The World

Zulus and Saudis, Christophes, Kamehamehas and Astors

TROPICAL MONARCHIES: KINGS OF HAITI AND BRAZIL

João had long ruled in place of his insane mother Queen Maria, a religious hysteric haunted by the devil and treated vainly by George III’s ‘mad-doctor’ Willis. João’s real enemy was his Spanish wife, Carlota Joaquina, skinny, sharp-faced, warty, moustachioed and lame, who, while fiercely riding horses, learning to fire cannon and relishing love affairs, tried to overthrow her husband and rule in Spain’s interest. This did not enhance marital harmony.

Now João agonized for months then courageously decided to defy Napoleon and move his court to Brazil. As panicking courtiers mobbed the docks at Belém loading their belongings, ladies abandoned their carriages and waded fully clothed out to the ships, some of them drowning. João arrived disguised as a woman and boarded the Príncipe Real accompanied by his treasonous wife, seven children and the demented queen, who kept saying, ‘Go slower! They’ll think we’re running away.’ When over 12,000 Portuguese had embarked on a British fleet of fifteen warships and forty smaller vessels, they sailed, playing cards all the way to Rio.

On arrival, the Brazilians were unimpressed by the royal family: although bathing was prized by creoles in Rio, the príncipe regente never fully washed. But the people of Rio – the Cariocas (from the Tupi Kara-i-oka) – were excited to share the first American capital of a European dynasty.

This was a city run on slavery. Slaves worked as casual labourers, sold food and carried masters in sedan chairs, while new slaves arrived from Africa at the docks. The príncipe regente owned 38,000 slaves. The Braganzas embraced Brazil’s eclectic culture, forming a theatrical company of enslaved African musicians, but they were shocked by the chaotic informality of ‘this infamous Babylon’, African in appearance, its festivals combining Portuguese Catholicism with African ritual. The king, after the death of Maria the Mad, was happy to remain in Brazil – as British troops under Wellington fought the French in Portugal – a decision that would lead to an independent south American monarchy.

It would not be the only one. On 1 January 1804, Governor-General-for-Life Dessalines declared the independence of a new republic that he called Haiti, its Taíno name – a nation of freed slaves, the second free republic in the Americas and the first country to abolish slavery. ‘It is not enough to expel the barbarians that drenched it in blood,’ he declaimed. ‘Soldiers! give all nations a terrible but just example of vengeance.’ He promised ‘to kill every Frenchman who soils the land of freedom’. Five hundred were hanged in a row, and hundreds of men, women and children^* were paraded to the port, the women raped, then all drowned in front of foreign merchants. Pregnant women were killed to prevent the birth of more Frenchmen. The killings – somewhere between 600 and 4,000, mainly butchered with knives – were designed to ensure the French would never return. The bloodshed was brutal, yet it was a small atrocity compared to the 350,000 killed by the French.

‘I’ve avenged America,’ said Dessalines, but the killing of all whites helped destroy the Haitian economy. On 6 October, he was crowned Emperor Jacques I of Haiti. His empress Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité cared for wounded Frenchmen, begged her husband to spare the whites and hid some of them in their house (while also raising their own seven children and those of his many paramours). The emperor protected and gave a job to his old French slave master, but he backed the 90 per cent of black Haitians against the mixed-raced elite, a rivalry that still undermines the country in the twenty-first century.

The emperor rightly feared that France would try to regain the colony: he ordered his general Henry Christophe to start the building of the huge fortress La Citadelle and other defences. Jacques himself, rapacious ruler of plantations, used his army and the Haitian whip, the coco-macac, to enforce the labour of the cultivateurs who now toiled in the fields. His generals conspired against him; in October 1806, the emperor marched to crush the rebels but, lured to Alexandre Pétion’s house in Port-au-Prince, he was shot and stabbed and his head was sliced open. A crowd then paraded his dismembered body, shouting, ‘The tyrant is dead!’

After Jacques, Henry Christophe, English-speaking, veteran of the American War of Independence, former waiter, drummer boy and paladin, became president, with the mixed-race Pétion, sometime French ally and enemy of Louverture, as Senate president, but they quickly fell out. Pétion ruled the south leniently, breaking up the estates while favouring his own mixed-race elite. Nicknamed Papa Bon Coeur, he was advised by one of the most remarkable women in American history, his paramour Marie-Madeleine Lachenais, daughter of a French colonel and an African woman. Later in Pétion’s rule, she became the lover of his secretary and heir General Boyer and so was known as La Présidente de Deux Présidents. But the Haitians were far from finished with monarchy.

In the north, President Henry Christophe came to power just as Wilberforce and the British abolitionists who were finally making progress.

On 23 February 1807, Grenville, the prime minister who with Wilberforce had backed abolition in Pitt’s garden, ensured that the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in the Commons by 283 votes to 16. Britain was not the first: Denmark had abolished the trade four years earlier at the second attempt. But Britain had the power to impose abolition, sending warships, soon upgraded to the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, that seized 1,600 slave ships, freeing 150,000 slaves. Haiti was the only country that had so far abolished slavery itself. Wilberforce and Clarkson were soon in contact with Christophe.^*

On 26 March 1811, Christophe was crowned King Henry I (premier monarque couronné du Nouveau-Monde as well as defender of the faith) by a white priest, alongside his queen Marie Louise,^* whose free father had owned the Crown tavern where they had met. They were enthroned on a platform seventy feet high under a scarlet canopy in a church shrouded with sky-blue silk. At the celebrations afterwards, King Henry toasted ‘my dear brother George III – invincible obstacle to the unbridled ambition of Napoleon’, though, like the emperor, he created a Christophean aristocracy led by four princes and eight dukes: his commander-in-chief became the duc de Marmelade and he co-opted Emperor Jacques’s nephews as barons and equerries. Yet he also promoted intellectuals of the Haitian Enlightenment. The writer Julien Prévost became foreign minister and comte de Limonade, and his ideologist was the historian Valentin de Vastey, now a baron.

The king and queen ordered royal carriages and regalia in London – engraved ‘Liberty, Equality and Henry’, their crest declaring ‘Reborn from the ashes’, their court revelling in its gold braid and spectacular uniforms. The queen led her own unit of Royal Amazons who paraded at annual fetes, celebrating with lightshows and pyramids, creole songs, kalinda and samba dancing.

Autocratic and short-tempered, the king was irrepressibly energetic, the first great black statesman of modern times, dreaming of creating an orderly rich and educated Haiti that would show whites that a black kingdom could equal or overtake them. He faced the constant threat of internal rivals and French invasion, enforcing his power with a Royal Corps of Dahomey – 4,000 troops imported from west Africa – while completing Emperor Jacques’s fortress, Citadelle La Ferrière, where thousands of labourers reportedly perished. His Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, featuring marble floors cooled by water from mountain springs, was just one of his fifteen chateaux, ‘erected by the descendants of Africans’, wrote baron de Vastey, ‘to show we have not lost the architectural taste and genius of our ancestors who covered Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage and old Spain with their superb monuments’.

Son of a French slave owner and a free black woman, Vastey, a cousin of Bonaparte’s general Dumas, reacted against Enlightened apologies for slavery and racism, placing the stories of Haitian cruelty in context by exposing France’s ‘unheard-of crimes that made nature shudder’, in works that were widely read in Europe and America – the first intellectual of colour to win a world readership, the first to write black history. Wary of a new French invasion and keen to unite Haiti, King Henry raided Pétion’s rival state and created his own navy under a British admiral. He was an Anglophile who consulted Clarkson on his vision of teaching Haitians English literature and language. Clarkson sent English teachers to the king, who in turn supported Clarkson’s campaign to abolish slavery altogether.

Grenville’s Act was far from the end of the slave trade. Some 700,000 people remained enslaved on British plantations, 300,000 in Jamaica. Brazil, Cuba and the French colonies still demanded more slaves, as new technical developments made them even more important in the USA.

Jefferson had survived the revelations about his family with Sally Hemings to be re-elected president in 1804.^* In 1807, a month after Grenville’s Act, he signed an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, but he remained uncertain about how to abolish slavery itself and suspicious about real liberation, refusing to recognize Haiti and allowing slavery to be extended into the Louisiana Purchase.

Just when it looked as if the profitability of slavery was ebbing, an invention suddenly placed slavery at the centre of American prosperity. In 1793, Eli Whitney, a Savannah schoolteacher, helped create a machine with a more effective system of rollers for clearing the seeds from the cotton. This cotton engine – a gin – helped make cotton planting vastly profitable. Southern planters switched to cotton growing, the cotton sent to New England mills or via New York to British Manchester. In 1793, a total of 500,000 pounds was exported. By 1810, it was 85 million, 20 per cent of US exports. Ten years later it had doubled. Slavery had become essential to the south.

Further west, Astor’s trackers were exploring river and coast in their pursuit of pelts. Astor founded his own Pacific town, Astoria, and dispatched ships to Alaska, then to Hawaii and China to trade pelts for sandalwood, tea, opium and spices. He poured the profits from his American Fur Company into New York property, buying Burr’s estate and much else. By the 1820s, Astor was America’s first millionaire. Surprisingly, his rival in the Pacific trade was neither American nor European but a Hawaiian conqueror.

WIVES OF THE CONQUERORS: KAMEHAMEHA AND NAPOLEON

Far to the west, Kamehameha, king of Hawaii, who resided at his villa in Kailua-Kona with his thirty wives and twenty-five children,^* was completing the conquest of Hawaii, aided by his British gunner John Young, whom he raised to the nobility and married to his niece. While he still ruled as a warrior conqueror, wearing the yellow ahuala cape made up of 250,000 feathers of the (now extinct) mamo bird, leading his armies and personally making human sacrifices, he always appreciated European technology. After trading sandalwood with the Europeans and Americans, he constructed his own fleet of twenty ships to trade with China, America and Russian Alaska – an extraordinary performance that contradicts the traditional narrative of European imperialism. As Kamehameha was at his peak, so was Napoleon.

In September 1808, at Erfurt in Germany, Tsar Alexander, four kings and a glittering entourage of aristocrats and nobles paid court to the hegemon of Europe.

Napoleon believed that ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the others with enough authority to force them to live in harmony’ and that power was France. Britain and the rest of Europe disagreed. Napoleon had already overreached – his brothers lacked grip, Habsburgs and Romanovs were conspiring and Talleyrand, whom he cordially hated as ‘shit in a silk stocking’, was betraying him. ‘It is for you to save Europe,’ Talleyrand told Alexander, ‘to resist Napoleon. The French are civilized – their sovereign is not.’ Alexander despised the Ogre but played his vanity sublimely. ‘I’m happy with Alexander,’ Napoleon told Josephine. ‘Were he a woman, I think I’d take him as my lover.’

In March 1809, Emperor Franz dispatched armies into Germany, Poland and Italy to restore Austrian pride and the balance of power in Europe, but in a series of battles culminating at Wagram, just across the Danube from Vienna, Napoleon defeated Franz’s brother, Archduke Karl. ‘My enemies are defeated, thrashed, in full rout,’ he told Josephine. In Vienna, Beethoven sheltered from Napoleon’s shelling in his brother’s basement with cushions over his ears. Napoleon occupied the capital, imposing stringent terms on the Habsburgs. He also survived an assassination attempt. This, along with close misses in battle, the death of his heir and nephew, Louis’s eldest son, and his own fathering of two illegitimate sons by different paramours, combined to convince him that he must divorce Josephine, now forty-six. As she cried and fainted, he told her, ‘You have children, I have none. You must feel the necessity of strengthening my dynasty.’

Napoleon proposed marriage into the Romanovs – to Alexander’s beloved sister Catherine. Alexander was horrified by the Ogre’s presumption. Catherine was quickly married off, leaving a younger sister Anna. But Napoleon switched from the Romanovs to Europe’s grandest dynasty, the Habsburgs.

‘I pity the poor princess he chooses,’ laughed the eighteen-year-old Maria Ludovica, better known as Marie Louise, pretty, sunny, fair-haired daughter of Emperor Franz – before she knew it was her. When she did, she sighed, ‘I resign myself to Divine Providence.’ The newest dynasty was marrying the oldest. The marriage took place by proxy before the archduchess set off for France. When she arrived at the Compiègne Palace, the couple were mutually impressed, she exclaiming, ‘You are much better-looking than your portrait,’ and he so delighted that he consummated the marriage before the formal celebrations. ‘She liked it so much,’ boasted Napoleon, ‘she asked me to do it again.’

WELLESLEYS, ROTHSCHILDS AND THE WOMAN WHO RIDES UPON THE BEAST

Napoleon was so keen on the empress, he retired his favourite mistress and spent every night with Marie Louise, though he reflected, ‘I loved Marie Louise … I loved Josephine better; that was natural; we’d risen together; she was full of grace.’ Marie fell in love with him, telling her father, ‘I assure you, dear papa … the better one knows him, the better one appreciates and loves him.’

‘Ought princesses to fall in love?’ Napoleon wondered later. ‘They are political chattels.’

In March 1811, as Napoleon advised his obstetrician to ‘Pretend you’re not delivering the empress but a bourgeois from the rue Saint-Denis,’ Marie gave birth to a king of Rome, Napoleon François, after an agonizing labour. ‘I’m not soft-hearted, yet I was much moved how she suffered,’ he said, boasting tactlessly to Josephine, ‘My son is big and healthy.’ He was ecstatic: ‘My family’s allied to all the sovereigns of Europe.’ That was true, but all of his new relatives were conspiring to bring about his downfall. Designed to destroy Britain, his blockade known as the Continental System was neither continental nor systematic. Britain was defiant under a ‘friend of Mister Pitt’, Spencer Perceval, an evangelical who regarded Napoleon as ‘the woman who rides upon the beast’ in the Book of Revelations. Marquess Wellesley had fancied his chances at becoming prime minister, but a vicious feud with his ex-actress wife and a sex addiction that embarrassed even his brother Arthur meant that he had to settle for foreign secretary. Perceval and Wellesley, seeking a way to attack the French–Spanish alliance, were persuaded by a south American adventurer to send an army to Venezuela.^* Arthur Wellesley, tempered by his Marathan victories, was designated commander, but the army was redirected to support the Spanish insurgency. After quickly defeating the French at Talavera, the general, raised to Viscount Wellington, became loved by his soldiers, who called him Beau; he called them ‘the scum of the earth’ as well as ‘fine fellows’: ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.’ Despising vainglory, he said, ‘There’s only one thing worse than a battle won and that’s a battle lost’ – though he never discovered what losing was like.

Wellington was constantly short of funds. Nathan Mayer Rothschild, trading in bullion with the continent and lending it to the government, now offered to smuggle it to Wellington to pay his army. The ‘government didn’t know how to get it to Portugal’, he explained. ‘I undertook all that and I sent it to France.’ This vast and secret work laid the foundation for the family fortune – ‘the best business I ever did’. The youngest Rothschild brother, James, handled the delivery across the Channel and on to Wellington. ‘Mister Rothschild’, said Lord Liverpool, the war secretary who appointed him Wellington’s supplier, was ‘a special friend … I don’t know what we should have done without him.’ NM, using his own secret couriers and informants, communicating with his brothers using codes for gold such as ‘fatman’, ‘fish’, ‘beer’ and ‘children’, was soon delivering not only British gold to Wellington but the subsidies to Russia, Prussia and Austria – £42 million between 1810 and 1815. Constantly in and out of Downing Street to see Liverpool, the prime minister, he raised the money on the markets that made Britain a world power.^*

As Wellington bled the French in Spain, Napoleon’s relations with Alexander were so strained that both were massing new armies. ‘But for my marriage with Marie, I never should have made war on Russia but I felt certain of the support of Austria …’ claimed Napoleon who decided to invade Russia.

ARABIAN CONQUESTS: MEHMED ALI AND THE SAUDIS

In Cairo, in 1811, at the height of Napoleon’s power in Europe, the pasha of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, invited 450 Mamluk amirs dressed in their yellow turbans, robes and chainmail, red pantaloons and red pointed slippers, to a ceremony at his divan in Saladin’s Citadel. He received them respectfully, but as they left through a passageway, its gates slammed shut and his troops slaughtered every one of them. As their heads were gathered, their households were raided, their women raped and a thousand more hunted down. He was master of Egypt.

The Ottoman sultan Mahmud II recognized Mehmed as Egyptian governor but set him a test that would kill two birds with one stone. Ever since 1517, the sultans had proudly guarded the hajj as Protectors of the Two Sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina, but now an obscure family of puritanical fanatics, from the deepest Najd, had stormed the cities. The family were the Saudis, who starting in 1744 as amirs of Diriyyah had made an alliance with the ascetic Sunni preacher Wahhab to liberate Islam from polytheism, magic, corruption and Shiite heresy, in order to reassert its origins. The Saudi amir Abdulaziz, who took Riyadh, accepted the allegiance of Qatar and Bahrain, then attempted to overthrow the al-Saids of Oman, dispatching an army under a black Nubian amir that failed to dislodge the family. In 1802, he sent his son Saud the Butcher into Ottoman Iraq, to storm the Shiite sanctuary of Karbala, where he massacred thousands of Shiites. Karbala was avenged when a Shiite stabbed Abdulaziz. The Butcher advanced into Hejaz, where he was resisted by Gahlib, amir of Mecca, one of the Hashemites descended from the Prophet: it was the start of a feud between the two first families of Islam that lasted into the twentieth century. The sultan ordered Mehmed to destroy the Saudis.

Mehmed’s son Tousson retook the Holy Cities but struggled to beat the Saudis, and became downhearted. ‘Don’t give up and don’t despair,’ advised the father, ‘for despair is a disgrace not befitting you.’ When Tousson died of the plague, Mehmed himself galloped into Arabia to counter-attack, assisted by his red-haired eldest son Ibrahim, possibly adopted, who had slaughtered the Mamluks. Ibrahim now proved a superb general, chasing the Saudis to Diriyyah, where he captured the young amir Abdullah and sent him to Constantinople. After being made to listen to the lute – a painful punishment for a Wahhabist – Abdullah was publicly beheaded. Everyone presumed they would never hear of the Saudis again.

Having added Arabia to his fiefdom, Mehmed now planned to conquer Sudan. At home, he embarked on visionary reforms, took personal ownership of Egyptian land, reformed the law, created schools for women, traded sugar and cotton – he micromanaged everything, his ambitions Napoleonic. ‘I’m well aware that the [Ottoman] empire is daily heading toward destruction,’ he said. ‘On its ruins, I’ll build a huge kingdom … up to the Euphrates and Tigris.’ In Paris, the Mehmed Ali of Europe was mustering the biggest army ever seen in Europe to conquer its biggest country.

NAPOLEON, MARIE AND MOSCOW: THE FRENCH ARE LIKE WOMEN – YOU MUSTN’T STAY AWAY TOO LONG

In May 1812, Napoleon left Marie Louise as regent in Paris, looking after the king of Rome, and invaded Russia with his multinational Grande Armée of 600,000. ‘The game’, he said, ‘is always with him who makes the fewest mistakes.’ Despite advice from those who knew better, Napoleon underestimated the vastness of Russia, the passion of Russian patriotism, the ferocity of Russian soldiery and the toughness of Alexander. Expecting Alexander to negotiate, he advanced deeper, the Russians retreating until the beleaguered tsar was forced to appoint a revered marshal, Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, an unflappable one-eyed veteran, to stand and fight. More men were killed in the few hours of grindingly bloody butchery at Borodino than in any engagement until the first day of the Somme in 1916. It was a stalemate, but Kutuzov retreated and abandoned Moscow.

Napoleon found himself in a deserted burning city, waiting for a surrender that never came.^* As brutal winter descended that October, he left Moscow and fought his way back across Russia before abandoning his men to save his throne. ‘The French are like women,’ he joshed. ‘You mustn’t stay away too long.’ Galloping across Europe, he reached Paris in December, having lost 524,000 men, more of them killed by typhus than by Russians.

‘What a career he’s ruined,’ Alexander exclaimed. ‘The spell is broken.’ Now it was Alexander’s turn for vengeance. Russia and Prussia joined a coalition funded by Britain, but Napoleon raised new armies and dazzled his gathering enemies with virtuoso manoeuvres. ‘Write to Papa François once a week,’ he told Marie, ‘send him military particulars and my affection.’ At Lützen in May 1813, after defeating the Russians and Prussians, he told her, ‘I am very tired, I’ve gained complete victory over … Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia.’ He added in a message to her father Franz that she ‘continues to please me in the extreme. She’s now my prime minister …’

Yet Franz, advised by his gifted but vain, neurotic, pleasure-loving minister Klemens von Metternich, was moving inexorably against his son-in-law. Blond, blue-eyed and cosmopolitan, Metternich was friendly with Napoleon, had slept with his sister Caroline Murat and had negotiated Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, but he was a believer in strategic balance, and he realized Napoleon would never accept compromise.

‘Metternich strikes me as an intriguer directing Papa François very badly,’ Napoleon told Marie, but he faced the dilemma of self-made warlords: ‘I owe everything to my glory. If I sacrifice it, I cease to be.’ In August 1813, the Habsburgs switched sides. ‘Deceived by Metternich, your father’s joined my enemies,’ he told his loyal wife. At Dresden he defeated Austrians, Prussians and Russians, informing Marie that ‘Papa François had the good sense not to come,’ while ‘Papa François’s troops have never been so bad.’ But at Leipzig in October, Napoleon’s 200,000 men were defeated by 300,000 Russians, Austrians and Swedes – the biggest European battle until the First World War. France was invaded by the coalition, led by Alexander from the east and Wellington from the south-west. Even the king and queen of Naples – Murat and his sister Caroline – betrayed Napoleon, while Talleyrand negotiated the restoration of the Bourbons in the obese shape of the guillotined king’s brother, Louis XVIII. ‘Treason,’ Talleyrand said, ‘is a matter of dates.’ As his house of cards collapsed, Napoleon admitted (like Louis XIV), ‘I’ve waged war too much.’ He reassured his anxious Marie, ‘I’m sorry to hear you are worrying. Cheer up and be gay. My health is perfect, my affairs, none too easy, aren’t in bad shape …’ But Marie was perhaps focused more on herself than on Napoleon’s crisis, writing in her diary as if she wondered what was keeping her husband so busy, ‘I have no news from the emperor. He is so casual in his ways. I can see he’s forgetting me.’

As a mark of the disintegration of the empire, in March 1813 Napoleon’s brother tried to seduce Empress Marie. ‘King Joseph’, she complained to Napoleon, ‘says very tiresome things to me.’

‘Don’t be too familiar with the King,’ Napoleon warned her. ‘Be cold to him … No intimacy … Talk to him only in the presence of the duchess and by a window.’ Later he confided, ‘All this depresses me rather; I need to be comforted by members of my family.’ He warned Joseph pathetically, ‘If you want the throne, take it … but leave me the heart and love of the empress,’ before instructing him, ‘Don’t allow the empress and the king of Rome to fall into enemy hands.’ Referring to the boy, he added grimly, ‘I’d sooner see him drowned in the Seine.’

As the allied armies surrounded Paris, Empress Marie fled, spoiling any chance of her baby king succeeding to the throne. Talleyrand assumed power. The Russians occupied Paris eighteen months after Parisians had occupied Moscow; Alexander had fought from Moscow to Paris, thus overseeing Russia’s emergence as a great power.^* The tsar stayed at Talleyrand’s mansion, joined by Wellington, newly minted duke. Alexander was charmed by the Empress Josephine; Wellington enjoyed the favours of the actresses who had once favoured Napoleon.

Lafayette arranged Napoleon’s exile to America. Instead, at Fontainebleau, Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son, who technically became Napoleon II, and accepted instead the title emperor of the small island of Elba, and for Empress Marie, the Italian duchy of Parma. ‘You’re to have … a beautiful country,’ he wrote. He hoped that ‘When you tire of Elba and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I’m older … you’ll be content with my ill-fortune if you … can still be happy sharing it.’ That night he attempted suicide with his poison kit, carried since Moscow.

WATERLOO: THE BRITISH CENTURY; NAPOLEON II AND THE RISE OF THE ROTHSCHILDS

After a night of vomiting, Napoleon survived. The Royal Navy delivered him to Elba, where he was soon joined by his mother and sister Pauline. Card games bored him.

‘You’re cheating, son,’ Madame Mère said.

‘You’re rich, mother,’ he replied. In Paris, Josephine died of pneumonia aged fifty, while his second empress, Marie, was scooped up by Austrian cavalry and reunited with her father. She still hoped to follow Napoleon to Elba. ‘I am in a very unhappy and critical position; I must be very prudent,’ she wrote. ‘There are moments when I think the best thing I could do is to die.’ Franz sent her and the infant ex-Napoleon II to Vienna, where she was assigned Count Adam von Neipperg, a one-eyed bravo, as chamberlain to prevent her joining Napoleon. ‘Within six months I’ll be her lover,’ Neipperg boasted, ‘and soon her husband.’ Marie fell in love with him – then fell pregnant.

Marie was soon joined in Vienna by the potentates and grifters of Europe as her father Emperor Franz and Chancellor Metternich presided over a congress to reorganize the continent. ‘When I arrived yesterday,’ wrote Metternich, ‘I found all Europe in my antechamber.’ The congress was the world’s biggest junket, a diplomatic summit, an interminable ball, a social carousel, a feast of gourmandism, a VD-infested super-brothel, attended by Alexander, Wellington, Talleyrand and hundreds of diplomats, spies, bankers, mountebanks and panders, as well as thousands of prostitutes and 18,000 members of the public, with a soundtrack by Beethoven: his ‘Wellington’s Victory’ was its anthem. It opened with a ball at the Hofburg for 10,000 guests.^*

Yet there were a hints of a new age. One of the favourite salons, attended by Metternich, Wellington and Talleyrand, was held by a sophisticated banker’s wife, Fanny von Arnstein, who was Jewish – a first for a salonnière. Metternich created one of the first secret-police bureaucracies to watch the players: these were soon essential tools of statehood. Baron Franz von Hager’s Oberste Polizei und Zensur Hofstelle employed an army of spies from princesses to the Grabennymphen, prostitutes of the streets: daily rapporte were presented to kaiser and chancellor. Metternich’s other indispensable aide was his publicist, Friedrich von Gentz. ‘The greatest evil is the press,’ Metternich told Gentz. But mass politics was on the threshold of the palace.

The exhausted grandees restored what they regarded as balance: the Habsburgs headed a German Confederation and secured northern Italy; the Romanovs were restored in Poland, the Bourbons in France; and outside Europe, Britain kept Cape Colony, and slave trading was abolished in the northern hemisphere.^* Just after the treaty was finally signed, the magnates received astonishing news.

In February 1815 Napoleon, infuriated by the failure to pay his pension and the diverting of Marie, escaped from Elba, rallied his veterans, who flocked to his banner unmoved by the fat, arrogant Louis XVIII, and retook Paris. He was at once declared ‘a disturber of the world’. He advanced into Belgium to knock out the Anglo-Prussians before the Austro-Russians arrived. He started well. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God,’ said Wellington, leaving Vienna to take command. On 18 June, at Waterloo, Napoleon, now forty-five, pot-bellied, dog-tired and haemorrhoidally aggravated,^* failed to master the battle and lost 25,000 men – more than at any other battle except Borodino.^* ‘A damned close-run thing,’ said Wellington.

Nathan Rothschild heard of Waterloo before Lord Liverpool, benefiting from his own intelligence network, but contrary to the myth that the Rothschilds made a fortune with the information, the quick victory wrongfooted him, exposing his holdings, just as the closing of the great French war ended his subsidy-delivery business. ‘I feel my spirits very low,’ Nathan told this brother Carl two weeks later. Their brother Salomon raised funds for Kaiser Franz and lent cash to Metternich (codenamed Uncle). Metternich was the first statesman to dine regularly with Jews chez Rothschild. In 1816, Emperor Franz elevated the brothers to the nobility, awarding the title baron, though he joked pointedly that they were ‘richer than I am’. Carl in Naples was advising the ex-empress Marie Louise; Amschel in Frankfurt covered Prussia; Nathan, ascetic and intense, directed the family from London.

The pleasures of family were their real treasure. ‘After dinner, I usually have nothing to do,’ Nathan wrote to Saloman in Vienna. ‘I don’t read books, I don’t play cards … My only pleasure is my business and in this way I read Amschel’s, Salomon’s, James’s and Carl’s letters.’ In 1806, Nathan had married a Dutch merchant’s daughter, Hannah Barent Cohen,^* with whom he had seven children and who described him as her ‘best friend’. Her sister Judith married an Italian immigrant, Moses Montefiore, a Sephardi banker, who lived next to Nathan and above the bullion business in St Swithin’s Lane in the City of London. They shared family and business, and increasingly collaborated in campaigns for Jewish rights and liberal reforms.

Nathan was expert at making bets on the future. ‘Mr Rothschild has been a very useful friend,’ said Liverpool, who was capable enough to remain prime minister for over fourteen years.^* The wars cost Britain much in blood and treasure, but ultimately they slowed the European economy – over three million died – but quickened the British. The war was the engine that drove British growth. And the Rothschilds provided the fuel: capital.

In Europe their judgement was just as acute. They lent money to Louis XVIII and Talleyrand. Months after trundling back into Paris, Louis sacked Talleyrand and failed to restrain a purge of Bonapartists. In Marseilles, 300 of Napoleon’s Mamluks were slaughtered in their barracks. After the assassination of the king’s nephew, thousands were prosecuted for supporting Napoleon – inspiring the story of Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte-Cristo. ‘They’ve learned nothing’, warned Talleyrand, ‘and forgotten nothing.’ The Rothschilds also supported the king’s liberal cousin Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans. ‘A court is always a court,’ said James de Rothschild, ‘and it always leads to something.’

In London, Nathan backed an urbane German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who, after spending time at the courts of Napoleon and Alexander, pulled off his marriage to the British heiress Princess Charlotte. But in 1817 she died after giving birth to a stillborn child. Leopold had no prospects, yet Salomon advised Nathan, ‘We should show even more friendship towards a man who fell on hard times than before.’ The death of Charlotte meant that the British succession now passed to one of the prince regent’s despicable brothers, the duke of Kent, who, marrying late, managed to father a girl, Victoria. But both the bets on Louis Philippe and Leopold would pay off.

In London, Nathan was trusted by all players from George IV (as the prince regent became in 1820)^* to Lord Liverpool and Wellington, the apex of the new nexus of finance, power and society, his standing enhanced when he helped rescue the Bank of England. But the Rothschilds’ success did not make them loved. They were the vanguard of newly emancipated Jews who, once hidden in the Judengasse counting houses, now thrived in a strange brash world of stock markets, factories, newspapers and bourgeois values, social-climbing their way into aristocratic drawing rooms and Christian families. The success spawned new strains of medieval anti-Jewish racism, partly jealousy at parvenu wealth, partly suspicion of power, encompassing both nationalist fervour and conservative fear.

Jews still faced discriminatory laws across Europe: they were increasingly persecuted in Russia, and even in Britain they could not be elected to Parliament, attend university or hold office. Nathan and his brother-in-law, Montefiore, campaigned for Jewish rights. However Olympian their social lives and however palatial their mansions, they were still family-minded observant Jews: of Nathan’s seven children, four married Rothschilds, one a Montefiore, another a cousin, and only one married out. But in 1827 Montefiore embarked on a dangerous visit to Jerusalem, now a half-deserted monumental village neglected by voracious Ottoman pashas, and there embraced a religious belief in the traditional Jewish dream of a return to Zion that dovetailed with a new Christian interest in the Holy City.

On 5 May 1821 while Metternich presided over the balance of power in Europe, a sickly retired soldier died in a damp house on the forsaken Atlantic island of St Helena and no one cared. ‘Not an event,’ quipped Talleyrand. ‘Just news.’ As the fifty-one-year-old Bonaparte succumbed to stomach cancer, three conquerors – south, east and north – were founding new African empires.

SHAKA ZULU, MOSHOESHOE AND DONA FRANCISCA: THE MFECANE

In 1816, Shaka bewitched his father, nkosi (king) of the minor Zulu chiefdom of the White Mfolozi River, an Ngumi people of southern Africa,^* then, on his death, killed his half-brother, the rightful successor, and claimed the throne. Shaka was mercurial, creative and charismatic, but ultimately even his own family regarded him as terrifying and unpredictable.

He was the unplanned, perhaps unwanted, eldest son of King Senzangakona, and a chief’s daughter, Nandi – Sweet. When Senzangakona succeeded to the throne, he married many times and fathered eighteen sons, resenting his first son. Nandi and Shaka fled, protected by the king’s sister, Mnkabayi, a shrewd power broker who became arbiter of the kingdom in a culture where female power was respected. Nandi remarried, while Shaka, bitter and alienated, returned to his father’s household. When it was clear he was going to make trouble the father decided to kill him.

Shaka fled into the wider world, which was divided between two Nguni kingdoms – Mthethwa led by King Dingiswayo and the Ndwandwe under King Zwide – who were already locked in a deadly rivalry that would explode into a broader conflict, the Mfecane – the Crushing. Aged twenty-two, Shaka joined King Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, who, declaring ‘there should be one great king to exercise control over the little ones’, recognized the potential in the bastard prince and promoted him to commander; Shaka soon became known as Dingiswayo’s Hero. Together they plotted for Shaka to seize the Zulu chiefdom. In 1816, when his father visited, Shaka arranged the bewitchment, a powerful tool in Nguni society, that led to Senzangakona’s death. The king was succeeded by a younger son, Sigujana. Dingiswayo lent Shaka a regiment so that he was able to put Sigujana to death. His aunt Mnkabayi, acting as his regent, arranged his invitation to become nkosi of the small Zulu realm. Shaka danced the ukugiya, washed in the royal enclosure and then emerged to be hailed nkosi. But in 1818 Zwide attacked and killed Dingiswaya, telling Shaka, ‘Now I’ve removed your head, why don’t you just bring the whole body before me, or I’ll chuck the body into the River Thukela.’

‘The body had two heads like the great river snake Nkanyamba,’ replied Shaka. ‘You’re just too stupid to see the other one.’

Shaka expanded his own kingdom, training a new army using the methods he had developed with his patron: swift manoeuvring by intensively drilled regiments behind walls of shields, commanded by himself, to act like the horns of cattle in battles of envelopment. They used both the traditional long spear and the mace, but also a new short stabbing spear. They had no horses, which died after being bitten by the tsetse fly, and no rifles, which they disdained. Shaka demanded celibacy from his active troops, who were trained to fight barefoot, hardened by dancing on devil-thorns. Any disobedience was punished with death. Creating a hierarchical nation with his family at the top, and conquered nations further down, he fostered an esprit de corps in the Zulus, parading his amabutho – regiments – who danced in animal skins singing ‘You’re a wild animal! A leopard! A lion!’, believing they were the People of the Sky empowered by the gods and the spirits of ancestors. Witches could take control of a person by procuring snippets of the body, fingernails or hair or urine – so these had to be carefully disposed of. After battle, warriors risked contamination from their enemies, whose bodies were therefore disembowelled to cleanse the killer. No prisoners were taken. ‘Let no one remain alive,’ said Shaka, ‘not even a dog or a child on its mother’s back.’

In 1819, Shaka defeated King Zwide, who escaped to Mozambique.^* The Zulu killed Zwide’s mother by sealing her in a hut with ravening hyenas.

Shaka moved on to new conquests. The king was not regarded as handsome – his head ‘peculiar’, his eyes red, with two prominent teeth and a way of laughing ‘outside his mouth’, his body unusually hirsute – and he was aware of it. ‘Though it’s said I’m in the habit of killing people, never will I kill you,’ he menacingly told a handsome warrior. ‘Were I to do so, Zulus would laugh at me, saying I’d killed you for being handsome and because I’m ugly.’ Later he ordered Europeans to bring him Macassar hair oil to dye his beard and hair black.

In his various capitals, he lived among hundreds of women – senior wives and his isigodlo of concubines, who styled their hair in topknots and wore short leather pleated skirts and carved ivory earplugs. Shaka ‘was a man of great feeling and used frequently from grief or excessive joy to burst into a crying fit’. He fathered no known children, though that may have been deliberate; those who got pregnant were ordered to abort or be killed. On most mornings, after being shaved, he came out and summoned his commanders and addressed the people. ‘Do you hear the king?’ shouted his courtiers.

‘Yes, Father!’ Healers (sangoma) and diviners (izangoma) were consulted to ‘smell out’ evil wizards: if they were clever, they divined Shaka’s wishes; but if they pointed out his favourites, he had the diviners killed. When he pointed with his staff saying, ‘Kill the wizards,’ the victims were dragged off to be impaled through their bowels and then smashed with a cudgel or had their necks broken, while women were strangled. ‘See vultures flying above,’ Shaka cried. ‘Wu! The birds of the king are hungry.’ He was said to have eviscerated a pregnant woman to ‘see how her child lay’ – stories that are told by more than one source and may have been true. The cruelties were becoming more capricious. His half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana and his powerful aunt watched him closely. Even his mother Nandi, the Great She-Elephant (female monarch), questioned his excesses.

As Shaka’s conquests intensified the Mfecane, he was just one player in a multi-ethnic tournament for power and resources. To the north-east, the Portuguese forged a unique model of European empire. Portuguese kings granted titles and estates to Luso-African warlords, the prazo senhors, who ruled alongside African magnates.^* These Luso-African lords – the prazeiros, commanding private armies of African colonos and chicundas (slave-soldiers) – hunted deeper into Africa for cattle, slaves and ivory to sell in Lourenço Marques (Mozambique); further north, Omani and Swahili slave traders hacked their way into central Africa, selling their captives around the Indian Ocean as Mehmed Ali raided into Sudan. To the south, the mixed-race Griqua raided into the northern Cape; Xhosa kings conquered the east Cape; and behind them came the Dutch and the British.

The Dutch traders of the VOC had founded Cape Town, where they settled thousands of poor Boers – farmers, devout Calvinists – who soon encountered the hunter-gatherer Khoikhoi (Bushmen or Hottentots to the Europeans), descended from the original inhabitants of the continent, pushed southwards by the Bantu who migrated from west Africa. The Dutch imported slaves from Dahomey, Angola and Mozambique to work their plantations while breaking the Khoikhoi, who, crushed between Bantu and Dutch, decimated by smallpox and reduced to indentured labour close to slavery, almost ceased to exist. The settlers, who called themselves Afrikaners, expanded northwards and eastwards, thus encountering the Nguni, herders of long-horned cattle, who were moving south conquering their own kingdoms.

The Afrikaners developed into skilled frontiersmen, who raided the herds and hunted elephants for ivory, but they also settled with African women with whom they had children, sometimes living more like Nguni royalty than Europeans. They became expert fighters in mounted units called commandos, and trained their mixed-race sons to serve as auxiliary fighters. When the British seized the Cape, it was a colony of 75,000 people – 15,000 semi-hostile Afrikaners, 13,000 black slaves, 1,200 freedmen and the rest mixed-race Khoikhoi-Dutch Griqua, known as the ‘Bastards’. As new British settlers arrived in the Cape, moving north and eastwards, they encountered resistance from the amaXhosa kingdom led by Tshawe warrior kings Ngqika, Hintsa and Mgolombane Sandile. The Xhosa were formidable fighters whose acumen is often neglected by historians: they halted the British empire for seventy years.

Now in 1818 as the British were fighting the amaXhosa under Hintsa, a group of frontiersmen founded Port Natal on the east coast and travelled to Shaka’s capital kwaBulawayo. The king mocked their strange fair hair – comparing it to cattle tails – but granted them rights to the port and recruited them as military advisers. Yet Shaka’s conquests were reaching their limit.

In 1824, while the British hunters were still in his kraal, Shaka was dancing when a would-be assassin speared him in the side. Shaka hunted down the hitmen, who were beaten to a pulp by the people, then he massacred the Qwabe tribe whom he decided to blame – though he rightly distrusted his own family. In 1827, his mother Nandi died mysteriously. She had disapproved of his purges, and may have protected a male baby born of his concubines: he either killed her in a rage or had her killed, like Nero. She was buried as Zulu royalty, sitting up supported by the bodies of sacrificed henchmen, servants and concubines, strangled or buried alive. Killing anyone suspected of disloyalty, Shaka supposedly killed 7,000 people. After Nandi’s death he appointed his aunt Mnkabayi as Great She-Elephant.

As the British and Afrikaners probed Zulu lands, and Shaka launched his terror, southern Africa was in ferment. In 1828, needing another victory, Shaka ordered an expedition against Soshangane, formerly one of Zwide’s generals, who led the tribe founded by his grandfather Gaza eastwards to find their own realm. Emulating many of Shaka’s military tactics, Soshangane routed the Zulus, weakening Shaka. ‘I’m like a wolf on the plain, at a loss for a place to hide his head in,’ Shaka said, encouraging the diviners to smell out witches among his half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana. Great She-Elephant Mnkabayi began to suggest that he was mad and had killed his mother. But while he was protected by his devoted inceku (warrior/bodyguard) Mbopha, no one could touch him.

Less meteoric than Shaka but more remarkable was Moshoeshoe, born the same year as the Zulu, leader of the Sotho, herdsmen who suffered bitterly from predations by Nguni and Griqua. Moshoeshoe led his Sotho on a perilous migration to the Qiloane plateau (Lesotho) where he created a stronghold – the Night Mountain, said to grow in the day and shrink in the night – where he withstood attacks by all his rival leaders to create a rich cattle-owning kingdom. Cleverly exploiting the British, he offered himself as a balance to Afrikaners and Zulus, buying rifles and hiring a French missionary, Eugène Casalis, as consigliere.

In a fifty-year reign (it ended in 1870), Moshoeshoe defeated the British, Afrikaners, Zulus and Ndebele. More humane and constructive than Shaka, he was ‘majestic and benevolent. His aquiline profile, the fullness and regularity of his features, his eyes a little weary made a deep impression upon me,’ wrote Casalis. ‘I felt at once I was dealing with a superior man, trained to think, to command others and, above all, himself.’ Out of these wars emerged the present shape of southern Africa.^*

Further north, an ex-general of King Zwide and cousin of Shaka, Zwangendaba, led his Ndwandwe on a 1,000-mile trek through Mozambique and Zimbabwe that took fifteen years. After the Zambezi parted for them during an eclipse, they ended by settling in today’s Tanzania where an Omani sultan, Said the Great, was conquering an empire from Somalia to Mozambique, from Kenya to Pakistan.

It all started with two Arab sheikhs duelling with daggers in the Arabian desert.

EMPIRE BUILDERS OF EAST AFRICA: MEHMED ALI AND SAID

In 1832, Said bin Sultan, sultan of Oman, moved his capital to Africa, creating his court on Zanzibar, where he built a palace, Bait al-Mtoni. His rise had started two decades earlier when his father was assassinated; his cousin Badr was appointed regent, backed by the Saudis. In 1806 Said lured the regent to his desert fortress and then ambushed him. The al-Said princes duelled to the death – and the teenaged Said won. As the bleeding Badr staggered into the desert, Said’s cameleteers beheaded him.

Having sliced up his cousin, Said seized Muscat, which his father had helped make one of the entrepôts of the Indian Ocean, then set about the conquest of the Swahili coast of Africa. The al-Said family already owned Zanzibar, which Said had visited as a child. He built a thalassocratic empire, taking Pemba in 1823. In the Gulf he took Bahrain and Qatar but failed to keep them. He then seized the ports of Gwadar (Pakistan) and Bandar Abbas and Hormuz (Iran). In 1837, he seized Mombasa.

But there was a problem: slavery. Said sold slaves to Indian princes, and French planters in Réunion and Mauritius, and kept some for his own cloves plantations. Afro-Omanis hacked their way into the African interior on murderous elephant and slave hunts around Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, into Uganda and Congo. At Kazeh (Tanzania), the Zanzibari slave lords lived sultanically with slaves and concubines, ruling their own Congolese fiefdoms. Later in Said’s rule, Tippu Tip, the twenty-year-old son of an aristocratic Omani mother and Swahili father, led a hundred gunmen into Africa to launch his career as slaving warlord, trader of cloves and much later a player in the European carve-up of Africa.

In 1820, understanding that the British craved security for India, Sultan Said negotiated an alliance with Britain in return for a personal exception to the slaving ban.

The Omani also sold slaves to his northern neighbour Mehmed Ali, who had rescued Oman from the predations of the Saudis and was now determined to conquer his own African empire. In 1820, Mehmed sent an expedition under his son Ismail to destroy the kingdom of Sennar and conquer Sudan. ‘You’re aware your mission has no other aim than to gather negroes,’ Mehmed told Ismail. ‘Slaves are worth more than jewels to us.’

Holding court in his half-lit Cairene divan like ‘a spider in a web’, Mehmed Ali Pasha cultivated an air of mystery, staring at his visitors, speaking portentously. ‘The only books I read,’ he said, ‘are men’s faces.’ Setting up his own printing press, he refused to print Machiavelli, joking that the Italian ‘had nothing to teach him’. He ran everything, promoting his sons but beheading any opposition.^*

Mehmed Ali founded Khartoum in Sudan as his southern base, whence his henchmen seized 30,000 slaves of whom two-thirds perished as they were being driven northwards ‘like sheep with the rot’. His rash son Ismail was killed, but Egyptian raids were now delivering 10,000 Sudanese slaves annually. Yet Mehmed Ali, ruler of Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, coveted Europe’s new technologies, cultivating cotton and building mills to process it – the first non-European state to join the industrial revolution. He invited French officers to train his modern army, modelling himself on Napoleon while cultivating a special relationship with Bourbon Paris – where the weary, bloated Louis XVIII struggled to compete with the glory of Napoleon. The legend of the emperor grew. After Waterloo, Napoleon’s Marie Louise set off with Neipperg to rule Parma, where she secretly bore him children, but she was ordered to leave her young son Napoleon in Vienna.

The boy was given a new name: having been both king of Rome and Napoleon II, his grandfather Franz renamed him Napoleon-Franz, duke of Reichstadt.^* Worshipping his father, he was shocked to discover his mother’s love life with Neipperg. ‘If Josephine had been my mother,’ he told a friend, ‘my father wouldn’t have been buried on St Helena, and I wouldn’t be in Vienna. My mother is kind but weak … not the wife my father deserved.’

Napoleon-Franz trained as a soldier but his grandfather and Chancellor Metternich were terrified that he could rally Bonapartists in France or revolutions elsewhere. In 1814, Tsar Alexander had conceived a conservative alliance to guide a rules-based Europe – an autocratic version of the UN Security Council – with Metternich and Lord Liverpool’s Britain, to crush the spread of revolutionary spirit. Or at least, as Metternich put it, ‘Events that can’t be prevented must be directed.’

Yet Metternich and his allies struggled to hold the line in Iberia: one of the peninsula’s kings, João, was in Rio, while the other, the inept king of Spain, Fernando, was trying to restore absolute rule. Fifteen years earlier, the sixteen-year-old Fernando had played tennis with a skinny colonial boy from Caracas, Simón Bolívar, aged seventeen, who, losing a point, hit the prince of Asturias over the head. ‘Who’d have guessed that this accident was a harbinger,’ Bolívar later boasted, ‘and I would rip the most precious jewel from his crown?’ The ‘jewel’ was America – and Bolívar, along with two Haitian monarchs and a Brazilian prince, would liberate a continent and open an era.

* The author of the Haitian Declaration of Independence was the first Haitian intellectual, Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, a carpenter’s son who had been educated in France, known as Tonnerre (Thunder) because his cradle had been hit by lightning. He encouraged the massacre: ‘For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!’ One of the killers was Jean Zombi, whose name spread the spectre of ‘zombies’ in western imaginations. The idea of zombies derived from west Africa, particularly Dahomey, where nothing was so terrifying as the undead deadness of slavery: the enslaved, it was believed, became half dead but still alive. Zombi’s killings reversed the sorcery. The only whites spared were the Poles in the French army, whom Dessalines, aware of the Russian massacres of Poles in Warsaw, called ‘the White Negroes of Europe’.

* Across the world, in Britain’s penal colony in Australia, a military coup had just taken place. Since the foundation of the colony, the Wales Corps had served as a garrison, increasingly trading in ‘rum’ – wheat-based booze from Bengal. With a shortage of coins, this moonshine was used as currency. When a new governor, Admiral Bligh, who had accompanied Captain Cook then survived a mutiny on his ship Bounty, became governor, he tried to end the commercial dealings of the so-called Rum Corps. In 1808, irate soldiers marched on Government House, arrested Bligh and seized power, which they held for two years – the first military coup in the British empire since Cromwell. When a new governor arrived, civilian power was restored and the corps was disbanded.

* Queen Marie Louise was a half-sister of Cécile Fatiman, the voodoo mambo who had started the rebellion in 1790.

* Jefferson decided to drop his vice-president, Aaron Burr, from the ticket. When Burr ran for New York governor, his old ally Hamilton called him an ‘unprincipled voluptuary’ and backed his opponent. Burr lost. On 11 July 1804, the men met to duel for their honour: Hamilton fired in the air but Burr shot him lethally in the stomach, shattering his liver. Burr fled but was never tried. Instead, rejected by the republic he had helped create, he planned to found an empire in the south-west, carved out of the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Mexico. The details are murky, yet he probably imagined himself as emperor. If it seems preposterous now, this was a time when an obscure Corsican had made himself emperor of Europe. But when he approached the US commander, the latter informed Jefferson, who backed his prosecution. When Burr was acquitted, he left America, travelling in Europe, returning only in old age.

* Kamehameha married for both love and prestige: he married Keopuolani, daughter of King Kiwalao, whom he had sacrificed, but they lived separately. She had fourteen children, four by the king, ten by her lovers. But his chief adviser was his favourite, Queen Kaʻahumanu, funny, clever and weighing 500 pounds, whom he appointed regent.

* This Francisco de Miranda was one of the most extraordinary characters of his time. Born into privilege – until his father, a Spaniard noble who migrated to Caracas, was denounced for having impure (Jewish) blood; ultimately his father’s certificate of limpieza de sangre was confirmed but the disgusted young Miranda left Caracas, fighting for Spain, travelling to America where he befriended Washington and Jefferson, and to Russia, where he charmed Catherine and Potemkin, before fighting for the French revolution then being imprisoned by Robespierre. Surviving the Terror, he travelled for a decade to promote his vision of a revolt against Spain to create a united south America under a hereditary Inca, advised by himself.

* In February 1811, George III, increasingly blind and bewildered and heartbroken after the death of his daughter Amelia from TB, became permanently mad. Perceval activated the Regency Act; Prince George became prince regent. Like many a young radical, the prince had become more conservative with age. When Perceval was assassinated by a lunatic, he appointed the earl of Liverpool as prime minister, betraying his furious Whig friends. When the regent cut his former pals Beau Brummell and Lord Alvanley at a ball, Beau delivered the best put-down in royal history: ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’ Living in French exile for another twenty years, Brummell died half mad and penniless.

* Amid the bleakness, only the flashy courage of Marshal Murat, king of Naples, raised French morale – ‘a stage king in the studied elegance of his attire’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘a real king in his bravery and inexhaustible activity’. Easily ‘recognized by his dress’, recalled Napoleon, ‘he was a regular target for the enemy, and the Cossacks used to admire him on account of his astonishing bravery’.

* Napoleon had tried to create a European empire; Russia and Britain too were building empires but against much weaker opponents outside the core of Europe. Britain’s triumph at Trafalgar was to confine Napoleon within Europe, where he had to fight the most powerful militaries in the world. Now full victory over Napoleon propelled Britain to world eminence: by not seeking European hegemony, merely enforcing a balance of power, it could deploy its relatively small population and formidable resources of naval power and industry in an aggressive pursuit of world empire. The victory also granted Russian tsardom a confidence that masked its primitive weakness. Nonetheless 1814 along with 1945 are the moments of Russian imperial triumph. In April 1945, when Soviet troops liberated Berlin from the Nazis, US ambassador Averell Harriman congratulated Stalin. ‘Yes,’ replied the dictator, ‘but Alexander took Paris.’

* The diplomacy was negotiated in ballrooms and bedrooms, particularly in the Palm Palace where two female grandees held court. Metternich was in love with an intelligent, libertine potentate, Wilhelmine, duchess of Sagan, whose lands were in the Russian sphere; Alexander tormented the chancellor by sleeping with her. Metternich’s own part-time affair with the White Pussycat, the Russian princess Catherine Bagration, also known as the Naked Angel thanks to her see-through dresses and concupiscent techniques, was ruined when she switched to Alexander, feeding him intelligence. Metternich wept with frustration. Talleyrand was accompanied by his niece-mistress Dorothea, later duchess of Dino, thirty-nine years his junior, who supported his restoration of France while juggling her own young lovers.

* In the east, a young EIC conquistador, Stamford Raffles, son of an EIC sea captain born at sea, had just defeated French–Dutch forces and taken Java. In 1815, when the Dutch lost the Cape but kept the East Indies, Raffles, a fluent Malay-speaker, persuaded the weak sultan of Johor to cede to Britain a strategic island which Raffles developed into a thriving colony: Singapore.

* ‘My brother,’ he wrote to King Jérôme in 1807, ‘I hear you suffer from piles. The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented since.’

* The bodies were, like all of the 500,000 or so killed in Napoleonic battles, stripped naked, often by their own comrades while dying. Then scavengers extracted teeth with pliers and sold them to denture makers – ‘Waterloo Teeth’ being especially popular – and collected bones that they sold to bone grinders to use as fertilizer.

* Ironically for the royal family of capital, Barent Cohen’s first cousin was Karl Marx’s grandmother.

* Bland and managerial, Liverpool was also part Indian, Britain’s only mixed-race premier. His grandmother was the part-Indian, four-times-married Frances ‘Begum’ Johnson, daughter of a Portuguese-Indian Isabella Beizor and a British governor of St David’s (Chennai) – it was a time when many Britons in India married Indian women. Frances’s daughter Amelia married Charles Jenkinson, first earl of Liverpool, but died aged nineteen giving birth to the future prime minister.

* When the deluded George IV boasted that he had led a charge at Waterloo, Wellington semi-tactfully replied, ‘I have often heard Your Majesty say so.’

* The name Zulu derived from a warlord, Zulu kaMalandela who had founded the tribe a century earlier. Zulu meant heaven or sky and they called themselves Abantu Bezulu – the People of the Sky.

* The northern Nguni included the Zulus and Swazis; the southern became the Xhosa peoples. In the Mfecane, their leader Ngubengcuka, related to Zwide, led his clan south into the eastern Cape, where he founded the kingdom of abeThembu, before dying in 1832. The children of his junior wife were the Mandelas. Nelson Mandela was his great-grandson.

* When the men died, the estates were inherited by female mixed-race potentates: in Zambezia (parts of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique) these Luso-Africans were known as the Zambezi donas. Dona Francisca de Moura Meneses was a mixed-race heiress who, born in 1738, ruled a massive Zambezian estate, owning several thousand slaves, presiding over many thousands of free Africans and deploying a private army that at times threatened the Portuguese governor. The Africans called her Chiponda – She Who Tramples All Underfoot. There was no equivalent of the Zambezi donas back home in Europe, let alone in any other empire.

* Mosheshoe’s family still rules Lesotho. Shaka accused Mzilikazi, a grandson of Zwide, of keeping cattle prizes for himself. The punishment was death. Mzilikazi escaped with his Ndebele clan into Transvaal and then Zimbabwe, where his Matabele kingdom confronted the Shona: the two tribes dominate Zimbabwe today. Shoshangane turned his victory into the Gaza kingdom in southern Mozambique, forcing the Afro-Portuguese prazeiros to pay tribute. Sobhuza, ruler of the Dlamini, also migrated to avoid Shaka, founding Swaziland (Eswatini), named after his son and successor Mswati. It likewise is still ruled by his family.

* It ran in the family. When Mehmed Ali’s daughter Nazli noticed her husband flirting with a female slave, she presented him with the slave’s head on a platter. The husband walked out and Mehmed Ali ordered one of his grandsons, Abbas, to execute Nazli, but Abbas persuaded him to let her live.

* His closest friendship, possibly a love affair, was with Sophie, the high-spirited, ambitious Bavarian princess married to Emperor Franz’s dull son Franz Karl. Her eldest son, Franz Josef, was a future emperor whose reign would extend into the First World War.