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The Incas had 2,000 concubines – quotas of ‘conquered women’ were dedicated as Brides of the Sun. The coya or queen, a sister or cousin of the Inca, was powerful. The Incas were polygynous; noble descent passed through both men and women; and children could inherit from either parent. There was no word for virgin, and premarital sex was not condemned. It was thought unhealthy to repress sexual urges. Only noble children were expected to do so, and then only until marriage. Speaking Quechua, the Incas had no writing but communicated by a system of knots. They sacrificed humans to their pantheon but not on a scale comparable to the Mexica.

Tupac expanded into Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, an aggressive, covetous empire, like that of his contemporaries the Mexica and the Aziz-Trastámara family of Iberia, led by warrior monarchs and martial aristocracies, and inspired by religious cults of conquest, loot and redemption. Their conquests seemed unstoppable – but it was the Iberians who first fell apart in a vicious and farcical family feud.

The masturbation of King Enrique IV of Castile by his doctors led to ejaculation, but the royal Trastámara sperm was ‘watery and sterile’. The physicians and courtiers despaired – so the frottage went on. The sperm was collected in a golden tube and given to Enrique’s queen, another Portuguese princess, Juana, to inject into her vagina in a desperate attempt to inseminate an heir. Their Jewish doctor Samaya supervised proceedings ‘to see if she could receive semen – but she could not’.

Blue-eyed and athletic with his English red hair, elongated jaw, bulging forehead and flat, broken nose, Enrique resembled either a lion or a monkey but, shy, gentle and unpretentious, he lacked the extrovert dynamism necessary to control the warriors of Castile.

His father Juan II was a cheerful, hunt-obsessed half-English poet fancier who married Enrique to Bianca of Navarre, but the groom failed to consummate and, embarrassingly, the bloodied wedding sheets were not displayed. While courtiers gossiped about the shape and alignment of the royal penis and possible homosexuality, his father sent priests to interview Enrique’s lovers, prostitutes who testified that ‘his virile member was firm and produced manly seed’ in fecund profusion. Enrique himself believed it was ‘reciprocal impotence due to malign influences’ – bewitchment – and poor Bianca was sent home to her father. In 1451, King Juan, remarried to a Portuguese princess, had another legitimate child – the infanta Isabella, twenty-six years younger than Enrique.

Worried about Portuguese interference, Juan married Enrique to his Portuguese first cousin Juana: interbreeding was already a problem in the Iberian royal family. But as Enrique was again unable to perform, after seven years the independent-minded Juana made her own arrangements, embarking on an affair – the first of many – with her husband’s mayordomo, Beltrán de la Cueva, leading to the birth of a daughter. Europe’s potentates discussed the Trastámara in gynaecological detail. ‘The queen was impregnated without losing her virginity,’ Pope Pius II was informed by his secretary; ‘the sperm [that was] poured into the entrance had penetrated the most hidden places inside her’. But ‘others believed a man other than Enrique was the father’. The daughter was nicknamed La Beltraneja after her natural father.

This was all the more galling because Enrique’s half-sister Isabella possessed all the qualities of a king except masculinity. It was the need to stop her succession that made Enrique’s sperm so important. Isabella’s youth was spent either in impoverished seclusion with her insane mother or resisting her brother’s shameless attempts to marry her off to inappropriate husbands. Surviving in a dangerous and unstable court, keeping her own counsel, she proved intelligent, secretive and fearless, fortified by fanatical Catholic piety and Trastámara grandeur.

As Enrique struggled to impose himself, and the Portuguese king intervened in the hope of taking the kingdom himself, Isabella secretly started to arrange her own marriage – the marriage that would create an empire. But Enrique’s impotence had empowered the Berber kings of Granada, the last Islamic power in Iberia, which now refused to pay its tribute. Enrique tried to prove his martial machismo by leading attacks on Granada, a kingdom so prosperous that its eponymous capital city was, with 165,000 people, by far the biggest city in Iberia and one of the biggest in Europe. Islam was resurgent: Granada easily fought off the Christian attacks, while at the other end of Europe the Ottoman conqueror was mopping up the last outposts of Christendom.

THE SECOND AND THIRD ROME: CAESAR MEHMED AND SOPHIA OF MOSCOW