The World

The Houses of Solomon and Asante, Habsburg and Saxe-Coburg

SALAMA, PRINCESS OF ZANZIBAR, AND KING CORPSES OF KATANGA

On 24 December 1871, at his Cairo opera house, Ismail the Magnificent presided over the premiere of the opera Aida for which he had paid Verdi 150,000 francs. Its story of an Ethiopian princess captured and enslaved by an Egyptian paladin was not completely fictional. Ismail was determined to conquer east Africa, starting with Ethiopia. The European scramble for Africa was in many ways kicked off by the ruler of Egypt.^* To win western support, he backed the anti-slavery crusade, sending armies southwards to seize Darfur (Sudan). Although Atlantic slavery had diminished, it was booming within Africa. African and Arab potentates and, so far, a motley scattering of Europeans, were all players in a tournament of power and resources. In the west of the continent, the caliphs and slave masters of Sokoto owned 2.5 million slaves – a quarter of the region’s population;^* in eastern Africa, the mayhem was intensifying.

On the death of the remarkable Omani sultan, Said, conqueror of an African–Arabian empire, in 1856, his sultanate of Zanzibar and Oman was split between two sons: one ruled Oman, while the other, Sultan Majid, backed by the British, took Zanzibar and much of Kenya and Tanzania, dispatching slave-hunting and ivory-collecting raids deep into the continent. East African slavery now reached its height. In the course of the nineteenth century, 1.6 million slaves, two-thirds of them women, were traded to Arab and Indian masters; 60,000 slaves annually were traded to the Mkunazini slave market in Zanzibar, confined in seventy-five hellish slave chambers.

In Zanzibar itself, where 100,000 slaves toiled, Majid enjoyed massive income from slaves, cloves and ivory, converting a Confederate warship, the Shenandoah, into a luxurious yacht, the Majid. But the sultan’s younger brother Bargush loathed the rising British influence and in 1859 planned a coup, assisted by his fifteen-year-old sister, Salama bint Said.^* This failed, but Bargush succeeded as sultan anyway; he bought steamships and founded his own shipping line between Africa and India. While he agreed to close the Mkunazini slave market, he secretly profited from the slave raiding and empire building of a fearsome phalanx of warlords, some African, some Arab, others European, all trading in slaves who were used to carry an even more valuable merchandise: ivory.^*

One Omani–Zanzibari warlord, Tippu Tip, hacked out an empire of 250,000 square miles. He was ‘a tall, black bearded man, of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick’, wrote a journalist. ‘He had a fine intelligent face, with a nervous twitching of the eyes,’ always dressed in dazzling white with a silver filigreed dagger. He had a dictum: ‘Slaves cost nothing; they have only to be gathered.’ When a boatload of enslaved women and children were lost over a waterfall, he just said, ‘What a pity – it was a fine canoe.’

Not all the slave trade was in the hands of Arabs: two Nyamwezi warlords ruled swathes of Congo for decades. One of those warlords, Mytela Kasanda, fought the Omanis, adopting the name Mirambo – Corpses – and leading his ruga-ruga militiamen who wore shirts of flayed human skin, caps of human scalps, belts of human intestines and teeth necklaces. His rival Msiri ruled his Yeke kingdom in Katanga, armed by his Afro-Portuguese ally Coimbra from Angola whose elegant sister, Maria de Fonseca, was a player in her own right. Msiri married his daughter to Tippu Tip to confirm their alliance.

In the south-east, the chief potentate was Mutesa, kabaka (king) of Buganda (Uganda), a strapping but psychotic dictator, his body embellished with copper rings and jewellery, who held court for thirty years from 1856 at a royal capital of huge huts, attended by his mother, 400 wives, ministers and executioners, deploying a vast army and a fleet of canoes that traded ivory and slaves. Winning power aged nineteen with a family massacre, Mutesa, whose dynasty had ruled for two centuries, maintained his dominance with capricious killings and tortures, sanctified by seasonal human sacrifices of 800 victims.

Ruling around two million people, the kabaka played off Muslims and Christians, Zanzibaris and Egyptians, as he expanded his kingdom. Further south, a fearsome Goan warlord, Manuel de Souza, known as Gouveia, leveraged his uncle’s plantations into a personal slaving and ivory fief in Portuguese Zambezia, building a private African army and taking over the Gasa kingdom to become Lord of Manica; he married the daughter of a Barue king, their son becoming heir to the throne. All of these were slave states locked in a frenzied spasm of predatory wars for land, slaves and ivory that now attracted the biggest African power: Egypt.

ISMAIL AND TEWODROS: THE BATTLE FOR EAST AFRICA

After taking Sudan, Ismail pushed further into central Africa, annexing Equatoria (northern Uganda), where as governor he hired General ‘Chinese’ Gordon, last seen fighting the Taiping for Empress Cixi. Even though Ismail was a slave lord, Gordon took the job to fight slavery.

Then Ismail turned to Ethiopia, a vast multi-ethnic region divided up into Christian kingdoms and Islamic sultanates, nominally ruled by a negus negust, king of kings – or emperor – of the Christian dynasty, claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, though certainly descended from its medieval founder Menelik. In 1855, a minor nobleman, Kassa Hailu, conquered the kingdoms of Tigray, Gojjam, Showa and Wollo, imprisoned their Solomonic princes in his mountain fortress Magdala and crowned himself Negus Negust Tewodros II. ‘Of medium stature but possessing a well-knit muscular frame capable of enduring any amount of fatigue’, Tewodros had ‘a noble bearing and a majestic walk, and he was the best shot, the best spearman, the best runner, and the best horseman’.

At his Magdala eyrie, he favoured one prisoner, a young Showan prince named Sahle Maryam – later known as Menelik – to whom he married his daughter. Menelik had revered Tewodros, ‘who educated me, for whom I’d always cherished filial, deep affection’. After the death of Tewodros’s beloved wife, the emperor started to unravel. Menelik escaped, while Tewodros tossed his prisoners off a cliff, then killed and tortured many more. In 1862, the erratic emperor requested British aid against Muslim potentates and, when it was not forthcoming, he imprisoned British envoys and missionaries. Disraeli dispatched 13,000 troops under Sir Robert Napier, quintessential soldier of empire, who had fought Sikhs, Indians and Chinese. In April 1868, Napier defeated Tewodros outside Magdala, killing 900 Ethiopians to two British losses after which the desperate emperor released his British hostages, threw his Ethiopian prisoners off the precipice and then, as Napier stormed the fortress, shot himself. Rewarded with a peerage, Lord Napier of Magdala looted Ethiopian treasures but withdrew^* as rival princes led by Menelik of Showa and Kasa Mercha of Tigray vied for the throne. Kasa won, and was crowned Yohannes IV.

This British raid was covered by an American journalist who chronicled the predations of British soldiers, but now fell in love with Africa and came to personify the spirit of European adventure and exploitation: Henry Morton Stanley. In fact he was neither American nor called Stanley; he was born John Rowlands, an illegitimate Welsh boy, abandoned by his mother and raised in workhouses. At eighteen, he sailed for America, adopted a new name, worked on Mississippi riverboats, fought for both the Confederacy and the Union, then, embracing sensationalist war journalism, was hired by the New York Herald to cover Napier’s little African war.

Stanley ignored African history and culture, calling it ‘unpeopled country’ and seeing it as a blank canvas, a commercial opportunity, a fantastical arena for this mendacious and indefatigable adventurer to display Victorian machismo and defy ‘that shallow life which thousands lead in England where a man isn’t permitted to be real and natural’. Now he needed a greater story.

His famous contemporary, the indomitable missionary Dr David Livingstone, was lost, feared dead. Stanley, still in his late twenties, proposed to his editor-proprietor in New York City to manufacture his own newspaper sensation: by finding Livingstone.

Livingstone was already celebrated for a different approach to Africa, where he had led a typically Victorian mission to spread Christianity, destroy east African slave lords and find the origins of the Zambezi and Nile. He too was an attention-seeker, a humourless and obsessional self-made man, a working-class Glaswegian, now a father of five who was bored at home and craved the solitary, righteous drama of his missions. Starting as a missionary in South Africa aged twenty-seven, he was restless and tireless, becoming the ‘explorer’ who travelled across the continent (a feat hailed in the British press, though two slave-trading pombeiros had crossed Africa in 1806). Seething within Livingstone was a Victorian cult of death: ‘Am I to be a martyr to my own cause?’ The booming newspapers of London and New York followed his exploits, the ladies attended his lectures. His abolitionist passion was noble and genuine but it was linked to his own vanity and his conviction that opening Africa to ‘commerce’ – British business – was the best antidote to slavery.

Many of the African ‘adventurers’, mostly British and French, believed in a ‘civilizing mission’ based on racist views of African inferiority; and even before the states arrived, it was hard to differentiate between Christian missionaries, scientific-geographic explorers and empire builders, mercantile adventurers, predatory mercenaries and sex tourists – but they were all risk-takers. Their journeys were often lethal. When Stanley later crossed Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Congo, some 7,000 miles, every white member of his party (except himself) and 173 Africans perished.

In 1866, Livingstone set off from the east African coast with just thirty-five bearers to find the source of the Nile, but found himself in an imbroglio of war and slave hunting in which his men died or deserted. He was driven by his Nilotic obsession: ‘The Nile sources are valuable only as a means to enable me to open my mouth with power among men … to remedy an enormous evil.’ At the mercy of slave lords, almost out of supplies, he somehow survived, although suffering dysentery. The news of his vanishing fascinated the world.

In March 1871 Stanley set off to ‘rescue’ Livingstone, accompanied by columns of African bearers and a formidable arsenal, as he played the warlord, fighting his way through conflicts between African and Arab slavers, picking off passing Africans with his rifle. At last, in November, he found the lost explorer in a setpiece of myth-making imperial adventure. ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ said Stanley, initiating this encounter of noble mission and shameless hucksterism. Toothless and emaciated, Livingstone was by then ‘just a ruckle of bones’. Stanley rushed back to file his story, and Livingstone, characteristically, insisted on pushing on towards the Nilotic source, dying of dysentery.

Yet Stanley’s story made him world famous. More importantly it publicized the ‘great human woe’ of east Africa’s slave trade, leading the British public to demand its abolition, a campaign that would – along with imperial ambition – draw in the European powers. London sent the navy to intercept slave traders and forced Sultan Bargush of Zanzibar to cease the trade.

After this sensation, Stanley travelled to west Africa where a British expedition demonstrated how, for the first time, new technological and scientific advances made a European advance into internal Africa feasible. In the four centuries since the Portuguese had built Elmina, Europeans had rarely attempted to conquer the interior, except for the Anglo-Dutch in the Cape and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. They remained confined to the coast, restrained by terrain, climate and above all malaria and yellow fever, which killed most Europeans. In 1824, a British attempt to challenge the kingdom of Asante ended with the British governor’s head served as a goblet for the asantehene. Only around 5 per cent of Africa had been colonized. That was about to change dramatically: telegraph speeded up communications; steamships meant troops could be concentrated; new weaponry delivered devastating firepower; and, the game changer, the availability of quinine, found in the bark of the Andean cinchona tree and now grown in Java, to treat malaria meant that Europeans could survive within Africa.

In 1871, the Asante challenged the British purchase of Dutch Gold Coast, under Afua Kobi, queen mother, the essential decision maker in the matrilineal Asante kingdom. After orchestrating the killing of rival princes, Afua Kobi had placed her son Kofi Karikari on the throne. ‘I’m only a woman,’ she said, ‘but would fight the governor with my left hand.’ Unbeknown to her, new technologies had changed the dynamic. In February 1874, Garnet Wolseley – one of those Anglo-Irish generals indispensable to British empire building – used steamships to land 2,500 British troops and built roads into the interior. Then, allied with thousands of African Fante auxiliaries, he advanced on the capital, Kumasi. Afua Kobi and the Asante were defeated in intense fighting, covered by the celebrated Stanley. As Afua retreated, Wolseley destroyed the capital and forced her to pay an indemnity in gold, liberate thousands of Asante slaves and ban human sacrifice – though the British did not capture the sacred Golden Stool. Queen Afua Kobi now deposed Kofi and placed another son on the throne. Wolseley – who said, ‘There’s only one way for a young man to get on in the army – he must try to get killed in every way possible’ – became the imperial troubleshooter, his competence coining a saying: ‘All Sir Garnet’ – meaning ‘Everything under control’.

Back in the east, the chaos in Ethiopia was an opportunity for Khedive Ismail, who occupied Massawa (Eritrea) and Zeila (Somalia) on the coast, and tried to seize Zanzibar, but was repelled by the sultan. In 1875, an Egyptian army led by the khedive’s son Hassan, and American, Swiss and Danish officers, invaded Ethiopia but was ambushed and annihilated at Gundet and Gura by Emperor Yohannes; Prince Hassan was captured. The victory empowered Yohannes.^* Nearby, Gordon, Ismail’s governor-general, was expanding the Egyptian empire 3,000 miles down the Nile all the way to the great lakes and Buganda, where the kabaka Mutesa resisted his advance. Travelling tirelessly through the vastness of Sudan on camels and Nilotic steamers, the saintly paladin Gordon declared: ‘I’m striking deadly blows against slavery’ – but he was struggling. The Sudanese slave lords – khabirs who enslaved 50,000 a year – resisted strongly.

Ismail the Magnificent had failed in Ethiopia and Buganda, but he now ruled an enormous empire, the first of the carve-up for Africa. Yet after ten wars, 1,200 miles of railway, French courtesans and Krupp cannon, Ismail could not cover his debts. He considered the sale of his shares in the Suez Canal, shares which Dizzy coveted. The prime minister turned for help to one of his best friends, Lionel de Rothschild.^* At cabinet in November 1875, Disraeli proposed the purchase, then popped his head out of the meeting. ‘Yes,’ he said to his secretary, Montagu Corry, who rushed by carriage to New Court. Rothschild was waiting. Disraeli needed £4 million ‘tomorrow’. ‘Rothschild picked up a muscatel grape, ate it, threw out the skin.’

‘What’s your security?’ asked Rothschild.

‘The British government,’ said Corry.

‘You shall have it.’ As Rothschild telegraphed the money to Ismail, Disraeli was received by Victoria.

‘It’s settled,’ said Disraeli portentously. ‘You have it, Madame.’

CETSHWAYO’S VICTORY AND THE LAST NAPOLEON

‘The Fairy’ – as he called Victoria – ‘is in ecstasies,’ boasted Disraeli. A year later, he consolidated the Raj by making her ‘Empress of India’ whose border he was then forced to defend. Empire is always a charade of power, a confidence trick, pulled off with the mystique of hegemony that can only be sustained by the threat of swift force. But the European powers – Portuguese, Dutch, British – were small nations that particularly needed the empire bluff to control far-flung colonies and vast populations. Yet empire was expensive. Armies and infrastructure soon ate the profits, and it was hard to avoid the imperial vortex: each new conquest required more war to hold what you had and then further annexations to deny prizes to your rivals. Disraeli bought the Canal to keep out France, but Russia was Britain’s chief enemy, the Romanovs the most successful empire builders since Genghis. In 1865 Russia took Tashkent, in 1868 Samarkand, while the amirs of Bukhara and the khans of Khiva became vassal rulers. After an astonishing ten-year advance, Alexander II had reached the Afghan border. Prevented by Britain from taking Constantinople, Alexander discussed an Indian invasion with his generals.

As the Romanovs nervously probed the Afghan amir Sher Ali and the British demanded proof of his loyalty, he swung between fraught insecurity and proud defiance. When he refused British demands, Disraeli agreed to an invasion, which, better planned and armed than that of 1839, took Kabul and installed Sher Ali’s son with a British plenipotentiary to guide him. Meanwhile the prime minister faced disaster in Africa.

In January 1879, Cetshwayo, nkosi of the Zulus, son of Mpande, nephew of Shaka, ordered an impi of 20,000 men against an advancing British army of 18,000 redcoats, who were encamped insouciantly at Isandlwana.

The war was not the first to be provoked by Lord Carnavon, the colonial secretary in London, who after making Canada a self-governing dominion hoped to erect a similar structure in South Africa, ruled by the white settlers. But South Africa was not Canada: the Zulus, Xhosas and white Afrikaners had no intention of cooperating. The arrogant demands of the high commissioner Bartle Frere soon drove the Xhosas into rebellion. After crushing them, he turned on Cetshwayo, ‘a man of considerable ability, much force of character, a dignified manner, sagacity’. As Cetshwayo retrained his armies, Frere demanded he give up territory and reduce his forces. The nkosi refused and massed his warriors. Frere was ready.

British aggression reflected the new stakes in South Africa. Eight years earlier, near the Vaal River, north-east of Cape Town, prospectors had found diamonds on the farm of the de Beer brothers in Griqualand, home of the mixed-race Griquas, who were ruled by their hereditary kaptein, Andries Waterboer. As diamond fever struck, 50,000 fortune hunters poured in to work the so-called Big Hole. Among the brilliant-seekers were an East End Jewish boxer, Barney Barnato, and an asthmatic English vicar’s son, Cecil Rhodes. Both the Griqua kaptein and the Afrikaner presidents of Transvaal and Orange Free State claimed the mines, but the British swiftly annexed the New Rush camp, which was soon named after colonial secretary Lord Kimberley. Now Frere planned moves not just against Cetshwayo but also against the Afrikaner Transvaal, which he annexed. The Afrikaners did not immediately resist for they too were nervous of the resurgent Zulus.

In January 1879, Frere sent in 18,000 men under General Lord Chelmsford, who led one column of 1,500 himself. Cetshwayo targeted Chelmsford with 24,000 fighters under his brother: ‘March slowly, attack at dawn, eat up the red soldiers.’ The overconfident Chelmsford established his column at Isandlwana without a fortified camp, convinced that his 1,000 British redcoats and 500 African auxiliaries with their Martini–Henry rifles would easily overpower the Zulus. He was absent on a surveillance mission when the Zulus ambushed his troops, killing 1,210 soldiers – 739 white and 471 Africans, all with their stomachs ripped out – though losing a similar number themselves. Later Zulu troops besieged a British unit at Rorke’s Drift that managed to hold out for twelve hours. In March, at Intombe, Cetshwayo destroyed a British column, killing eighty; but a rash assault on a fortified camp, although it killed eighty-four Britons and a hundred Africans, cost him 2,000 Zulus. In London, Disraeli was furious, but Chelmsford redeemed himself by reinvading with 25,000 men, armed with a new weapon: the Gatling gun.^*

A young Frenchman rushed from London to join the British forces: Louis Napoleon – the twenty-two-year-old Loulou, only son of Napoleon III and Eugénie. Loulou begged to enlist. Disraeli vetoed it, but Eugénie appealed to Queen Victoria. ‘What can you do,’ sighed Disraeli, ‘when you have two obstinate women to deal with?’ Loulou – nicknamed PI (prince imperial) – was keen to fight, saying, ‘If I had to fall, I’d prefer an assegai to a bullet.’ Out scouting, his small unit was ambushed by thirty Zulus; his horse bolted with him clinging on until he fell and he was left behind, firing his pistol, until he was overwhelmed, sustaining eighteen assegai wounds.

Victoria visited Eugénie at her Kentish home to offer comfort. Later when Cetshwayo offered peace, he returned Loulou’s Napoleonic sword. At home in England, his death, marking as it did the end of the Bonapartes, fascinated the public almost as much as Rorke’s Drift.

On 4 July 1879, Chelmsford advanced on the royal kraal at Ulundi, where, facing the Zulu army in a hollow-square formation, his two Gatling guns and artillery scythed down 1,500, wounding thousands in thirty minutes. Afterwards he burned Ulundi. The king was captured and dispatched to London, the kingdom broken up.^* The fall of Cetshwayo unleashed the Afrikaners, sharpshooting maestros of commando warfare, who defeated the redcoats. Britain recognized their independence, but the diamonds, soon followed by gold, would transform South Africa.

‘The terrible disaster,’ Disraeli remarked of Isandlwana, ‘has shaken me to the centre’ – and so did his other fiasco in Kabul. On 3 September, a mutiny of unpaid Afghan soldiers escalated into an insurgency: the British plenipotentiary was murdered, 7,000 British troops besieged and defeated. Isandlwana and Kabul demonstrated how a great empire is one that can be defeated on more than one front simultaneously, without any loss of prestige.

With an election campaign underway Disraeli’s rival William Gladstone, an indefatigable seventy-year-old, attacked the imperial impresario for his showy vainglory, while Disraeli, five years older, suffering gout and asthma, mocked that ‘sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’. But the verbosity worked: in April 1880, Gladstone won a landslide, exulting that Disraeli’s defeat was ‘like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance’.

Gladstone – nicknamed GOM (Grand Old Man) – was committed to granting Home Rule to troublesome Ireland, where Catholic peasants raged against Protestant lords. But he could not avoid the imperial vortex: Afghanistan had to be stabilized. This time the British were better led by General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, small, wiry Anglo-Irish veteran of India and Ethiopia, who repulsed the siege of his palisade then retook Kabul. In July 1880, a British force of 2,500 mainly Indian troops was routed by Afghans under Sher Ali’s son. But Bobs led his Kabul and Kandahar Field Force to save Kandahar, where in September he routed the Afghans in turn. As in 1842, the British understood the principle of Afghan war: strike hard and then get out fast, leaving a friendly ruler. ‘It may not be very flattering to our amour propre,’ wrote Bobs, ‘but … the less the Afghans see of us the less they’ll dislike us.’ The new amir, Abdur Rahman, agreed that Afghanistan would have foreign relations only with Britain and then spent twelve years crushing rebellions. When in 1885 Russian troops assaulted an Afghan unit at Panjdeh, bringing Russia and Britain to the brink of war, the amir and his British backers held their nerve. The debacles of 1878 won Britain another forty years of protectorate over Afghanistan.

Gladstone’s other imperial vortex was Egypt, where in 1882 British interference provoked a nationalist revolt. To protect the Canal, Gladstone reluctantly sent Wolseley to occupy the country, but further south in Sudan, Britain’s anti-slavery mission had unleashed a jihadist insurgency under a Nilotic boat builder’s son, Muhammad Ahmed, who after a life of austere hermitage experienced divine visions and claimed to be the Mahdi. ‘We shall destroy this and create the next world,’ he said. ‘Whoever doesn’t believe in my messianism shall be purified by the sword.’ He then ordered his adepts, the Ansaris (after the followers of Muhammad who went to Medina), ‘Kill the Turks [Egyptians], pay no taxes.’ The Mahdi’s rebellion was backed by the reactionary slave traders who had been threatened by well-meaning British abolitionism.

As fanatical Ansaris defeated British and Egyptian troops, the British press demanded: ‘Send Gordon!’ Gladstone reluctantly appointed the righteous maverick Gordon to evacuate Sudan, only for the general to follow his own divine mission. When the Ansaris closed in, Gordon continued to hold Khartoum with 7,000 Sudanese. ‘I feel so very much inclined to wish it His will might be my release,’ he told his sister. ‘Earth’s joys grow very dim, its glories have faded.’ As the publicity-seeking martyr flaunted his courage, a public outcry forced Gladstone to send an expedition under Wolseley. ‘Better a bullet to the brain,’ wrote Gordon, ‘than to flicker out unheeded.’ The doomed Gordon chain-smoked, beat his servants with a cane and ranted, ‘Go, tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear!’

On 26 January 1885, the Mahdi stormed Khartoum, butchering Gordon’s troops. Gordon himself was speared on his veranda; his head was cut off and taken to the Mahdi, who hung it from a tree in Omdurman: ‘his blue eyes half-opened’, noted a European prisoner. The British admired this display of Christian heroism and demanded revenge; Gladstone was swept from office (GOM now said to mean Gordon’s Own Murderer). The Mahdi ruled Sudan, making slavery a government monopoly, assisted by Arab slave masters who enslaved hundreds of thousands. On his death the khalifa (successor) Abdullahi, served by fifteen enslaved boys and 400 concubines, took command, treating Darfur and Equatoria as hunting reserves for slaves. Keen to expand his empire, in 1888 the khalifa invaded Ethiopia, slaughtering or enslaving thousands then sacking the capital Gondar. Emperor Yohannes counter-attacked into Sudan. In March 1889 at Gallabat – a neglected moment, perhaps because it was an encounter between Africans, but one of the biggest battles ever fought on the continent – 150,000 Ethiopians chastened 80,000 Sudanese, who tore victory out of defeat by killing Yohannes IV, the last monarch to be killed in battle, sending his head back to dangle next to Gordon on that grisly tree in Omdurman.

This battle, in which as many as 30,000 were killed, was just one sector in the carve-up that would be unleashed in part by the ambition of one king.

BUTCHER LEOPOLD, HANGMAN PETERS AND MAD CAPTAIN VOULET: AFRICAN CONQUESTS

Angular and awkward, long-nosed and bushy-bearded, Leopold II of Belgium was an oddball manipulator who had always craved an empire. Son of Victoria’s uncle Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and a daughter of Louis Philippe, the young duke of Brabant was embarrassed by being ‘king of a small country and small-minded people’, but claimed that ‘When men are great, however narrow the frontiers within which they live, they always find the means to do great things.’ He tried to buy Crete, Cuba, Fiji, Sarawak, Philippines, Vietnam and parts of Texas and China. Inspired by Ismail the Magnificent, he thought Egypt ‘a gold mine and we must spare no effort in our attempt to develop it’, then suggested, ‘One could purchase a small kingdom in Abyssinia.’ His father married the boy to a Habsburg archduchess, Marie Henriette, who was obsessed with horses: it was a marriage ‘between a stable boy and a nun’, joked Pauline Metternich, ‘and by nun I mean the duke of Brabant’. After his accession in 1865, Leopold declared that his ambition was to make Belgium ‘strong, prosperous, [and] therefore have colonies of her own’.

As soon as he heard of Stanley’s trans-African journey, he announced, ‘I’d like to see Stanley.’ He charmed Stanley, the journalist who fancied himself a warlord. Setting up his Comité d’Études du Haut-Congo, its name designed to sound philanthropic, the king hired Stanley, who understood that the ‘clever’ king, ‘under the guise of an international Association, wants to make a Belgian dependency of the Congo basin’. In Africa, Stanley started to found Belgian ‘stations’, the most important being Leopoldville (Kinsasha), beating a French explorer Comte Savorgnan de Brazza in the race to claim territory. ‘I don’t want to miss,’ said Leopold, ‘a share of this magnificent African cake.’

In 1882, he set up the Association Internationale du Congo to front his acquisitions, which he called ‘Free States’, claiming swathes of ‘central Africa abandoned by Egypt where slave trading continues. To allow these to be administered by a new State would be the best way to get at the root of the trouble and eradicate it.’

‘Swindle! Fantasies!’ sneered Bismarck, disgusted by Leopold, who ‘displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything and give nothing in return’. The Iron Chancellor, facing resentment even from social democrats that Germany was missing out on empire, was being pressured by a sinister clergyman’s son from Hanover, Carl Peters, a twenty-six-year-old philosophy graduate who, after hearing of British colonial gains while staying in London, founded a German East African Company and travelled to Zanzibar to claim territories. Twice Bismarck refused to accept Peters’s claims over parts of Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. But in November 1884 he invited all the African contenders to Berlin for the dissection of a continent, as Leopold waited in Brussels. Europe, particularly in the Balkans, was so tense that the powers, accustomed to fierce competition, pivoted their rivalries on to Africa: British and French ‘explorers’ – usually imperial soldiers – raced to claim slices of the ‘cake’ if only to deny it to the other. Ideology and religion always reflect political contingency: Christian mission and mission civilisatrice, justified by theories of racist superiority and eugenics, dovetailed perfectly with imperial ambition and commercial avarice.^*

Yet at that very moment, in the same city, a scientist was laying the foundations that would disprove this pseudo-science. In 1869, in Tübingen, Germany, a Swiss scientist, Friedrich Miescher, had borrowed pus-soaked, bloody bandages from a local hospital and, analysing the white blood cells, had identified a new substance that he called nuclein. He did not yet know it but nuclein contained deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA – that revealed how family and heredity really descended through ancestral lines over thousands of years. While Bismarck was dividing up Africa at the Berlin chancellery, a chemistry professor across town at the university – Albrecht Kossel – sensed the importance of these nucleins. ‘The processes of life are like a drama,’ Kossel said, ‘and I’m studying the actors, not the plot.’

The plot remained in the hands of Bismarck. Germany, Britain and France each backed Leopold to prevent Congo going to the others. The Belgian king took personal possession of Congo, a million square miles, seventy-six times the size of Belgium with ten million inhabitants. Almost declaring himself ‘emperor of Congo’, he called it Congo Free State, but first he had to conquer it. Ordering its commercial exploitation, he formed a private army, the Force Publique, hiring Belgians and many other European adventurers as officers to command 20,000 Congolese auxiliaries, to direct ivory hunting and to manage a new source of income, rubber. In 1888, John Dunlop, an Irish vet, invented the rubber tyre, used on bicycles and soon on motor cars. Leopold’s thugs, wielding rifles, chicotes – hippo-hide whips – and machetes, hunted down any opposition and executed workers who failed to deliver their rubber quotas. ‘As soon as it was a question of rubber,’ recalled a Leopoldine official, Charles Lemaire, ‘I wrote to the government: “To gather rubber, one must cut off hands, noses, ears.”’ The Force Publique enforced cheap rubber collection and cheap labour with violence, killing those who refused to work or punishing those who resisted by cutting off limbs for minor infringements: its units even had a Keeper of Hands since some soldiers were paid bonuses for hands collected (and bullets saved); others collected them as trophies. Leopoldine officers sometimes shot Africans for fun, killed their mistresses if they slept with other men, raped women and traded chained ‘volunteers’, effectively slaves. Though the number of deaths is now impossible to calculate, millions died. But this was not enough.

Leopold wanted to expand eastwards to grab Sudan. He ordered Stanley to reach the beleaguered governor of Egyptian Equatoria, Emin Pasha, a German-Jewish doctor convert to Islam, but to do so they needed Zanzibari help. Leopold and Stanley joined forces with the warlord Tippu Tip, appointing him a local governor. Emin was rescued and Equatoria claimed. ‘Now what do you say,’ the king asked Stanley, ‘about taking Khartoum?’ As host of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference, Leopold was criticized for his alliance with Tippu. The ailing Tippu soon retired to Zanzibar, succeeded by his son Sefu and nephew Raschid, who ruled large parts of Congo with other slaver-warlords. In 1890, Msiri, king of independent Katanga, was approached by British, French and Belgian emissaries, who negotiated with his Luso-African wife, Maria de Fonseca.

Leopold won by being more ruthless: when the sixty-year-old Msiri drew his sword against a Belgian lieutenant named Omer Bodson, he shot and then beheaded the warlord, shouting, ‘I’ve killed a tiger! Vive le Roi!’ Msiri’s guards then killed Bodson. But Msiri’s adopted son Mukanda accused Maria of betraying Msiri to the Europeans. Pushing her to her knees, he beheaded her with a machete. ‘I’m Mukanda who walks over enemies!’ he said, but he had lost his independence: Leopold got Katanga.

Bismarck accepted lesser prizes, ranging from Cameroon to South West Africa^* – while Peters, broad-hipped, soft-skinned and pasty, sporting self-designed military gear and bearing an array of guns, tried to seize Uganda from the kabaka of Buganda, and Tanganyika from the sultan of Zanzibar. He was successful in Tanganyika, where as Reichskommissar, known as Mkono wa Damu – Bloodsmeared Man – he ruled murderously. When his favourite concubine slept with his manservant, he hanged both and liquidated their villages, shocking even the Germans, who recalled Hangman Peters and sent troops to crush the resulting rebellion.^*

The lion’s share of Africa was secured by Britain and France, the Third Republic proving every bit as hungry for empire as the Napoleons. The era of popular nationalism that doomed pure monarchy and aristocracy fostered both bourgeois values and increasingly representative government at home, but security, profit, and prestige demanded empire abroad. In 1873, France – with a monarchist majority in the Assembly – offered the throne to the comte de Chambord (grandson of Charles X), who lost the crown by refusing to accept the tricolour flag. In the absence of a monarchy, the army came to symbolize stability, Catholicism and l’ordre moral – against the other France, secular, liberal, socialist. The army was the unifying symbol of a divided country, the empire its consolation.

‘The higher races,’ said the premier Jules Ferry to the Assembly on 28 March 1884, ‘have a duty to civilize the inferior races.’ Ferry, a heavily bewhiskered lawyer, annexed the last Barbary State, Tunis, and expanded Indo-China, taking Cambodia, Laos and the rest of Vietnam, though the latter absorption was challenged by China. Ferry defeated the Chinese, a war that helped discredit the premier – but not the empire. While killing many thousands in an endless war to subjugate Algeria, the French military were spearheaded by their cosmopolitan vanguard, the Foreign Legion, with its cut-throat cult of victory. ‘You, legionnaires, became soldiers to die,’ their general Oscar de Négrier told them as they seized more of Vietnam, ‘and I’m sending you to do just that!’

In west Africa, France crushed the Wassoulou kingdom in Mali and Guinea, then turned on Dahomey. Its king, Glele, son of Ghezo, had maintained power through military raids, using slaves to work his palm-oil estates, but his granting of the towns Cotonou and Porto-Novo to France undermined his authority. The Berlin conference granted Dahomey to Paris. After Glele was assassinated, his son Kondo, taking the regal name Béhanzin, became a warrior king in the Dahomean tradition, propagating his image in the form of wooden statues decorating Abomey. In 1889, he returned to slaving in French territory, using his female vanguard, the Minon, as slave raiders. In 1892, the French invaded, commanded by a tough colonel of mixed French, African and Amerindian descent, Alfred-Amédée Dodds, who had fought at Sedan and in Indo-China. At Adégon, King Béhanzin was routed by Dodds, and 400 of his female fighters killed. In January 1894, as Dodds closed in, the king burned Abomey, and was exiled to Martinique. France seized massive territories using its harsh Armée d’Afrique, composed of Berber and Arab cavalry – the Spahis – and cameleteers from the Maghreb, along with 200,000 west African sharpshooters, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, and Tirailleurs from Indo-China and Madagascar. These troops helped to conquer a French empire from southern Congo to Chad and most of north-west Africa.

While France celebrated its conquests abroad, at home the nation edged towards civil war over a case of grotesque injustice. On 5 January 1895, a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, son of a self-made Alsatian textile manufacturer, was found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life on the hellish Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Yet the army command knew that he was innocent and knew the identity of the real culprit, an aristocratic officer. The Dreyfusard novelist Zola exposed the outrage in ‘J’accuse’, an open letter to the president – for which the novelist may have been poisoned by anti-Dreyfusards. The army falsified more evidence, finding Dreyfus guilty again, but the president pardoned him. L’affaire Dreyfus had exposed the fragility of France – and the special role of the army in holding together patrie and empire.^*

The British too were seizing as much as they could – as cheaply as possible – through the usual armed companies. ‘British policy,’ said the prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury, formerly Disraeli’s foreign secretary, ‘is to drift lazily downstream occasionally putting out a boathook to avoid collision.’ But his hand was repeatedly forced by imperialistic ministers and entrepreneurial conquistadors. In east Africa, when the empire-building kabaka Mutesa died in 1884, his son’s murder of Christian converts provoked a dynamic British merchant-soldier, Frederick Lugard, yet another vicar’s son, veteran of the Afghan and Sudan wars, to outmanoeuvre the German psychopath Peters and take control of Uganda; his successors added the Kikuyu lands (Kenya). When the sultan of Zanzibar, Khalid, poisoned his British-backed uncle Bargush and defied the British, the Royal Navy opened fire as 150 marines stormed the palace and overthrew him in thirty-eight minutes – the shortest war in history. Khalid’s successors agreed to Zanzibar becoming a British protectorate, freed 60,000 slaves and kept their throne.

In west Africa, a secretive, sex-obsessed, hard-drinking Scottish-Manx merchant, Sir George Goldie, was conquering an empire north of the British colony of Lagos. ‘I conceived the ambition of adding the region of Niger to the British empire,’ said Goldie, who had once lived ‘a life of dissipation’, including some years with an Arab paramour in Egypt. On African visits, he fathered children with an Igbo woman. He was a master of political canvassing, orchestrating a charter for his Royal Niger Company on the Niger River run by Lugard, fresh from the conquest of Uganda, enforced by the Royal Niger Constabulary, a militia of British officers and African auxiliaries, which regularly launched raids and executed any opposition. The prize was palm oil, which was used to make industrial lubricant and soap.

In 1895, in the Gold Coast, the British forced a protectorate on the asantehene Agyeman Prempeh, who was exiled to the Seychelles. But just five years later the crassness of a British governor demanding to sit on the sacred Golden Stool of the Asante sparked a rebellion led, in the absence of the asantehene, by a sixty-year-old female leader, Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of the Fon fiefdom of Ejisu, who took command of 12,000 Asante warriors. After ferocious fighting, she was captured, but the Golden Stool remained hidden.^*

In 1897, Goldie’s militia attacked and conquered the two amirates of Bida and Ilorin, partly to stop their slaving raids but also to beat the French. The next year, Goldie advised London to conquer the northern slave-owning emirates of Sokoto, and then to merge the multi-ethnic, multi-religious region into one colony. He was bought out (his company later became the conglomerate Unilever), but his plan was executed: Lugard and his West Africa Frontier Force conquered Sokoto, liberating two million slaves. It was Lugard’s wife, Flora Shaw, who argued that the colony should be called Nigeria, of which he became the first governor-general.

By now, France ruled the largest portion of Africa, followed by Britain. In terms of population, Britain ruled almost 30 per cent of Africans, France 15 per cent. The more aggressive imperialists in both countries aspired to contiguous empires: the French east–west, from Senegal to the French colony of Djibouti; the British north–south, from the Cape to Cairo. But their visions were about to clash.

As Leopold’s profits poured out of Congo, so did stories of his atrocities, first publicized in the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a Polish steamboat officer in Congo, and then in the damning report of the British consul Roger Casement. In London, Leopold was named in court as the paedophilic patron of a ‘disorderly house’ to which he paid £800 per month for a supply of virgins, aged ten to fifteen. In Paris, the sixty-five-year-old king fell for a prostitute, Blanche Delacroix, aged fifteen, ‘plump but graceful’, dispatching his female pander with a message: ‘Madame, I am sent to you by a gentleman who’s noticed you. He’s a very high personage, but his exalted position obliges me to withhold his name.’ Summoned for a comical interview at which the ‘high personage’, whom she mistakenly called ‘King Oscar’, examined her in silence, she passed the test. Blanche became his paramour, mother of two sons and proprietress of millions of Congo shares; she was also created baronne de Vaughan.

Yet he had not completely neglected his family. In 1880, he had triumphantly married his daughter Stephanie to the Habsburg crown prince, Rudolf, at a wedding in Vienna, attended by Bertie, prince of Wales, and Wilhelm, crown prince of Prussia. But Rudolf was wild, if not insane; Stephanie grew desperate, but no one could have predicted the tragedy that followed.^*

RUDOLF AND MARY AT MAYERLING; INSPECTOR HIEDLER AND ADOLF AT BRAUNAU

Long ignored by his self-obsessed mother Sisi and coldly lectured by Franz Josef, who had refused to let him study at university, Rudolf was intelligent and surprisingly liberal with republican tendencies, seeking out liberals, even Jews, writing anonymous articles attacking the nobility and an ethnographic study of the empire that his father approved. Whenever Sisi swept into his life on one of her visits to the court, ‘The crown prince’s eyes glowed … he’s very like his mother, whom he worships.’

Franz Josef was bemused by his untameable wife and alienated son. Sisi spent most of her time hunting in England, obsessively slimming and exercising, both seeking privacy and courting publicity, but she had at least helped him in Hungary where the reconquest of 1848–9 had never been forgiven. Cultivating an intimate friendship, possibly an affair, with a dashing Hungarian ex-rebel who favoured the gold-embroidered, tiger-skinned Attila dress of the nobility, Count Gyula Andrássy, she orchestrated the negotiation of a new arrangement, a Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary. Andrássy became foreign minister, drawing Austria close to Germany, but the rise of the Hungarians, coupled with the emergence of new Slavic countries, encouraged the seething nationalism of Czechs and other Slavs.

Sisi encouraged her plodding husband, now fifty-three, to console himself with a married actress, the thirty-year-old Katharina Schratt, whom he had admired from the imperial box in the Burgtheater. The kaiser’s seduction was glacial. ‘I didn’t have the courage,’ he wrote to her, ‘while one is observed from all sides through opera glasses and the press hyenas are everywhere.’ But finally their affair was consummated. ‘Yesterday it was exactly six weeks since I left you in your bed, hoping in two days I should be sitting on it again!’ wrote Franzl to Kathi. ‘We’ll have a wonderful reunion.’ Sisi helped him by visiting Kathi herself. ‘You will control yourself,’ Franzl assured Kathi, ‘so will I, though it will not be easy for me,’ adding, ‘The empress has repeatedly expressed herself in favourable terms about you.’ Privately Sisi thought Schratt bovine, but as their daughter Marie Valerie put it, ‘Her calm, very natural ways are attractive to papa.’ Soon Schratt was part of the inner Habsburg family, the only thing except shooting that made Franz Josef cheerful: ‘Poka [Hungarian for turkey, her nickname for Franz Josef] is happy tonight,’ Sisi told her daughter. ‘I’ve invited his friend.’

Neither parent had much time for Rudolf, who resented Sisi’s slick hunting boyfriend Bay Middleton and ridiculed her spiritualist fortune tellers. Sisi did not help by bullying her daughter-in-law, calling her a ‘mighty bumpkin’.

The crown prince, needy and heedless, became ‘mad about women’, addicted to drugs and courtesans, keeping a ledger of sexual conquests (virginities taken in red ink), and established a hierarchy of gifts for his conquests, depending on whether they were royalty, nobility or commoners.

Rudolf and Stephanie were becoming estranged. After the birth of a daughter, Rudolf returned to his mistresses, falling in love with Mitzi Kaspar, teenaged actress and courtesan from Madame Wolf’s Viennese bordello. He soon infected Stephanie with gonorrhoea. Unsurprisingly she turned against him, and started an affair with a Polish count. Pursuing his liberal views, Rudolf was friendly with the open-spirited Bertie, who was friends with Rothschilds and other Jewish magnates. Both were connoisseurs of courtesans, but even Bertie thought, ‘For a young man of his age, Rudolf knows a lot about sexual matters.’ Rudolf loathed his grotesque fellow heir, Wilhelm of Prussia, whom he called ‘a diehard Junker and reactionary’, joking to Stephanie that he would ‘only invite Wilhelm along … so as to hasten him out of this world through an elegant hunting adventure’.

Rudolf meanwhile watched the tragedy of his cousin, Ludwig of Bavaria, who for twenty years had spent extravagantly on swan castles and Wagnerian operas, ignoring state business and having love affairs with male favourites. Only his cousin Empress Sisi was sympathetic. ‘The King wasn’t mad,’ she believed, ‘just an eccentric living in a world of dreams.’ Ludwig planned to dismiss his ministers, who appealed to Bismarck. In 1886, a psychological report by doctors declared him insane. That June, when ministers and doctors arrived to depose him, a loyal baroness tried to beat them off with an umbrella and Ludwig took them prisoner, then tried to escape. Since he had no children, his uncle Luitpold became regent. ‘Have you declared me insane?’ Ludwig asked Dr Bernhard von Gudden, director of the Munich Asylum. ‘You’ve never examined me.’ Next day, transferred to Berg Castle on Lake Starnberg, Ludwig and Gudden did not return from a walk around the lake shore. Found dead in the water, Gudden had been strangled, the king’s cause of death still unknown.^*

Rudolf fantasized about watching someone else die and proposed a suicide pact to Mitzi, not least because he was sure his own succession was hopeless. ‘On the day Papa closes his eyes for ever, things will grow very uncomfortable in Austria,’ he warned his sister. ‘I advise you to emigrate’ – as millions of Germans were doing.^*

He had already had an affair with a promiscuous married woman of recent nobility, Baroness Helene Vetsera, who had slept with him when he was barely out of his teens. Now she introduced him to her teenaged daughter, Mary, who grumbled about her mother: ‘Ever since I was a little girl she has treated me like something she means to dispose of to the best advantage.’ Mary fell wildly in love with Rudolf, who was captivated by ‘the power of her full and triumphant beauty, her deep black eyes, her cameo-like profile, her throat of a goddess, and her arresting sensual grace’. He declared, ‘I can’t tear myself away from her.’ But she was far from his only paramour.

On 29 January 1889 Rudolf slept with Mitzi, his real love, but the next day he and Mary set off for his shooting lodge at Mayerling. ‘If I could give him my life,’ wrote Mary, ‘I should be glad to do it, for what does life mean for me?’ Rudolf wrote to his mother, describing Mary as ‘a pure angel who accompanies me to the hereafter’.

The next day in the early hours, the seventeen-year-old Mary lay down on the bed, her hair around her shoulders, holding a rose; Rudolf, now thirty, shot her in the temple or gave her poison to drink – the details are still mysterious – then spent several hours with her body before shooting himself. When they were discovered, Sisi was told first; she received the news icily, insisting that ‘the girl poisoned him’, but calling Schratt and instructing her to soothe Franz Josef as she gave him the news. Sisi then summoned Stephanie, telling her maliciously, ‘Things would have been different if he’d had a wife who understood him.’^* Mary’s mother Helene turned up wanting to know if anyone had seen her daughter. Sisi told her. Helene sobbed: ‘My child, my beautiful child!’

‘But you do know Rudolf is dead too?’ said Sisi.

Helene fell to her knees: ‘My unhappy child, what has she done?’

‘Remember,’ Sisi said. ‘Rudolf died of a heart attack.’ Back at Mayerling, courtiers were frantically covering up: Rudolf’s body was sent back to the Hofburg, but Mary’s two uncles smuggled out her body, dressed and seated upright in their carriage. The court announced that Rudolf had killed himself while insane, which meant that he could be buried in the Capuchin Chapel. Sisi returned to her travelling, her behaviour ever more idiosyncratic.

While decadent Vienna reflected the Habsburgs’ multi-ethnic empire, the archaic kaiser ruled the k. und k. (kaiserlich und königlich – imperial and royal) monarchy through its rigid hierarchy of nobility and bureaucracy. A typical example of this species was Alois Hiedler, inspector of customs at Braunau am Inn. Born illegitimate when his mother Maria Schicklgruber got unexpectedly pregnant, he later assumed the name of his stepfather (probably his real father) Hiedler.

Alois was an irascible, taciturn, hard-drinking bully but also capable. Lacking the usual education, he rose by merit, proud of his uniform, demanding to be addressed as Herr Oberoffizial Hiedler. His hobbies were beekeeping, beer drinking and skirt chasing: his love life was chaotic and semi-incestuous, as he fathered children with various women, of whom a daughter Angela survived, before he began an affair when he was already married with a cousin or half-niece hired as a maid called Klara Pölzl, twenty-three years his junior. After the death of his wife, he married Klara. Their first three children died young, two of the same bout of diphtheria. In April 1889, when Hiedler (now spelt Hitler) was fifty-one, Klara gave birth to a third, Adolf, followed by a daughter Paula. Another son died of measles. Far from having a harsh childhood, Adolf enjoyed a comfortable upbringing on Alois’s generous salary. Alois occasionally beat him but such discipline was almost universal at that time. Adolf found schoolwork ‘laughably easy’ and bathed in his mother’s passionate love, which granted him boundless self-confidence and self-indulgence. If anything, he was loved too much.

Oberoffizial Hiedler retired to a farm aged fifty-eight but dropped dead in 1903 when Adolf was thirteen, Paula six. Adolf had disdained his father’s bureaucratic pomposity, believing himself destined to be an artist. Moving to Linz, Klara, affectionate and devout, raised the children, encouraging Adolf’s indolent dreaming and supporting his yearning to study art. Hitler’s relations with his sisters were cool – ‘stupid geese’, he called them – though he was closer to Angela. Early on, adults noticed his ‘remarkable eyes’: ‘He had his mother’s light-coloured eyes … her penetrating stare.’ Escaping from his dull family, he set off to become a famous artist in Vienna, where there was a new heir: Franz Ferdinand.

MODERN MONARCHS: FRANZ FERDINAND AND SOPHIE, PEDRO AND ISABELLA, DARLING WILLY

He was son of the emperor’s brother, who, in yet another blow, had died on pilgrimage to Jerusalem after drinking the waters of the River Jordan. Franz Ferdinand was fixated on royal hierarchy and shooting anything, from elephants to the 272,511 birds and beasts listed in his diary, but he was at least conscientious. Even so, he shocked the emperor by falling in love with a non-royal noblewoman, Sophie Chotek. Franz Josef finally allowed them to marry morganatically (meaning their children would be excluded from the succession).

A short-tempered, arrogant but intelligent champion of autocracy, Franz Ferdinand travelled the world to prepare himself. Setting up a military chancellery at his residence the Belvedere Palace, he thought about the problems facing the monarchy. He believed the empire needed to offer the Slavs a partnership similar to that of the Hungarians: ‘Irredentism in our country … will cease immediately if our Slavs are given a comfortable, fair and good life.’ Franz Ferdinand repeatedly warned against confrontations with Serbia that would bring in Russia.

Franz Josef’s first cousin Emperor Pedro had now ruled Brazil for fifty-eight years, and Brazil was almost the last Atlantic slave-owning society. Weary of power, Pedro travelled the world and left his daughter, Isabel, in charge, but her French husband Gaston became hated as an avaricious foreigner. In 1881, the royal jewels were stolen from the palace, and when two servants were suspected, Pedro protected them – to public outrage. Pedro aimed to abolish slavery slowly to avoid revolts and an agricultural crash. In 1885, the Sexagenarian Law freed slaves at sixty. Finally, on 13 May 1888, Isabel abolished slavery and freed 700,000 slaves, generating a surge of popularity as Redeemer of the Blacks. While black people supported the monarchy, forming a Black Guard to defend it, many planters became republican.

Politics was stalemated. Everyone looked to the army, whose commander Marshal Deodoro de Fonseca was still devoted to Pedro. On his return, Pedro was jubilantly received, but it did not last. In November 1889, the old emperor held a ball for the visiting Chilean navy. But when Pedro arrived, he tripped. ‘The monarchy stumbles,’ he joked. ‘But doesn’t fall.’ Marshal Fonseca discouraged republican officers – ‘I want to accompany the emperor’s coffin. He’s old; I respect him’ – but they went ahead anyway. A provincial government declared a republic. At the palace, Pedro waited for the marshal, who was too embarrassed to come. The empress panicked. ‘Nonsense, my lady,’ said Pedro. ‘It’s a tempest in a teapot – I know my fellow Brazilians. Monarchies don’t fall that easily.’ But they do.

In the early hours, junior officers arrived to inform Pedro that he had been deposed and banished. ‘I’m not an escaped slave,’ he said as he boarded a ship. ‘I won’t leave in the middle of the night.’ But he did. ‘Gentlemen,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’re all mad!’ As the emperor sailed for Europe, Fonseca became the first president of Brazil.

Pedro had once been celebrated for his modernity, but now in Europe a bumptious young kaiser, who prided himself on his knowledge of technology and ethos of medieval chivalry, was taking centre stage.

In March 1888, on the death aged ninety of Wilhelm I, his son Friedrich III – Fritz, the able commander of 1870 – succeeded to the throne with his British wife Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria, knowing he was already far too ill to realize their vision of a liberal Germany. When German Jews were attacked in an antisemitic campaign, Fritz and Vicky had supported them by going to a synagogue in Berlin.

Bismarck plotted their destruction, focusing his hatred on Vicky – ‘a wild woman … who terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality which speaks through her eyes’. But the chancellor was fortunate: Fritz was already suffering from throat cancer and filial betrayal. His son Willy, long indulged and funded by his grandfather ‘Wilhelm the Great’, despised his weakened father and liberal mother and could not wait to become absolutist kaiser and arbiter of Europe.

Kaiser Friedrich ruled for just ninety-eight days, dying on 15 June 1888, succeeded by twenty-nine-year-old Wilhelm, whom the ageing Bismarck called ‘the young man’.

Willy’s breech birth damaged his left arm. Educated at a normal school, he was happiest in the Guards, adoring the male companionship and the fetishistic trappings of Prussian virility, uniforms, high boots, eagle helmets. He travelled to Vienna for sexual adventures, having a child with one mistress before embarking on another affair with a Berlin courtesan who called herself Miss Love – both of whom indulged his fetish for women wearing gloves. At twenty-two, Willy married Dona (Augusta Victoria) of Schleswig-Holstein, who likewise indulged his fetish for gloves. ‘I shall see you have all your little pleasures,’ she promised. ‘I always have gloves on at night now … You naughty little husband … You know how awfully much I love you and … how willing I am to do everything. You won’t be disappointed.’ They had seven children, but Willy was bored by her.

Wilhelm inherited Bismarck, creator of the hybrid Reich which only he could truly manage, striving to control the rise of socialists in the Reichstag and the brash young kaiser. Both were challenging: the Supreme Warlord was almost gifted, interested in everything, but also unbalanced, bombastic, impetuous, magniloquent and hyperactive, a manic babbler who scarcely stopped talking and travelling for the next thirty years, telling his entourage, ‘All of you know nothing. I alone know something.’

Willy bullied and persecuted his mother Vicky, who smuggled out her letters to England. ‘W fancies he can do everything himself,’ she wrote to her mother Queen Victoria. ‘He cannot. A little modesty and self-knowledge would show him he’s not the genius or Frederick the Great he imagines. I fear he’ll get into trouble,’ thanks to his ‘love of playing the despot and showing off’. She added, ‘It’s indeed a misfortune for us all that W … is imbued with prejudices, false notions and mistaken ideas … so unripe of character and judgement … Power was put into his hands which he so often abuses.’ Vicky had foresight too: ‘The worst of it is that we shall perhaps all have to pay for his ignorance and impudence.’ She meant war.

Germany was booming, in one sense the most modern state in Europe, its Reichstag filled with middle-class socialists; its industries, particularly steel and chemicals, overtaking those of Britain and France. In another sense it was antiquated, ruled by the absolute prerogative of the Prussian king, surrounded by high-booted Junkers, to whom he said he would ‘always be mindful that the eyes of my forefathers look down upon me from the next world and I shall one day have to answer to them for the glory and honour of the army’. Willy believed his power was bestowed by God. ‘Forever and forever there’s only one real Emperor in the world,’ he wrote, ‘and that is the German regardless of his person and qualities but by right of a thousand years’ tradition. And his Chancellor has to obey!’

Bismarck had to buy Willy’s love letters off Miss Love, but Willy soon resented the chancellor’s dominance. ‘I am accustomed to being obeyed,’ said Willy. ‘I don’t enter into discussions.’

Willy gathered around himself a coterie of harsh Junker generals and worshipful, secret homosexual friends, led by his favourite Count ‘Phili’ zu Eulenburg, singer, poet and spiritualist, and a married father of six, who was twelve years older. When they met at a shooting house party in 1886, they were instantly dazzled by one another. Together they sang Nordic mystical ballads, rowed on lakes, shared seances, discussed race and gossiped about Ludwig of Bavaria, where Phili was a diplomat. But most of all they planned the Wilhelmine reign. Kaiserin Dona was immediately jealous, accusing her husband of having an affair with Phili.

The kaiser ignored her, confessing he was happiest with ‘the nice young men’ of his Potsdam regiments. He prized his summer cruises on the yacht Hohenzollern with male company, indulging in manly pranks that usually involved rectums and sausages. At sea in 1894, Phili was awoken by the ‘loud, laughing, shouting, pealing voice of the Kaiser outside my door: he was chasing the old excellencies Heintze, Kessel, Scholl, etc., through the corridors of the ship to bed’.^*

Eulenburg adored Willy, whom he called Liebchen – Darling – even to his face, and ‘the kindest of Kaisers, most sympathetic of friends’ for whom he ‘yearned’; Willy called him ‘my bosom friend, the only one I have’. Yet the repressed kaiser knew little of the secret lives of Phili’s intimates. When rumours about one of them, Count Kuno von Moltke, commandant of Berlin, reached Willy, he stopped another of the coterie. ‘The Liebchen accosted me in the Tiergarten the day before yesterday,’ wrote Baron Axel von Varnbüler. ‘After he duly admired my yellow boots and colour-coordinated riding costume, he asked me “Do you know anything about Kuno?”’

Willy mocked Bismarck’s alliance with Russia, which was designed to ensure peace and prevent the encirclement of Germany. ‘That young man wants war with Russia,’ complained Bismarck, ‘and would like to draw his sword straight away if he could. I shall not be a party to it.’ Now Phili saw his Darling as the ‘personification of Germany’, and praised the way ‘The kaiser combines in himself two different natures –the chivalrous … and the modern.’ He now advised Willy to dismiss the domineering old monster. In March 1890, when kaiser and chancellor clashed about workers’ rights, Willy duly dismissed Bismarck, appointing in his place a more compliant general.

Willy wanted to be ‘my own Bismarck’, making full use of the awesome powers of kaiserdom. Abroad, his dream, he told Eulenburg, was German domination, ‘a sort of Napoleonic supremacy … in the peaceful sense’, but he also embraced the racial ideologies of Teutons (Germans) versus Slavs (Russians). Phili had had an affair with Gobineau, the racist ideologue, and Willy embraced his theories about the Aryan master race, which were becoming popular.

Willy sustained Bismarck’s alliance with Austria–Hungary, recently joined by Italy, but his bombast sowed confusion and alarm: he was both jealous of Britain’s liberalism and power (represented by his mother and her brother Bertie) and awestruck by its empire and navy (represented by his revered grandmother Victoria).

A similar contradiction distorted his approach to Russia. On 1 March 1881, the sixty-seven-year-old emperor of Russia, Alexander II, was riding in his carriage through the streets, surrounded by Cossacks and secret policemen, on his way to review his Guards when a radical threw a bomb. It was a special day: the Romanov had just signed a decree to form Russia’s first consultative assembly of elected delegates, which ‘I don’t hide from myself, is the first step towards a constitution’. Yet his slow reforms had inspired, then lethally disappointed, Russian radicals, whose People’s Will faction launched four assassination attempts. Now Alexander was unharmed, yet against advice he insisted on comforting the wounded. As he did so, another terrorist dropped at bomb at his feet, blowing off his leg. He died a few hours later, watched by his Brobdingnagian son, now Alexander III, and his stunned grandson, Nicholas.

Alexander III, six foot three, coarse, hard-drinking, who favoured wearing muzhik blouses and boots, ended his father’s reforms, repressed both nationalist and liberal aspirations and embraced the other tradition – police autocracy, imperial expansion and messianic nationalism linked to Slavophilism. Russification – the banning of the use of Georgian, Finnish and Ukrainian languages – drove those peoples to join nationalist or socialist parties. Jews, the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy, were intensely persecuted. The Colossus was a masterful, competent autocrat who always knew what he wanted: he once bent a fork and told the Austrian ambassador, ‘That’s what I’m going to do to your army corps.’ He thought nothing of grabbing his ministers by the scruffs of the neck and bullied his shy slight son, Nicky, whom he called a ‘child’. But he also backed business, creating an economic boom of railway building and industrial development.^*

Willy tried to charm the Colossus (who was repelled by him), but then discontinued Bismarck’s alliance with the tsarist empire. Even Phili struggled to understand what Willy really wanted. Britain and Russia were rivals for Asian power, but did Willy want an alliance with Russia against Britain or one with Britain against Russia?^* Yet for twenty-four years this unstable narcissist was, said his ally Franz Ferdinand, ‘the grandest man in Europe’.

Alexander III reacted with two far-sighted decisions that produced world-changing consequences. In July 1891, he allied Russia to republican France, effecting the very envelopment that Wilhelm had meant to avoid; and around the same time he commissioned the building of the 5,772-mile Trans-Siberian Railway, projecting Russian power towards disintegrating China.

Willy was too gripped by the emergence of what the racist Gobineau called ‘the Yellow Peril’. On 17 September 1894, at the mouth of the Yalu River, a new naval power, Japan, sank eight (out of ten) Chinese battleships and then invaded China, seizing Port Arthur and massacring civilians.

* Married to four wives, keeping 200 odalisques, Ismail fell in love with a beautiful harem slave only to find that she had had her arm amputated for stealing; nonetheless he married her and she became the mother of King Fuad, living into the 1930s.

* The Sokoto jihadi empire would help inspire others in Africa later in the century, first the Senussi in Libya and then the Mahdi in Sudan. In the twenty-first century, it is the inspiration for the jihadist insurgencies in Nigeria, Mali, Chad and Niger.

* Singular, passionate, beautiful and intelligent, Salama had taught herself to read and write. On the death of her mother, Jilfidan, a Georgian slave bought by her father in Constantinople, she had inherited three clove plantations worked by slaves. Majid defeated the coup, exiling Bargush to Bombay, though their sister was not punished. When Bargush succeeded as sultan, Salama broke convention by spending time with Europeans, attending their parties and falling in love with a German trader, Heinrich Ruete. When she became pregnant, the sultan was enraged and ordered her execution. A Royal Navy frigate conveyed her to freedom. She converted to Christianity as Emily, marrying Ruerte and bringing up two children in Hamburg. When her husband was killed in a tram accident, Emily/Salama lost her security, was unable to claim her Zanzibari estates and, settling in Beirut, wrote her Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, perhaps the first Arab woman to write a modern autobiography.

* By 1890 Bargush was selling 75 per cent of global ivory, overseeing the killing of 60,000 elephants annually. The ivory was traded east and west. In the latter it was used to construct, among other things, the pianos – ‘supreme symbol of Victorian female gentility’, in Neil Faulkner’s words – that embellished European homes.

* The empress asked the British to protect Tewodros’s young son Alemayehu, who was brought up as an English gentleman.

* Yohannes’s rival Solomonic prince, Menelik, submitted and was crowned as king of Showa; his daughter Zewditu was married to his emperor’s son. Menelik would become the formative emperor of modern Ethiopia; Zewditu would be empress; and her regent would be Haile Selassie.

* Back in 1844, as his novel Coningsby first became successful, Dizzy had met Lionel de Rothschild, Nathan’s heir as head of the British bank. He was fascinated by Lionel’s power and by his wife, Charlotte, intelligent daughter of the Neapolitan branch. ‘The young bride from Frankfurt,’ he wrote, ‘was tall, graceful, dark and clear.’ In Coningsby, Disraeli based his Sephardic Jewish potentate Sidonia on a mixture of Lionel, Montefiore and himself. While running the bank, Lionel raised funds for the Irish famine and with his uncle Montefiore led the long campaign to win Jews the right to serve in the House of Commons, winning three elections (without being allowed to sit in the chamber) before the Jews Relief Act was finally passed in 1858.

* An American inventor Richard Gatling created this first machine gun to save lives during the civil war: ‘If I could invent a machine – a gun – which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle-duty as a hundred, it would … supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease.’ It did not work like that.

* Cetshwayo was exiled, but when his kingdom dissolved into civil war he was returned as king. But, now sixty and wounded in battle, he was poisoned by rivals. His son Dinuzulu recruited Afrikaner commandos to restore his kingdom, but was captured and exiled by the British to St Helena. The kingdom was incorporated into South Africa, but the house of Shaka still reigns.

* Such ideas were developed simultaneously by British, German and French thinkers. The biologist-sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857) came out just before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, argued that human species perfected themselves by fighting for mastery – ‘survival of the fittest’. A wealthy cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, obsessed with how to breed Hereditary Genius (the title of his 1869 book), believed that admirable characteristics could be encouraged by selective breeding: ‘superiors’ must be encouraged to breed; ‘inferiors’ – who lived off charity or in lunatic asylums – should not be allowed to breed or they would overrun society. He called his theory eugenics and it came to be widely held. Simultaneously the French diplomat Gobineau, disgusted by the ‘age of national mediocrity’, had invented modern scientific racism in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, published in 1855, in which he argued that ‘The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength,’ and in which he used the term ‘Aryan’ to describe a master race, la race germanique. The theories were embraced by his friend Wagner, whose wife wrote to Gobineau, ‘My husband is quite at your service, always reading The Races.’ The American racists Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze, as well as Kaiser Wilhelm II, espoused his views, which later inspired Hitler.

* The first governor of German South West Africa was Heinrich Göring, father of Hitler’s Reichsmarschall.

* Yet Peters remained a hero to many in Germany, keeping a job at the Colonial Office, embarking on expensive ‘explorations’ and writing a book expounding racist social Darwinist philosophy, Willenswelt und Weltwille (The Will to Power and the Power to Will). In 1914 he was pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm and after his death rehabilitated by Hitler.

* In November 1898, two psychopathic officers – Captain Paul Voulet, known for his ‘love of blood and cruelty’, and Lieutenant Julien Chanoine, ‘cruel out of hard-heartedness and pleasure’ – embarked with a mainly African force of Senegalese Tirailleurs and Berber Spahis, armed with Gatling guns and artillery, to complete the conquest of Mali and Chad. Having made their names taking Ouagadougou and been given carte blanche by the war minister, their ‘infernal column’ burned villages and killed thousands, with men suspended so they were eaten by hyenas and vultures, women raped and hanged, children roasted – until their own officers denounced them. When a colonel was sent to stop them, Voulet and Chanoine murdered him. ‘I’m no longer a Frenchman,’ declared Voulet, ‘I’m a black chief. With you, I’ll found an empire.’ But French officers and Senegalese Tirailleurs killed the two men. As in the case of Dreyfus, the army proved untouchable: an inquiry decided that these monsters had merely suffered the madness of ‘soudanite aiguë’ – African heat.

* The obas of Benin also could not avoid the British. In January 1897, members of a delegation to force Benin to open to British trade were murdered, providing the pretext for an invasion already mustering. After bombarding Benin City with artillery, the officers captured and exiled the oba, Overami, and looted 2,000 of his ivory, wooden and bronze sculptures, keeping some for themselves and sending others to the queen and various museums: some are now being returned.

* In 1906, the outcry against Leopold’s brutal proprietorship of Congo led the Belgian state to negotiate the takeover of the colony, spending 45.5 million francs to finish his building projects and paying the king himself 50 million francs: yet the cost of buying out the predator was to be raised from Congo itself. Leopold, one of the richest men in the world, died in 1909 – though it was far from the end of Belgian predations in Congo.

* In the royal palace in Munich, the princes were being tutored by a respected local schoolmaster, Gebhard Himmler, an enthusiastic royalist whose favourite pupil was Prince Heinrich. When he had a son, he named him Heinrich after the prince, who became a godfather of the future Reichsführer-SS.

* Much of Bavaria was poor. Between 1881 and 1890, 1.4 million Germans immigrated to the USA, many of them Bavarians. A typical example of these migrants, leaving in 1885, was Friedrich Drumpf, whose family would travel from the village of Kallstadt to the White House, a quintessential American story. Later Drumpf changed his name to Trump.

* As Rudolf was buried, his ‘friend’ Wilhelm, the new German kaiser, reflected that ‘lunacy was lurking in the background and the monomania of suicide has done its silent but sure work on the overexcited brain’. Stephanie survived the malice of Sisi to remarry and settle in Hungary, but in a surprising initiative for a Habsburg crown princess, in 1908 she invented the hostess trolley – ‘a new chafing dish and spirit lamp combined’ – taking out US and British patents.

* Willy loved bullying his Junker generals. ‘It’s a curious sight,’ chuckled Phili. ‘All those old military fogeys having to do their knee-jerks with strained faces! The Kaiser sometimes laughs out loud and eggs them on with a dig to the ribs.’ Willy encouraged his courtiers – Junker officers – to dress as poodles or ballerinas. ‘You must be paraded by me as a circus poodle! – that will be a “hit” like nothing else,’ Count Georg von Hülsen wrote to a fellow courtier. ‘Just think: behind shaved tights … at the back a genuine poodle tail, a marked rectal opening and, when you “beg”, in front a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol or do other tricks. It is simply splendid! … I can already see H.M. [His Majesty] laughing with us … H.M. must be satisfied.’

* This was funded by raising loans on the markets but also selling grain. When this caused a famine on the Volga, Alexander denied it existed, continued exporting grain and 350,000 perished – a precursor of the famines of 1932/3.

* Willy was so inconsistent that at various times he planned to seize Iraq, China and Latin America, and in 1903 he even ordered the Admiralty to prepare an invasion (Operationsplan III) for Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York, while seeking alliances with and against virtually every other state.