The World полностью

* In 1504, when Esigie’s father Oba Ozolua died, two of his sons fought for the throne; the neighbouring Igala rebelled and invaded. But Prince Esigie was advised by his mother, Idia, who served as his consigliera and priestess in his campaign to destroy the brother and the invaders, for which he rewarded her with a new title of Iyoba, queen mother. The Iyoba received her own capital, regiments and court, but she was forbidden to see her son again. Perhaps the beautiful bronze bust of Idia’s face – now in a Berlin museum – was not only for religious purposes. Perhaps Esigie missed his mother.

* The Granadan aristocracy included a courtier, Moulay Ali al-Rashid, his wife, the former Spanish slave Zohra Fernandez, and their daughter Aisha, who would become the pirate queen of the Mediterranean.

* This was an ancient world of connected islands settled first in the seventh millennium BC. Around 500 BC, as new DNA research shows, they were invaded by conquerors from the mainland who massacred them: the Taínos of Haiti, Cuba and Jamaica, ruled by chieftains (kasike in Taíno, cacique in Spanish), were their descendants. The islands were known vaguely to the Mexica. While the Spanish believed there were millions of Taínos, it is likely they were far fewer, perhaps no more than tens of thousands. The Caribs gave their name to the sea and to the word cannibal, given their taste for eating enemies. Bahama, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica were Columbus’ version of their Taíno names.

* The disease – passed by sexual contact and manifesting in three states, starting with genital sores and culminating many years later in facial swellings and decay along with degeneration of the nervous system leading to insanity – was first recorded during the French invasion of Naples two or three years later. The Neapolitans called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease. One of the few diseases named after a fictional character, the name was coined by the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro for his syphilitic shepherd boy in his poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis or The French Disease). It raged for the next four centuries, cured only by the invention of antibiotics. On the islands, Columbus saw ‘men and women with a half-burned weed in their hands, being herbs they’re accustomed to smoke’. His sailors were the first Europeans to sample tobacco.

* Vespucci’s grandfather, also Amerigo, was chancellor of Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent and he himself had worked for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who sent him to run his Seville office. There he first helped to finance Columbus’ voyages, then became a sailor himself on voyages recorded in his published letters to the Medici, before King Ferdinand appointed him to run the House of Contracts in Seville. In 1507 a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named the continent after him, a honour he may never have known about. The oddity is that Waldseemüller used Vespucci’s first name: why did he not call the new continent Vespuccia? It is just as resonant as America.

* Later, in retirement, Machiavelli used his experience of Cesare Borgia and Ferdinand of Spain to write The Prince, his guide to the practice of power. It was not published until after his death.

* Cesare appointed Leonardo da Vinci as architect and chief engineer. While devising new fortresses and military vehicles that resembled tanks and helicopters, Leonardo also sketched Cesare himself.

Habsburgs and Ottomans

ARCH-SLEEPYHEAD OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE – AND JUANA THE MAD

In August 1496, Isabella escorted her sixteen-year-old daughter Juana on to a carrack at the northern port of Laredo and then watched her sail away to Flanders to marry Philip the Handsome, duke of Burgundy. Almost simultaneously her only son Juan would wed Philip’s sister Margaret.^*

The two foreign spouses were the children of Kaiser Maximilian, ‘the German Hercules’, strapping, blond, blue-eyed, his beard concealing a prominent jaw. He was a late developer, not speaking until he was nine and growing up in a family in crisis.

His father, Frederick III the Fat, the same kaiser married and crowned in Rome forty years earlier, had endured decades of catastrophe, surviving with impressive serenity a desperate siege of Vienna, which he eventually lost. ‘Happiness,’ he said, ‘is to forget what cannot be recovered.’ Nicknamed Arch-Sleepyhead of the Roman Empire, he ate prodigiously, prognosticated endlessly, collected mouse droppings and tended flowers, boring his vivacious Portuguese wife. But his motto – ‘Hold the measure and look to the end’ – was abundantly justified. Outlasting all his enemies, Arch-Sleepyhead reclaimed his territories, promoting the House of Austria with the acrostic AEIOU (Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan – The Whole World is Subject to Austria) – a dream that Maximilian brought to fruition.^*