in mixed monarchies with reform from above but Voltaire wrote a biography of Peter the Great and encouraged ‘philosopher-kings’.

The vaunted Enlightenment was actually the intellectual movement of a feverishly interconnected European elite close to a nervous breakdown and identity crisis, still honeycombed with snobbery, bigotry, conspiracy theories and magical hucksterism. It was an era of disguise and reinvention, a time of sociability, travel, individuality and sexual freedom personified by a writer named Giacomo Casanova. After a famous escape from a Venetian prison, Casanova travelled through Europe, habitually cursed with indebtedness, religious persecution and venereal disease, studying science and alchemy, seeking aristocratic patronage, proposing financial schemes, adopting false names and titles, losing money in faro games and meeting emperors and philosophes. All the while he was relishing sexual encounters with women high and low, young and old, some romantic, some adventurous (a threesome with nuns) and others predatory, rapey and even paedophilic.

When he retired to be the librarian of a Bohemian count, he recounted it all in memoirs that were the expression of the new sensibility of self amid a new consciousness of community. ‘I pride myself,’ wrote Diderot, ‘on being a citizen of that great city, the world.’ The spirit was expressed in letter writing: educated people from Massachusetts to Moscow stayed up late by candlelight manically writing letters that they often expected their friends to copy and share with cognoscenti around the world.

In 1736, one of the best letter writers, Prince Frederick, wrote a letter to another virtuoso epistolarian, Voltaire, who recognized his correspondent’s rare character but also like all writers lost his mind as soon as he was flattered by a leader. Frederick was secretly rebelling against his father, growing his hair long, dressing in scarlet brocaded dressing gowns. He despised Christianity, Germanic philistinism and martial machismo; he worshipped everything French, sending Voltaire his poetry and philosophical writings. But at the same time he mulled over the Habsburg succession: he considered marrying Maria Theresa until his father forced him to marry a German princess who his sister said smelled so foul that ‘she must have a dozen anal fistulas’. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ Frederick told his sister after the wedding night, callously ignoring his wife for the rest of their marriage. During this time, his father let him accompany the ageing Prince Eugen on campaign, enabling Frederick to study the brilliant old man – waspish, cultured, homosexual: ‘If I understand anything of my trade I owe it to Prince Eugen.’ Although attracted to the Enlightenment, writing an attack on Machiavelli, Frederick planned a Machiavellian gambit that would shock Europe.

As Frederick dreamed of a bold conquest, another upstart prince, another exceptional ruler, Iran’s Nader Shah, planned his own invasion. The target was India. In 1738, Nader seized Kandahar and Kabul, then Lahore. Then the greatest conqueror of the century and the last of the tribal marauders emulated his heroes Genghis and Tamerlane and advanced on Delhi.

On 24 February 1739, the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, great-grandson of Alamgir, who wrote poetry as Sada Rangila (Eternal Playboy), made his stand at Karnal. Rangila was a connoisseur of the music of Sadarang, the painting of Nidha Mal and the singing of the tawaifs, courtesans, led by Nur Bai, gap-toothed singer-poetess, ‘bulbul-voiced and houri-like in beauty’, who was richly paid by the line of the ghazals she sang. A regular paramour of Rangila, Nur Bai enjoyed tormenting his official wife, Qudsia Begum, herself an ex-singer, but she was more interested in a colossal diamond he kept in his turban. While the elephants of potentates queued up outside her mansion, Nur Bai herself paraded around Delhi on her own bejewelled elephant. After the atrocious murders of his predecessors, it was no wonder Rangila devoted himself to love and music. Playboy’s court artists portrayed him penetrating dancing girls with an invincible phallus, but this was no use against Nader.

After Alamgir’s death, the Mughals had lost control of their magnates and subahdars (governors). The young Rangila had turned to one of Alamgir’s protégés, Chin Qilich Khan (Lord Boy Swordsman), son of a Turkic paladin from Bukhara, now viceroy of Deccan with the title Nizam al-Mulk (Regulator of the Realm). Yet Nizam was infuriated by Emperor Playboy’s ‘jesters and harlots’, who mocked him as ‘the Deccan Dancing Monkey’. The Nizam retired to carve out his own kingdom, founding a dynasty that would rule Hyderabad until 1947. But he was not the only one. Across India, subahdars seized revenues and territories, setting themselves up as princes – nawabs. The Tamerlane family had arrived as Turkic conquerors, becoming Indianized through their marriages with Hindu princesses, but the dynasty and a tiny clique of courtiers had squeezed the empire to pay for their wars and luxuries. A total of 655 grandees, suggests one estimate, out of 150 million Indians, owned a quarter of GNP. Shahjahan’s failed attempt to conquer Samarkand and his vanity projects – the Taj Mahal – followed by Alamgir’s interminable wars contributed to the collapse of the Mughals. ‘I failed,’ Alamgir admitted on his deathbed, ‘to protect the people.’ Now this predatory rent-seeking system, dependent on strong emperors and weak competition, had fallen apart, ‘undermined from within and below,’ writes Richard M. Eaton, ‘in the way termites silently hollow out the base of a wooden structure’. In the east, Bengal was privatized by its subahdar; in the west, a Sikh chieftain, Banda Bahadur, seized Punjab.

In the centre, Shivaji’s grandson, Shahu, had appointed a fierce, capable Maratha general called Baji Rao as peshwa (minister). Baji had expanded aggressively into Mughal territory and hacked out a Maratha empire, training his son Balaji Rao as successor: this cavalry maestro had defeated the Nizam of Hyderabad and other princes, finally turning to the decaying House of Tamerlane: ‘Let’s hack at the trunk of the withering tree and the branches will fall off themselves.’ In 1737, Baji galloped north to Delhi, defeated the Mughals and the branches started to fall off. But he himself was exhausted, dying before his fortieth birthday. The House of Tamerlane ruled no further than Delhi, but it took a foreign predator to break the Mughals.

THE ORGASM, THE CONQUEROR, THE DIAMOND AND THE COURTESAN: NADER, RANGILA AND FREDERICK

‘I haven’t come to leave the country in peace but to turn everything upside down,’ declared Nader, an athletic, weather-beaten, rugged, six foot lifeforce. ‘I’m not a human, I am God’s wrath.’ His rise was made possible only by the degeneration of the Safavi shahs, whose early deaths from alcoholism, syphilis and opium had so weakened Persia that an Afghan warlord with a tiny army managed to conquer the empire. It was a catastrophe that empowered Nader.

In 1709, the Pashtun Ghilzai tribes, Sunnis who hated the Shiite Safavis, led by a respected chieftain, Mirwais Hotak, rebelled against their Persian rulers. The Safavis, who also ruled the Caucasus in the west, promoted Bagrationi kings – descendants of Queen Tamara – to high offices and recruited armies of Georgian soldier-slaves: Shah Hosain defeated a rebellious Georgian king Giorgi XI, a tough paladin, then restored him to his throne, appointing him commander-in-chief and governor of Kandahar. Giorgi, who converted to Islam under the name Gurgin Khan, marched east with his Georgian army and retook Afghanistan, letting Hotak massacre his fellow Pashtun rivals, the Abdalis. These rivalries would soon explode out of Afghanistan in the shape of two Afghan empires.

King Giorgi sent Mirwais Hotak to Isfahan, where he warned the shah against the overmighty kinglet who governed Afghanistan and Georgia. Mirwais Baba – Granpa Mirwais – was sent back to watch Giorgi, who demanded the Afghan’s daughter as concubine. Hotak sent another girl disguised as his daughter, then orchestrated the slaughter of Giorgi and his Georgians at a banquet. He united Afghan chieftains, asking, ‘if there are any among you who lack the courage to enjoy this precious gift of heaven-sent freedom’. On his deathbed, Mirwais Baba ordered his eighteen-year-old son, Mahmud, to ‘take Isfahan itself’.

In May 1722, Mahmud Hotak and 15,000 Afghans, armed with a Pashtun innovation, light cannon mounted on camels – zamburaks (wasplets) – invaded Iran. At Gulnabad, 50,000 splendid Persian troops blocked the way. ‘If you win, the treasure of Isfahan is your prize,’ Hotak told his Pashtuns. ‘If you fail, you’ve no retreat and will face death, embittered by disgrace.’ Thanks to their 100 zamburaks, they routed the Iranians, then laid siege to Isfahan, where 80,000 died of starvation. Taking the city, Mahmud declared himself shah, but he struggled to control Persia. Maddened by paranoia and projectile dysentery, he killed first most of the Safavis, then his own family. ‘His bowels were so disordered that he defecated excrement from his mouth,’ until he was strangled by his own nephew Ashraf. Persia disintegrated.

Only one Safavi prince, Tahmasp, survived, but his prospects were dire until he was rescued by an obscure warlord: Nader. Born in 1698, Nader, son of an Afshari Turkman goatherd, started as a brigand with feral charisma but soon commanded his own army: he knew the name of every officer and many troopers, who called him Baba Bazorg – Big Daddy. He now offered his 2,000 men to the beleaguered shah, but he had a rival, the khan of the Qajars, a Turkman clan from Caspian shores, Fath-Ali Khan. In 1726 Nader had him murdered, though later the Qajars would rule Iran. Now Nader retook ruined Isfahan. As Ashraf Hotak fled back to Afghanistan, Big Daddy restored Tahmasp, a drunken jackanapes. Then, deploying a semi-tribal, semi-regular army of horse archers, zamburaks and jacayerchi (musketeers), Iranians, Kurds, Turkmen, Afghans, Uzbeks, Nader seized back swathes of Iraq and the Caucasus. Tahmasp awarded him the title Tahmasp-Qoli – Tahmasp’s Slave – then regent. But Nader wanted more.

In 1731, Tahmasp lost Nader’s Caucasian gains. In Isfahan, Nader boozed with the fuddled shah until he collapsed then invited in the magnates to observe the stupefied shah whom he replaced with a baby, Abbas III. It was unthinkable for a ragged Turkman to replace the sacred Safavis, but by a process of momentous inevitability Nader was increasingly regarded as a contender for the throne. In four years, he defeated foreigners east and west, took the Gulf, Muscat and Bahrain, then convened 20,000 notables who proposed that he assume the crown. He graciously accepted. When the chief mullah privately asserted loyalty to the Safavis, Nader had him strangled, demanding total loyalty to himself and, radically, abandoning Shiism.

Proud of his base origins, he and his eldest son Reza Qoli married sisters of the shah – his Afghans merging with Safavis. Big Daddy’s pastime was drinking parties with his concubines, which could be dangerous for any loose-lipped companions: one who made a pun on Nader’s name was strangled on the spot. But his real pleasure was war.

In 1729, Nader crushed the Abdalis of Herat and recruited 12,000 of them as special forces. Just as the Persians had used Georgians to crush Afghans, now Nader used Afghans to crush Georgia. Nine years later, he swung eastwards into Afghanistan, expelling the Hotaks from Kandahar, which he gave to the Abdalis. He chose as his bodyguard their chieftain’s sixteen-year-old son Ahmad, later known as Durrani (Pearl), handsome, tough, genial.

When his Afghan enemies fled to Rangila, the Mughul emperor, Nader demanded their return. Rangila refused – and Nader had his pretext to attack India first, taking Lahore. In January 1739, he marched on Delhi, ready to channel Tamerlane against his descendants. Rangila summoned his veteran adviser, the Nizam, as Nader and 100,000 troops – including a Georgian unit commanded by a teenaged Georgian king, Hercules II, and his Afghans under Durrani – advanced towards his 300,000 men and 2,000 elephants. Nader’s zamburaks and jacayerchi scythed down the Mughals. The Nizam did not make it into battle at all, sipping coffee in his howdah atop his elephant, until afterwards he arranged the emperor’s submission.

Riding into Delhi – Shahjahanabad – with its 400,000 inhabitants, Nader, guarded by 20,000 cavalry, was received by Rangila, seated on the bejewelled Peacock Throne in the colossal Audience Chamber commissioned by Shahjahan with its inscription: ‘If there is paradise on earth, it is this, it is this!’ Nader banned looting, but as Iranians celebrated Nowruz, rumours spread that Nader had been assassinated and crowds began to attack his troops. Galloping to the Roshan ud-Daula Mosque, he climbed on to the roof. At 9 a.m. a shot was fired and Nader drew his sword, unleashing slaughter. By 3 p.m. some 25,000 lay dead. Rangila sent the old Nizam to Nader: He quoted Hafiz:

Oh king, you’ve killed so many

If you wish to kill more, bring them back to life.

‘I pardon you for your grey beard,’ replied Nader, stopping the cull. Then, leaving the bodies in the streets, he started to gather his spoils, both humans and gems. A great-granddaughter of Alamgir was married to his son Nasrullah, joining upstart Afsharis to Tamerlanians. When courtiers charted the traditional seven generations of the groom’s genealogy, Nader just replied, ‘Tell them he is the son of Nader Shah, son of the sword, grandson of the sword and so on for seventy generations.’

The Nizam noticed Nader’s bodyguard, the Afghan Durrani. ‘He will be a king,’ he said. Nader called in Durrani, drew his dagger and clipped his ears.

‘When you’re a king,’ he said, ‘this will remind you of me.’ Later he called Durrani forward. ‘Come near. Remember you’ll be a king one day.’

‘Execute me if you wish, Majesty. There’s no truth in these words.’

‘Treat the descendants of Nader kindly,’ said Nader.

Enjoying the blood-spattered calm, Nader invited the courtesan Nur Bai to perform a ghazal. ‘What have you left of my heart,’ she sang – she told him about a mega-diamond hidden in Playboy’s turban. Nader decided to seduce the famous tawaif and take her home. She pretended to fall ill and vanished: sleeping with Nader, she said, ‘I’d feel as if my body itself was guilty of a massacre.’

Nader recrowned Emperor Rangila, with the jiqe, the imperial aigrette attached to the royal turban, restoring power to ‘the illustrious family of Gurkan’ (one of Tamerlane’s titles), and added, ‘Don’t forget, I’m not far away.’ Nader loaded 30,000 camels and 20,000 mules with plunder, including the Peacock Throne, which became the symbol of Iranian royalty, and Rangila handed over the 105.6-carat diamond that the shah compared to a ‘mountain of light’ (Koh-i-Noor). The journey of this bauble would chart the trajectory of south Asian power, passing through the treasure houses of Iranian, Afghan and Sikh monarchs to end up in the British crown. Nader had shattered the fragile prestige of the Mughals: their delicate, delicious symbol, Nur Bai, suspected of collaboration, died in poverty; voracious Mughal governors and Rajput rajas vied for the prizes, now joined by equally voracious foreigners. Nader planned to send back his son Nasrullah, married into the Tamerlane family, to rule India.

Watching the predations of Nader from Petersburg, the new empress of Russia, Elizaveta (Peter’s daughter), compared him with horror to Europe’s own version, Frederick the Great.

In May 1740, an attack of porphyria killed the ogre Frederick William, liberating his twenty-eight-year-old son Frederick, brilliant, reckless, neurotic. He came out in glorious fashion, creating a homoerotic court that would have driven his father crazy. His greatest love was a bisexual Venetian aesthete, Francesco Algarotti, and the new king celebrated their coup de foudre with a poem ‘The Orgasm’, sent to Voltaire and addressed to ‘Algarotti, Swan of Padua’. It reveals a very different Frederick.^*

Now he could put Voltaire’s ideas into practice, calling himself ‘the first servant of the state’: ‘My principal occupation is to combat ignorance and prejudice, enlighten minds and make people happy.’ Voltaire hailed him as a ‘philosopher-king’. Frederick invited him to visit Berlin.

Yet Frederick was also his father’s son – a micromanaging dictator whose malice, not just about his rivals but about his siblings and ordinary people, was ferocious. He bullied his brothers, sneered at everyone and hated most women, once shouting at ladies-in-waiting, ‘You can smell these horrible cows ten miles away.’ The only woman he loved was his sister Wilhelmine. While parading philosophical virtues, he was cynical: ‘If anything is to be gained by honesty, then we’ll be honest; if deceit is called for, let’s be knaves.’ He dismissed his father’s Giants, but, encouraged by his 80,000 troops and full treasury, he saw an opportunity: France, now under the self-indulgent Louis XV and his shrewd mistress Madame de Pompadour (‘a wretched whore’, said Frederick), struggled to defend its pre-eminence; Russia was often paralysed by murderous Romanov intrigues; and Britain tried to avoid European entanglements. Then in October the Habsburg Karl VI died after what Voltaire called ‘a pot of mushrooms that changed the course of history’. Maria Theresa, aged twenty-three, found herself archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, but she could not become empress. Frederick was ready to exploit the felicitous conjunction, writing, ‘I am the luckiest child of nature.’

STOP MAKING THE QUEEN WRETCHED: MARIA THERESA – MOTHER, EMPRESS, WARLADY

On 16 December 1740, Frederick invaded the rich Habsburg province of Silesia, still writing to Algarotti but now grimly focused on advancing Prussia at any cost, even his own death in battle. Beleaguered in Vienna, Maria Theresa reflected, ‘I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own.’ Her generals were placemen. ‘As for the state in which I found the army, I can’t begin to describe it,’ she said. ‘History hardly knows of a crowned head who started under circumstances more grievous.’

Maria Theresa faced the demolition of the dynasty, yet she rose to the challenge with brisk acumen, frequent rages, romantic theatricality and a light touch. She was also pregnant, giving birth in March 1741 to a son, Joseph, a male Habsburg at last. But her ministers were craven antiques: ‘Each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop.’ Faced with the resignation of one of these relics, she replied, ‘You’d much better stay and try to do what good you can,’ adding, ‘I shall see to it you do no harm.’ To another, she snapped, ‘Dear me, what mutterings and ugly faces … Stop making the Queen wretched and help her instead!’ Dealing with a baby, a war, a failed monarchy, she had to boost her needy husband Franz: ‘Dear sweetheart … I was uneasy like a little dog about you. Love me and forgive me that I don’t write more … Adieu, Little Mouse … I am your happy bride.’ Yet she loved being pregnant. ‘I wish I was in the sixth month of a new pregnancy,’ she said just after giving birth to Joseph.

Frederick erupted into Silesia, unleashing twenty years of war. At his first battle Mollwitz, he fled from the battlefield only to find he had won. But, as the greatest general between Eugen and Napoleon, he quickly learned the art of command, routing Maria Theresa’s ponderous generals. The war swiftly expanded as Louis XV, keen to demolish his Habsburg rivals, joined in the carve-up of the Habsburg monarchy. The elector of Bavaria, chief of house Wittelsbach, rival of the Habsburgs, won election as emperor and seized Prague. Hungary toyed with independence.

Maria Theresa held her nerve. She rushed to Budapest, dressed in mourning black, to declare that ‘The very existence of the kingdom of Hungary, of our own person, of our children and our crown are now at stake. Betrayed by all, we place our sole resource in the loyalty, arms and ancient valour of the Hungarians.’ They promised 40,000 troops and more taxes, promises she rewarded theatrically by brandishing her baby, introducing them to their future king Joseph. Through it all, she ruled her massive court with its mixture of rigid bewigged Spanish ceremonial and family informality, deploying her characteristic gaiety, loving the ‘carousels’ in which she and her ladies, dressed to the nines, rode through Vienna side-saddle firing pistols in the air, before dancing all afternoon then holding a masque ball dressed as a peasant girl.

After eight years, she realized that Frederick could not be destroyed by war. While never giving up on the reconquest of Silesia, she negotiated peace and won the election of her husband as emperor, then focused on reforming the monarchy.

Her marriage to Little Mouse was happy except for her jealousy of his actresses. Their rows over mistresses and his other demands ended with ‘our usual refuge, caresses and tears … I got into another temper’, and Franz walked out. ‘If he really leaves,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll either follow him or shut myself in a convent.’ She was usually pregnant during the Silesian wars, raising her sixteen children, between the Hofburg and her new summer palace, Schönbrunn: ‘I had to write this in four instalments,’ she wrote to a minister, ‘six children in the room with me and the emperor too: it reads like it.’ She micromanaged the children, writing long orders to their tutors: ‘I insist on their eating everything with no fault-finding, no picking and choosing.’ She treated her daughters as dynastic assets, bred just for marriage: ‘They must not be allowed to talk to doorkeepers and stokers, or give orders; they are born to obey …’ The children’s virtues were witheringly analysed: ‘Joana is pig-headed though clever enough; Joseph a good child but not so capable.’ Her favourite was the pretty and intelligent Mimi – Maria Christina – who remembered how ‘mixed with love was always a dose of mistrust and palpable coldness’. Power is a cruel mother.

Her penultimate child, born when she was thirty-nine, was Maria Antonia – later Marie Antoinette – who grew up impulsive and frivolous. The heir, Joseph, was fiercely intelligent but lacked empathy and tact – ‘My son was brought up from the cradle with the greatest tenderness and love, but it must be admitted that his desires and requests have been deferred to in many ways, flattering him and allowing him to develop a premature conception of his exalted station.’ He admired the philosophes, but his hero was his mother’s nemesis, Frederick. The empress worried about the future.

Little Mouse’s infidelities intensified her priggish piety: nude paintings were covered, and her Chastity Commission spied on love affairs, expelled saucy actresses and packed prostitutes into barges to be settled further down the Danube – earning her the mockery of enlightened Europe. Although she was suspicious of the philosophes, her reforms worked. ‘These are no longer the same Austrians,’ noted Frederick, who now complained of this ‘ambitious vindictive enemy, who was the more dangerous because she was a woman’. She had survived, yet Frederick kept Silesia. Voltaire hailed him as the Great, but he had a sneaking suspicion of warlords. ‘It’s forbidden to kill,’ wrote Voltaire. ‘Therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.’ Their meeting was disappointing. The two greatest men in Europe expected to be the master – and they clashed bitchily, each roiling the other. They were better apart – and the war was not over.

The Frederick of Asia, Nader, similarly could not rest on his laurels. He returned from Delhi as the most successful shah in a millennium. Yet success is never final. Brilliance is never far from madness.

WHAT’S A FATHER, WHAT’S A SON? THE MADNESS OF BIG DADDY

Now calling himself Shahanshah – king of kings and Lord of the Conjunction – Nader returned to find that his beloved eldest son Reza Qoli, a successful general whom he had left as viceroy, had conspired to take the throne if anything happened to Nader, murdering the ex-shah Tahmasp and his young sons. Reza’s wife, Tahmasp’s daughter, had committed suicide, while the prince griped, ‘My father wants to conquer even the ends of the earth and oppresses us all.’ Reza’s behaviour was recounted by Nader’s favourite, Taqi Khan, who entertained the shah during his drinking bouts. Nader loved him so much he even promised he would never execute him whatever he did. Yet there was a touchiness in their relationship. Nader was suspicious of Taqi, who in turn felt undervalued by Nader.

Reza arrived to greet his triumphant father with his own retinue of 12,000 musketeers. Nader was gripped by paranoia, favouring a younger son and his nephew Ali Qoli. He demoted Reza and gave the prettiest of the Mughal princesses to Ali Qoli. In 1741, as Nader was out riding, an assassin fired at him, and when Reza rode up to console him the shah accused him of complicity. He then found the assassin, who confessed all under torture. Nader threatened to take out Reza’s eyes.

‘Cut them out and shove them up your wife’s cunt,’ shouted Reza.

‘What’s a father,’ sobbed Nader when the boy’s eyes were brought to him, ‘what’s a son?’ Nader hugged Reza and howled.

‘You should know,’ Reza said finally. ‘By taking my eyes, you have blinded yourself and destroyed your own life.’

Nader campaigned against the Ottomans, but withdrew from Mosul, ailing and looking much older than his years, faced with a spate of rebellions.

In Shiraz, his intimate Taqi rebelled. Nader crushed Shiraz in a frenzy, building towers of heads. Having sworn never to execute his friend, he devised an ingenious torment in which he was not to be killed. Taqi was castrated, one eye torn out, the other left intact so he could watch as his sons and brothers were executed, before his beloved wives were gang-raped by soldiers. When the one-eyed, castrated Taqi was brought before Nader, he managed to crack a joke that saved his life, and he was sent to govern Kabul. But the tyrant was alienating many of his retainers. When he ordered the arrest of his nephew Ali Qoli, the prince started to plot.

In 1747, Nader summoned his children and favourite grandson Shahrokh (son of the blinded Reza and his Safavi wife), staring at them strangely for a long time then begging them to take the throne. All feared a trick. In June, fighting Kurdish rebels, Big Daddy camped at Fathabad, where, alone and paranoid, he suspected his Afshari bodyguards of plotting with Ali Qoli. So he ordered Durrani and his Afghans to execute his Iranian praetorians, but somehow the guards heard of the plan. Nader was sleeping with his favourite concubine, Chuki, when the assassins burst into the tent. Chuki awoke him; Nader jumped up but tripped as one of the guards swung his sword, lopping off his arm. As he begged for mercy, they beheaded him.

Durrani and the Afghans tried to rescue him, weeping when they found his headless corpse. They then looted the tent, seizing the Koh-i-Noor diamond off Nader’s arm and wrenching off his signet ring.

Then they galloped back to Kandahar.

* When the Jews were expelled from their suburb across the Danube, Im Werd, the Austrians celebrated by renaming it Leopoldstadt, but later this neighbourhood again became popular with Viennese Jews, their lives celebrated in Tom Stoppard’s play, Leopoldstadt.

* Four centuries later, in 2001, an Islamic terrorist regarded 9/11 as the moment the righteous mission of Islam had been halted by Christendom: Osama bin Laden chose the date for his own attack on the leading Christian power, America.

* This included sacks of what the Poles initially thought were camel feed: coffee. Coffee houses were already popular in London – Pepys wrote, ‘Thence I to the coffee house where much good discourse’ – but Vienna did not yet have any. A legend claims that Sobieski gave the sacks to a Ukrainian soldier-spy Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who founded the first Viennese café. The crescent shape and name of croissants was said to originate in this victory.

* The fantasist’s lies were initially exploited by the king’s own chief minister, Thomas Osbourne, earl of Danby, who hoped to purge the court of pro-Catholics, then by the ex-Cromwellian Antony Ashley, earl of Shaftesbury, who became a shameless inquisitor. Buckingham at times joined in. In 1774, the young Lord Shrewsbury, whose father had been killed by the duke, led an attack on Buckingham in Parliament that prompted his downfall and enforced separation from Anna Maria. Embittered, Buckingham joined the attacks on Charles II, who imprisoned him. The rake finally retired to his Yorkshire estates. After the government had orchestrated a case of sodomy against him, he went into a decline, reflecting, ‘O! what a prodigal I’ve been of that most valuable of all possessions – Time!’

* Said to wear green when genial, white when murderous, Ismail was always escorted by eighty African bodyguards, ‘his long face more black than white, a mulatto’, according to the French envoy. ‘One of his normal entertainments,’ reported a European, ‘was to draw his sword as he mounted his horse and decapitate the slave who held the stirrup.’ His chief wives were Zaydana, an enslaved African and ‘Mrs Shaw’, an enslaved Englishwoman whose respective sons, Zaydan and Muhammad, fought for the succession. Ismail had Zaydan’s hand and foot amputated as punishment and later had him murdered by his own concubines. There was no shortage of heirs: Ismail was the most prolific father in history. By now, in 1703, he had 868 children; by his death in 1727, the figure was 1,171 – so much of today’s Morocco is descended from him. He negotiated with Louis, demanding an illegitimate daughter as wife. When he died at eighty-one, he was planning an invasion of Spain. His family still rules Morocco today.

* Hugh was the great-nephew of the first Peter Chamberlen who had delivered James I’s children. The last of the dynasty, Hugh’s son (also Hugh) junior had no heirs, and allowed the forceps to become public knowledge; the device saved millions of lives.

* After handing over his naval papers to William, Pepys retired. He was an indefatigable state servant and incorrigible lover of life – ‘I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world’ – but he was also a master storyteller, witness to the plague, the Fire, Medway and the Merry Monarch. His diary is a masterpiece, recording his marriage and rise at the Admiralty, his experiences of court politics and ‘towsing’ his girlfriends. Yet it covered only nine years of his successful career from election to Parliament and to presidency of the Royal Society. His zenith was his 1782 appointment by Charles as admiralty secretary, a post he held until 1688. During the insecure early months of William’s reign, one of those arrested as a suspected Jacobite was Pepys. He was released but, content with his well-born mistress, he retired to Clapham, dying in 1703.

* Combining the best parts of Oliver’s republic and Charles II’s monarchy, it delivered. Frequent parliaments, in which MPs could freely criticize government, would oversee royal finances. Sovereigns became paid presidents of the state but with enormous power, provided they had parliamentary majorities. This was not democracy, just the launch of a new oligarchy that endured for a century in which the monarchs ruled in a fluctuating partnership with a tiny coterie of landed magnates, squires and City merchants. These were divided into two factions: the supporters of the new settlement, known as Whigs, and its enemies, known as Tories. Its Toleration Act was the first of its kind in Europe, yet it was not particularly tolerant: Jews could neither vote nor own property nor enjoy office; Dissenters and Catholics were also excluded from office.

* Principia explored calculus and gravity and demonstrated that all matter is attracted to other particles, explaining the motion of the planets and tides. This rational analysis did not rule out his belief in a unitarian God nor in alchemy: like most clever people of his time, he thought such secret knowledge did not contradict the laws of nature.

* After Mary’s death in 1694, William’s heir was Mary’s sister Anne and her son the duke of Gloucester, but in 1701, when the child died, William and Parliament agreed an Act of Settlement, organizing the succession through the nearest Protestant heir, Sophia, electress of Hanover, granddaughter of James I, and her son George, bypassing the rightful but Catholic family of James II. The Act arranged the succession into the twenty-first century.

* Carlos was thirty-eight. His post-mortem revealed that ‘His heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.’

* As Long Ben divided up the swag, the English launched a worldwide manhunt to catch him. He escaped to the Caribbean, bribing his way. Six of his pirates were tried and hanged for the outrage, but Long Ben himself and the treasure vanished, fate unknown.

* It took a few years to cut and sell: the buyer was the regent, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, who had it set into the crown of Louis XV.

* There is a tendency to backdate the rise of democracy. As we will see, Walpole is traditionally named as ‘the first prime minister’, but there was little difference in style from his patron Godolphin. Both were appointed by sovereigns, not chosen by Parliament, and both were expert managers of finance and Parliament. But Godolphin was the first to fund a European war; Walpole never had to. Godolphin trained Walpole, who adored and respected him, even resigning to protect his patron. It would be eighty years before Parliament could force a monarch to appoint a minister and before prime ministers became the leader of their cabinet in the modern sense.

* Scotland’s population was one-ninth of England’s, its wealth a fortieth of England’s: by population, the Scots would receive eighty-five MPs at Westminster; by wealth thirteen. It was agreed that Scotland should receive forty-five MPs in the Commons and sixteen lords.

* Eugen was the son of a Savoy prince and Olympe, niece of Mazarin, mistress of Louis. But Olympe was implicated in the Affair of the Poisons, which cast a shadow over Eugen. Part of a coterie of homosexual aristocrats, the unprepossessing Eugen was despised by Louis, who told him to become a priest. Driven out of Versailles, he served the Austrian Habsburgs, seizing much of the Ottoman Balkans. As a general he was mobile, fluid and clear-sighted, reflecting on discipline: ‘You should only be harsh when, as often happens, kindness proves useless.’

* Peter offered Marlborough the exotic titles prince of Kyiv or prince of Siberia if he could persuade Charles to attack the Habsburgs.

* Peter crushed the Ukrainian Cossacks under Hetman Ivan Mazeppa, who, after being his ally, had switched sides to support the Swedes and bid for independence. Charles and Mazeppa escaped to Benderi in Ottoman territory. Charles later made it back to Sweden, an eclipsed force. Mazeppa died, succeeded as hetman by Ivan Skoropadsky, a Russian client. A semi-independent hetmanate, closely allied to Russia, survived until 1775. Peter’s attempt to expand into Ottoman Ukraine, Moldova and Wallachia (Romania) ended in disaster in July 1711 when he was defeated and almost captured by the grand vizier at Staˇniles¸ti. In 1722–3, the voracious empire builder attacked Persia, seizing parts of Azerbaijan.

* George I arrived with his German mistresses, one so cadaverous she was nicknamed the Scarecrow, the other obese. Londoners nicknamed them Elephant and Castle after a famous London pub, itself named after the west African trade. George was even less attractive than he looked: in 1694, the elector had discovered that his wife was having an affair with a young Swede, Count Philipp von Königsmarck, whom he had murdered and probably dissected and buried under the Hanover palace; his wife was imprisoned for thirty years and never allowed to see her children again.

* Smallpox killed 400,000 Europeans annually during the eighteenth century. Yet variolation – the introduction of the antigen – from a smallpox scab, long practised from Africa to China, was about to change this. In 1706, an Akan slave given to an American Protestant minister, Cotton Mather, who named him Onesimus, explained the procedure to him. ‘Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow,’ Mather told the Royal Society of London, ‘whether he ever had the Small-Pox; he answered, both, Yes, and No; and then told me, that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox, and would forever preserve him from it, adding that it was often used among the Guramantese … and showed me in his Arm the Scar.’ Despite resistance by those who did not believe Africans could be more advanced than Europeans, Mather used variolation to mitigate a smallpox epidemic in Boston. In 1715, the British duke’s daughter and wife of the British ambassador to Istanbul, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her beauty spoiled by smallpox, returned to London with an Ottoman version. Her variolation of her own children persuaded Princess Caroline, wife of the future George II, to inoculate her children. It is worth pointing out that it was not doctors who recognized the possibilities of inoculation but intelligent amateurs. Among those inoculated in childhood was Edward Jenner, who later improved this method.

* Walpole never called himself prime minister. The top office was lord treasurer, last held by the Duke of Shrewsbury, who lived an extraordinary life. In 1668, he was the child whose father was killed by his mother’s lover, Buckingham, whom he in turn later destroyed. Twice he was the helmsman who steered Britain in dynastic crisis: in 1688, he invited William III to invade; rewarded with a dukedom and regarded as the noblest patrician of his time, even William called him ‘king of hearts’; in 1714, he ruled as all-powerful lord treasurer when the last Stuart, Queen Anne, died, ensuring the Hanoverian succession. Since 1715, the treasury has been ‘in commission’ under the first lord of the treasury, increasingly known as prime minister. In 1732, George II gave a townhouse to Walpole, who accepted it as a residence for the first lord: Ten Downing Street.

* Before his death in 1725, Peter had tortured his own son, Alexei, to death for fleeing to Austria. He left the throne to his wife, Catherine, a former Lithuanian laundress and camp follower – a rise unique in European history and the first of a line of female Russian autocrats.

* Aurora was the daughter of a Swedish-German general; it was her brother Philipp who was murdered by George I of Britain for adultery with his wife.

* Scottish and Irish officers – usually Jacobite exiles after 1688 – now filled the armies of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Bourbons and Romanovs. They were known as the Wild Geese.

* Even if they did not yet understand the practicality of their discoveries, Daniel Fahrenheit invented the thermometer in 1714, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier discovered the nature of oxygen and its role in burning, while Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery, though electricity was seen as entertainment rather than useful.

* ‘During this night, satisfying his fierce desires, / Algarotti swam in a sea of pleasure … / Our happy lovers, in their extreme delirium, / In the fury of their love, they know only each other; / Fucking [baiser], climaxing, feeling, sighing and expiring, / Resuming fucking, rushing back for more pleasure.’ Algarotti had scandalized London by enjoying a ménage à trois with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey, then accompanied Lord Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland in America, on his yacht to attend a Russian wedding, stopping off in Germany where he met Frederick.