The World полностью

Motecuhzoma promoted himself to Huehuetlatoani, Supreme Speaker, translated as emperor. The Mexica differentiated themselves from their allies, believing that as the chosen people of the gods and successors to Teotihuacan, they were destined to rule the world. Their Speakers were surrogates of the gods, hailed at their accession: ‘You are their flute … they make you their fangs, claws, you are their wild beast, their eater-of-people, their judge.’ They also created a new nobility with military-religious orders of quauhpili knights who enjoyed privileges – only nobles being allowed to wear lip plugs, cotton cloaks, golden armbands.^* Noblemen owned hundreds of concubines, including slaves captured in war, but within the royal family women were powerful.^*

Yet as the empire expanded and tension rose with its allies, the bloodletting at the Great Temple^* became ever more frantic. Their allies and vassals bitterly resented them. Given a chance, they would rise and destroy them.

* Their brother Fernando was captured. Henry negotiated through a Jewish doctor to swap him for Ceuta, but just as the king was about to approve the deal, he died of the Destructive Death – and their brother died in confinement after six years of humiliation. Infante Fernando was eviscerated and embalmed, his fellow Christian prisoners hiding his heart and viscera in pots under the jail floor while the prince’s naked body was hung for years from the battlements of Fez.

* Zurara himself, who so admired Henry – ‘Our prince’ – sensed the ominous implications in this invocation to cruel Fate: ‘O powerful fortune, that with your wheels makes and unmakes, encompassing the matters of this world as pleases you, do you at last put before the eyes of that miserable race some understanding of matters to come; that they may receive some consolation in the midst of their great sorrow? And you who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look with pity upon so much misery; and see how they cling one to the other, so that you can hardly separate them.’

* Conquest was inconceivable: Europeans, checked by the power of African rulers and their armies, daunted by the inhospitable vastness of Africa, decimated by malaria, did not conquer the continent for another four centuries. They lacked military supremacy and the physical endurance until the development of steam, machine guns and quinine in the late nineteenth century.

* The word banking derives from banco, the marketplace stall from which these early financiers did their business.

* The word Renaissance was not used by contemporaries. It was the polymath Leon Battista Alberti who, advising Pope Nicholas V on the rebuilding of Rome and designing the Vatican, sensed the possibilities of Uomo Universale – ‘A man can do all things if he will.’ Giorgio Vasari, biographer of Michelangelo, used the word rinascita (rebirth) in his Lives of the Artists, but Renaissance was really coined by English historians in the 1830s.

* A German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, was the first to use movable print, modelled on a wine press, to publish 180 copies of the Bible. The spread of reading, like the internet in the twenty-first century, did not only enlighten people’s minds, it also darkened them: the hysteria of witch trials and witch burning was at least partly intensified by the popularity of books such as one of the first bestsellers, Henricus Institor’s 1487 Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy as with a two-edged sword.

* A refined, merciful Persianate padishah (emperor), Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh ruled the core empire for forty years while his son Ulanbeg governed Samarkand. Ulanbeg’s interests were astronomy and science, building his observatory – parts of which survive in Samarkand – to aid his calculations; his catalogue of the stars and measurements of the earth’s tilt and sidereal years were highly accurate. But perhaps astronomy distracted him from politics: he was assassinated and the empire disintegrated. Shahrukh and Ulanbeg joined Tamerlane in the Gur Amir, which later inspired the domed Persianate style of Tamerlane’s Mughal descendants.

* ‘Whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne it behoves him to kill his brothers in the interest of world order,’ decreed Mehmed. ‘Most of the jurists have approved this. Let action be taken accordingly.’ Altogether around eighty Ottoman princes were strangled by the bowstring so as not to shed royal blood in the only family in which filicide and fratricide were not just occasional and accidental but religious and political policy.

* They were the sons of the voivode (prince) of Wallachia, Vlad II, known as Dracul after his membership of the Order of the Dragon.