* The Yoruba worshipped a large pantheon of gods and spirits (
* A week earlier, on 13 August, a small English army under the twenty-seven-year-old king Henry V had landed in France to restart the conquest of France, successfully begun by the vigorous Edward III then lost by his psychopathic grandson Richard II. Richard had been overthrown and murdered by his cousin, Henry, duke of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. The most extraordinary thing about Henry V was that he was alive at all. When he was sixteen, fighting with his father against a rebel nobleman, he was hit in the face by an arrow that entered below his eye and lodged in the back of the neck – without touching his brain. Usually this would have led to death from infection and most physicians would simply have pulled the arrow out through the face, tearing the flesh inside. An initial team of doctors – later described as ‘lewd chattering leeches’ – bungled this, breaking off the arrow. But the royal doctor, John Bradmore, a brilliant man, was also a metalworker and gemestre (jeweller). He disinfected the wounds with honey, washed them with alcohol and devised an instrument to grip the arrow head within a cylinder and pull it through the skull and out the other side. Astonishingly this operation worked and the wound did not become infected; Bradmore was richly rewarded. Henry, tall and powerful, must have been heavily scarred. On succeeding to the throne, he gathered his fleet in Southampton, before swiftly killing his best friend and two other barons who were caught in a conspiracy. In France, he took the port of Harfleur, then fought a French army double the size of his own at Agincourt, massacring most of the French prisoners, the first of several such atrocities. After his victories, the French king agreed to marry his daughter Catherine to Henry. Their only son was a baby when Henry died at thirty-six from dysentery. After his death Catherine married a Welsh steward, Owen Tudor, from whom the Tudors were descended.
* João’s father Pedro, erratic and lascivious, had married a Castilian princess, Constanza. But she arrived with a lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro. Pedro had a son with his wife but fell in love with Inês. After Constanza’s death, he started to advance Inês’s family: in a showdown with the hostile court, Inês was beheaded in front of her children. When Pedro became king, he hunted down her killers and personally tore out their hearts in revenge. It was said he exhumed Inês, dressed her in crown and jewels and had the court pay tribute. He certainly built her a tomb, facing his own, engraved with the words ‘until the end of the world’.
* The Canary Islands had been inhabited since around the birth of Christ by the Guanche, Berber Canary islanders, enjoying occasional contact with Europe or Africa and maintaining a Stone Age civilization without boats or metal. The discovery of their mummified ancestors reveals a sophisticated alternative way to embalm, leaving brains and intestines intact by smoking the bodies in bonfires then wrapping them in goatskins. In 1312, the Genoese banker-adventurer Lancelotto Malocello had tried to find what happened to the Vivaldi brothers, who had landed on the islands; he gave his name to Lanzarote (Lancelotto) and founded a fortress there, but was eventually expelled in a Guanche rebellion. Now, in 1402, a French Crusader colonized the islands and declared himself king – but, facing revolts by the indigenous peoples, he ceded the islands to Castile. The islanders were rapidly enslaved, killed and decimated by disease.
ACT TEN
350 MILLION
Medici and Mexica, Ottomans and Aviz
HENRY THE NAVIGATOR: SLAVES, SUGAR AND GOLD
In 1425, Infante Henry, duke of Viseu, ordered the planting of a new crop on one of his new territories. It was a crop that would change the world: sugar cane. The location was the formerly uninhabited Atlantic island of Madeira, claimed by two of Henry’s knights, and developed for him by a merchant from Piacenza, Bartolomeu Perestrello.
